A lease states the handover date but usually says nothing about what happens if the landlord misses it. For years the standard answer was a substitute floor in the same building. With vacancy in Warsaw at 7.52% and 502,000 sqm available immediately, that remedy has effectively disappeared, leaving the tenant with a rent discount that solves nothing operationally.
If the landlord fails to hand over the office on time, most leases provide for nothing at all. There is a handover date, sometimes a commencement date, and that is it. A tenant whose previous lease is expiring is left with a problem the document never anticipated: nowhere to work, and the only claim available is a discount on space it has not moved into yet.
Marika Skonieczna, the attorney we work with on lease negotiations for tenants, calls this a silence in the contract. In our conversation about what is missing from an office lease she put late handover first, ahead of guarantees and the service charge audit. The reason is chronological: it is the first thing that can go wrong, and the only one capable of stopping a company from operating.
The substitute floor in the same building no longer exists
When the draft contains no remedy for delay, landlords usually reassure tenants that they will find them other premises in the building if needed. For many years that genuinely worked. Today there is nothing to offer.
At the end of September 2026 vacancy in Warsaw stood at 7.52% and space available immediately at 502,000 sqm, which is 183,000 sqm less than a year earlier. All of those figures come from our third quarter report. In the two districts where office tenants look for space most often it is tighter still: Wola records 4.49% vacancy and Śródmieście 5.18%.
At those levels, a promise of substitute space in the same building is worth exactly as many square metres as the landlord happens to have free. Usually that is none, because every vacant floor is already being marketed. The exception is owners with a portfolio of several buildings, who can move a tenant elsewhere, and that is the only situation in which such a clause still means something.
A rent discount compensates for the wrong thing
The most common provision that does appear in leases is a rent reduction for the period of delay. For some tenants that is enough. A company sitting in its own building and renting extra space only because it has outgrown it is not being evicted, so the delay is an inconvenience rather than a crisis, and a discount closes the matter.
The problem starts where the previous lease is ending and the old landlord will not agree to a two or three month addendum, because another tenant is already waiting for the space and its fit-out has to start. The tenant then chooses between a few weeks of coworking with a double move, or sending people to work remotely, if the nature of the business allows it at all. Neither of those is bought with a rent discount.
In most leases the contractual penalty for late handover is a fiction, because its level bears no relation to the cost the tenant actually incurs. It is a fraction of the rent rather than an answer to the invoice for substitute space. Some landlord-side counsel will disagree, since from their perspective the penalty itself is discipline enough.
A penalty works when it is calculated from a real invoice
Marika Skonieczna sets a simple condition here: the penalty is satisfactory when it covers the cost of coworking or the fee for holding over in the old space. The second matters because it is often the only realistic way out. The tenant stays in its current office past the deadline and pays the holdover fee, counting on covering it from the penalty owed by the new landlord.
That route has a price. If the old lease includes a notarised declaration of submission to enforcement as to vacating the premises, known in the market as "three sevens" after article 777 of the Polish Code of Civil Procedure, the previous landlord can use it and the tenant loses the office overnight. Any calculation of how large the penalty should be therefore has to price in that risk, not just the rate per square metre.
Subleases as genuine substitute space
There is one more source of space that lease drafts never mention and that has grown in Warsaw. At the end of the third quarter of 2026 there were 67,400 sqm on the sublease market, 7.3% more than a quarter earlier, of which 19,400 sqm in Wola, 18,100 sqm in Mokotów and 13,700 sqm in Śródmieście. Subleases run 20 to 40% cheaper than a direct lease and are short by nature, because the subtenant wants to shed space it no longer needs.
For a tenant that needs to bridge a quarter, this is often better than coworking, because the space is already fitted out and furnished. It is worth naming it in the lease as one of the options alongside premises in the building, together with the landlord's obligation to cover the difference in rate and the cost of moving.
What the lease should contain
A clause that actually delivers has four elements. First, the deadline after which the delay triggers consequences, counted from the handover date rather than the commencement date. Second, a cascade of remedies: substitute premises in the building if any exist, and if not, the cost of flexible space, coworking or a sublease, together with the cost of moving both ways. Third, a contractual penalty for the case where none of the above works, calculated from the cost the tenant will genuinely bear. Fourth, a right to exit the lease if the delay passes the point at which the move stops making sense.
That point has to be set individually, because it depends on the business. It looks different in a company that can work remotely for a month and different again in a project team using equipment that cannot be moved into someone's flat.
When to negotiate it
It is cheapest at the letter of intent stage, before the landlord's lawyers sit down to draft. At that point it is one line in the term sheet next to rent, lease term and fit-out contribution, rather than an exception carved out of a finished document. Once the draft has been issued, the same conversation costs several rounds of correspondence, because it concerns something the draft does not contain, so formally there is nothing to discuss.
The question worth asking the landlord's agent at term sheet stage is this: what happens if the occupancy permit arrives a month late. An answer along the lines of "that will not happen" is, in practice, notice that the clause will not be in the lease. If you are negotiating a renewal of your current lease at the same time, see also when to start renegotiations, because both timetables have to close at the same moment.
