Two red accordion folders sit at the end of my kitchen table, one holding my mother's paperwork and one holding mine, and until this spring neither had ever needed a roommate agreement wedged inside.
My brother needed one when a tenant moved into his basement to help cover a property tax bill that keeps climbing every year in Indianapolis. He asked around first. A pro bono legal clinic downtown could review the paperwork, but the waiting list ran three months long, longer than most people give a new roommate before deciding if the arrangement is working. Neither of us wanted to pay a local attorney's hourly rate for a document that comes down to a handful of clear rules, so I opened LawDepot instead, the same DIY legal software I have leaned on for three years of my own family's paperwork.
I'm a reference librarian, the kind who spends a shift helping someone find the right call number for a home-repair manual and then explains why the library can't notarize their documents. That job trained me to read instructions literally and to notice when a form is missing a step, which is exactly what a roommate agreement full of blanks will do to you six months in, usually at the worst possible moment.
What a Roommate Agreement Actually Needs to Cover
A chore wheel is not a contract. Legal enforceability comes down to two things: who is financially liable for what, and how the arrangement ends. If a roommate stops paying their share of the heat, or leaves mid-lease with no notice, a list of who scrubs the grout will not help you in small claims court. The agreement needs to name a dollar split for rent and utilities, a notice period for moving out, and what happens to a security deposit if the roommate leaves early. Everything else, guest policy, quiet hours, parking, is worth including too, but those three are the parts that hold up when someone is actually upset.
Inside the LawDepot Questionnaire
LawDepot covers 51 jurisdictions, all 50 states plus D.C., and the interview changes slightly depending on which one you pick. Indiana does not require a notary for a roommate agreement to be valid, and it does not require the same two-witness signing that an Indiana will does, but the questionnaire still prompts for witness lines, which is worth using anyway. You answer a series of questions about the property, the people, and the money, and the software assembles the document around those answers instead of handing you a blank page and a prayer. For a basement rental, that meant specifying an exact percentage of the gas and electric bill rather than a vague split evenly, plus how many days after the bill arrives the payment is due.
That same software family has produced nearly everything on that kitchen table by now, and none of it is a roommate agreement. A self-proving clause on a will saves your kids a courtroom appearance, the same logic that makes those witness lines worth including here. A durable power of attorney let my mother sign for herself on paper well before anyone had to sign for her in person, and I still picture her at that table holding the notarized page, one sheet, laminated, looking less scared than she had in weeks. A transfer-on-death deed moved a car title without probate. A beneficiary worksheet made sure every name on an account matched what she actually wanted. A final tax return for a parent who has passed is its own separate headache software only partly solves. A revocable living trust was worth pricing out once, even though we did not end up needing one. A living will spells out medical wishes before anyone has to guess them. A small estate affidavit can skip probate if the estate is modest enough. A personal property memorandum settles who gets which chair without rewriting an entire will. A letter of instruction tells an executor where the spare key lives. A digital asset inventory keeps an executor out of a password-guessing game after the fact. None of those documents look anything like a roommate agreement, but they taught me what a good one has to do: hold up on its own, with no lawyer standing next to it to explain what it means.
Do You Need a Witness, and Does It Need to Be Notarized?
Short answer: no notary, and no legal requirement for witnesses on a roommate agreement in Indiana. Longer answer: get two anyway. In librarian terms, that is just two neighbors or friends who can sign along with you over coffee to prove everyone saw the same document get signed. It will not hold up the same way a witnessed will does in probate court, because a roommate agreement is a private contract, not a testamentary document, but a witnessed signature turns a handshake deal into something you can point to later. Skipping this step is the single most common shortcut I see people take, and it is the cheapest one to fix.
Skipping a Step Costs You Later
Quiet hours is the section people leave blank most often, usually because the roommate has not moved in yet and the conversation feels awkward to have in advance. Fill it in anyway. If eleven at night is not written down as the cutoff, you have no ground to stand on when the bass starts rattling the floorboards on a Tuesday. A widowed neighbor named Garnet Tidwell found my notes through a flyer at the library and emailed a numbered list of questions, the way he does with everything, and one of them was whether a roommate agreement could specify something as small as trash night. It can. If it matters enough to cause an argument later, it belongs in the document, not in a text message sent at midnight.
Setting the Exit Terms Before You Need Them
The termination clause matters more than every other section combined. Define the notice period, thirty days is standard in Indiana, and spell out what triggers it: a job loss, a move across the country, a new spouse who needs to be added or is not welcome. I have written separately about how to write a mutual lease termination agreement with LawDepot, and the same principle applies here: decide how the relationship ends while everyone is still on good terms, because nobody negotiates well once they are already angry. Attach a number to the security deposit return too, not just a promise to return it promptly.
When a Roommate Agreement Is Not Enough
I am not a lawyer, not a paralegal, and not in legal services of any kind. I am a librarian who got tired of hourly quotes for documents you can draft at a kitchen table with the right software. That said, LawDepot has limits. Estates over $500,000, blended families with layered inheritance questions, or a roommate who is also a business partner belong in front of an attorney, not a template. If you are untangling family property at the same time, my notes on how to file a quitclaim deed for family property transfers cover a different but related headache. For a straightforward roommate splitting rent and utilities, though, the software is more than enough.
Check the margins before you print. I rage-printed the same form three times before I noticed the library's default settings were off, and Lenora, who keeps a color-coded reference binder for every policy change, just laughed at me from the next desk over. Small mistake, entirely avoidable, and still worth mentioning because someone else is about to make it too.