This does not mean that the tenant has no responsibility to ensure that the gutters are clean or to notify you if they are not, but ultimately, it is the landlord who must ensure that the gutters and other systems in the building are regularly inspected. When you live in a house and treat it as if it were your own, you are expected to take care of regular maintenance. Like mowing lawns and trimming hedges, part of regular maintenance involves cleaning gutters. If the lease says “regular outdoor maintenance” or “landscape care”, there is a valid argument that the tenant should clean the gutters.
If you don't want to worry about who needs to clean your gutters again, contact Gutter Helmet and we'll put you in touch with your local installer. The tenant's sole responsibility for gutter cleaning is to notify the property manager or landlord of any obstruction or suspected damage to the gutters. You may want to split a cleaning bill for a professional gutter cleaner or each do one cleaning a year. If the reason behind blocked gutters is your own negligence, then don't fight fair expectations that you'll pay the gutter cleaning bill.
And since letting gutters get out of control can cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, then you may want to take a deep breath, accept the fact that you accepted a bad deal, and call someone to clean those gutters safely so you don't have to go out a ladder. If you don't read your lease or if you knowingly sign on that dotted line after spotting some type of gutter cleaning clause, then yes, you could be held legally and financially responsible for the condition of your gutters. So one could argue that tenants should also keep gutters clean, but my counterargument is that no one EVER pays attention to gutters. Likewise, the homeowner must also keep the gutters clean, since the gutters are part of the roofing system.
While gutters are certainly part of the roof and therefore part of the structure's drainage system, some homeowners consider cleaning the gutters to be the responsibility of the tenant, in the same category as changing light bulbs or sweeping the sidewalk.
