Most people about to sign their first commercial lease quickly discover that it bears little resemblance to the residential contract they remember from their student days. Where Norwegian tenancy law keeps a protective hand over residential tenants, the very same law allows almost full freedom of contract once the premises are used for business. That means the contract, not the law, decides most of it. For a company with a handful of employees that is about to commit for several years, it is worth taking the time to understand what you are actually signing. Here are five topics we believe every first-time tenant should approach with open eyes.
1. A commercial lease is a different genre entirely from residential leasing
Commercial leasing in Norway is governed by the Tenancy Act (husleieloven) of 1999, the same law that applies to homes. But that is where the similarity ends. Section 1-2 of the Act states that it cannot be set aside to the tenant's detriment in residential leasing, while for the lease of business premises it can be set aside almost freely. In practice this means the parties are free to agree solutions other than the law's default arrangements on nearly every point. Only a few provisions are mandatory for commercial leases too, mainly certain very general rules and formal requirements.
The consequence is fundamental. In residential leasing, the law is the floor you can always fall back on. In commercial leasing, the contract is the floor, the ceiling and the walls. If something is not in the agreement, the law's background rules apply, but the agreement may have shifted almost all responsibility onto you as the tenant without the law stepping in. The legislator designed it this way deliberately, on the assumption that businesses are equal parties able to look after their own interests. That often holds up poorly when a small company meets a professional landlord with its own lawyers.
A typical commercial lease covers the premises and the area, the level of rent and how it is adjusted, common costs, the lease term, maintenance obligations, security requirements, permitted use and the obligation to hand the premises back. A couple of concepts are worth being clear on from the start. Rent is almost always quoted as a price per square metre per year, and the area the price is based on is usually the gross leasable area, which includes a share of the building's common areas. The space you actually occupy, the net area, can be a fair bit smaller, and the difference between gross and net leasable area is worth understanding before you compare prices. Common costs come on top of the rent and cover everything from heating of shared areas to caretaking and waste collection. And the rent is normally adjusted once a year in line with the consumer price index, known as CPI or index adjustment, with its basis in Section 4-2 of the Act.
2. The broker standard: the industry's shared contractual language
A question many first-time tenants do not know they should ask is which contractual basis the landlord is actually using. It is worth clearing up a common misunderstanding here. Many assume there is a numbered Norwegian Standard for commercial leasing on a par with the construction industry's NS contracts. There is not. The NS numbers such as NS 8405, NS 8406 and NS 8407 belong to construction and contracting, not to the leasing of finished premises. The dominant contractual basis in Norwegian commercial leasing is what the industry calls the broker standard (meglerstandarden), a series of standard agreements developed by Norsk Eiendom together with Forum for Næringsmeglere and the Norwegian Association of Real Estate Agents.
These standards have established themselves as the leading templates in the market, and they were updated in 2025. They come in several variants, and the difference between them is precisely what the first-time tenant should note. The most widely used is the standard for premises let "as is", often with few or no tenant improvements. For premises that are to be built or refurbished, a separate standard for new and refurbished premises is used.
The distinction has a real legal consequence. Under the standard for new or refurbished premises, any defect that is not remedied can give grounds for a price reduction or compensation. For existing premises the threshold is higher: there the defect must be material before it carries such consequences, and a great deal is required before a defect counts as material. This difference was introduced in a revision some years ago, and is something many landlords are not fully aware of themselves.
Why does this matter to you? Because a standard contract from Norsk Eiendom and Forum for Næringsmeglere is a known and reasonably balanced starting point, where professional parties have agreed a sensible allocation of risk. The standard is nonetheless not entirely neutral at the outset. It was originally developed on the landlord side, and certain provisions still bear the mark of that. When a landlord instead puts forward its own bespoke contract, or an older edition of the standard, that is a signal to read extra carefully, or to have someone do it for you. (We will return to the individual standards and how they differ in a separate article.)
3. Termination: the big difference between fixed-term and open-ended leases
The most important thing a first-time tenant must understand about termination is that the vast majority of commercial leases are fixed-term. A fixed-term lease runs until a set end date and expires then without notice. The flip side is that a fixed-term lease generally cannot be terminated before the period is up. If you tie your company to a five-year contract, you are in principle stuck with the rental obligation for five years, even if the company outgrows the premises or shrinks.
This is not a detail, it is the very economic core of the agreement. Lease terms of three, five and ten years are common in commercial leasing, and the longer the commitment, the more serious the obligation. An open-ended lease, by contrast, runs until one of the parties terminates it with the agreed notice. It is also worth noting that the strong protection against termination that residential tenants enjoy under Section 9-5 of the Act, where the landlord must have just cause, does not in practice apply to commercial premises. For the lease of business premises, the landlord can as a rule terminate an open-ended lease without giving a reason.
For a tenant who wants predictability, there are two mechanisms worth negotiating over. The first is an option to extend, a right to renew the lease for a further period, often on the same terms, though usually with an adjustment to market rent. Such options normally require you to give written notice within a set deadline before expiry. The second is flexibility during the term: in a slow market it can be worth negotiating in a break clause or a shorter commitment, even if it costs a little more in rent. If you are already tied in and need to free up space, subletting can be a way out, provided the contract allows for it. (How termination, options and the lease term fit together is something we go into more thoroughly in a separate article.)
4. Tenant improvements: who pays to make the premises fit you?
Few premises suit a new tenant perfectly from day one. Walls need moving, meeting rooms building, acoustics and lighting adapting. Such changes are called tenant improvements, and the question of who pays is often one of the most important negotiating topics in the entire process. The answer is rarely simple, but there are a few common models. The tenant can cover and own the improvements itself. Or the landlord can carry the investment and recover it through higher rent over the lease term, a mechanism the industry calls investment rent. The latter works in practice like a loan: the cost is spread over time, and the landlord usually adds interest. That makes the total investment more expensive, but spares the tenant a large one-off outlay. Investment rent is widespread in the market.
There is also a direct link to the lease term here. The longer you commit, the more a professional landlord is willing to invest in the premises, because the investment can be paid down over more years. Long contracts and extensive improvements therefore go hand in hand. It is also worth knowing that highly specialised solutions can make the premises harder to let again, something the landlord factors into the negotiation.
The most common trap for first-time tenants lies at the end of the lease. Under the broker standard, the main rule is that the tenant's alterations must be reinstated on vacating, unless something else has been agreed in writing. That means in the worst case you have to pay to tear out what you once paid to build. So clarify already at the point of signing what is to happen to the improvements at the end of the lease, whether they are to be removed or taken over by the landlord, and ideally who owns them during the term. There are also tax and VAT consequences that are too extensive to go into here. (Tenant improvements and reinstatement deserve their own treatment, which is coming.)
5. Barehouse or fully fitted: the full spectrum of responsibility
The fifth topic is closely tied to the fourth. When you view premises, you should understand early where on the scale between bare shell and move-in ready they sit, because that determines both cost and responsibility.
At one end you find the barehouse. A barehouse agreement is, put simply, an agreement where a large part of the landlord's usual obligations have been shifted onto the tenant, often including property tax, insurance and the entire maintenance responsibility, both internal and external. A related concept is "as is", where the premises are delivered in the state they stand in, without the landlord taking responsibility for them meeting your needs or current technical requirements. These solutions give the tenant a great deal of control, but also a great deal of risk and cost, and typically suit larger players who want to run the premises themselves.
At the other end you find fully fitted, furnished premises, often marketed as "plug and play". Here you move in with your laptop under your arm, and the rent includes furniture, operations and usually a short notice period. Such solutions, and flexible office communities, are often well suited to a small first-time tenant that has neither the capital to invest in a fit-out nor the appetite to commit for ten years. For a company with two to fifty employees, this very trade-off, between control and low cost on one side and flexibility and predictability on the other, is often the most decisive. A larger, established business with specific needs will by contrast often prefer to adapt rawer premises from the ground up. (The difference between barehouse, "as is" and move-in ready gets its own article.)
A few practical notes to finish
Two things recur across all of the above. The first is security. A professional landlord almost always requires security, most often in the form of a bank guarantee or a deposit. While Sections 3-5 and 3-6 of the Act set a ceiling of six months' rent for residential leasing, this is freely negotiable for commercial leases. In practice we often see requirements equivalent to between six and twelve months' rent, frequently including common costs and VAT. For a newly started company with no track record the requirement can become excessive, and it ties up capital.
The second is advice. Because the contract matters so much more than the law in commercial leasing, this is not the place to save money. A review by someone who knows the broker standard and the market can save you far larger sums later. This is exactly where a marketplace and adviser like Spacefinder comes in: the service is free for the tenant, and the point is to give the small company some of the same expertise the professional landlord has on its side of the table. Anyone who understands the five topics above before signing already has a far better negotiating position than most first-time tenants.
Sources: The Tenancy Act / husleieloven (Lovdata), Norsk Eiendom and Forum for Næringsmeglere (the broker standard), DLA Piper, NE.no, Huseiernes Landsforbund, and Spacefinder's own market observations.
