Fair wear and tear: the line an aircon dispute turns on
Almost every tenancy carries the phrase fair wear and tear, and almost none define it. At handover the landlord sees a system worse than it was, the tenant says it only aged, and both can be describing the same unit honestly.
By Team Snowflake | Updated 6 Aug 2026
What the phrase is doing in your agreement
Fair wear and tear appears in most tenancies as an exception, not as a definition. The obligation is to hand the property back in the condition it was received. The phrase carves out what nobody could have prevented. Because it works as a carve-out, it never has to list anything, and in practice it does not.
The standard it sets is comparative. It asks what condition the system would have reached anyway, over the same period, under normal use in the same flat. Deterioration inside that boundary is wear. Deterioration past it needs a cause, and the cause is what the argument is actually about.
A checklist would be wrong within a year of being written. A condenser on a west-facing ledge above a carpark ages faster than an identical one tucked in shade. A system cooling one person at weekends ages slower than one holding a full flat cool every day. Any fixed list of acceptable deterioration would forgive real neglect in one flat and punish ordinary living in another.
Your agreement's own wording controls, and that wording differs from tenancy to tenancy. The Council for Estate Agencies (CEA) publishes a tenancy agreement template for private residential property, and states plainly that the template is a guide rather than a requirement. Even there, the phrase appears only as an exception carved out of the return obligation, and is never defined. This page is orientation for the conversation, not legal advice. A dispute with real money in it deserves proper advice on the actual agreement.
Which aircon faults sit clearly on one side
Most of a handover is not in dispute. The clear cases separate on one test: did the deterioration need someone to act, or to stop acting? Metal dulling, plastics yellowing, and a compressor reaching the end of its service life happen on their own. A drain packed solid and a filter matted shut do not.
The landlord's side holds everything that arrived with time. Fins lose their sheen. Insulation goes brittle. Bearings loosen and a fan gets louder. A compressor that ran for years and then stopped is the asset ending its life, and that is not chargeable to whoever happened to be living there when it showed.
The tenant's side holds everything that traces back to maintenance that did not happen. A drain line does not block overnight. A coil sealed under a felt of dust took cycles of neglect to get there, and one omission produces a chain. Airflow drops, the coil ices, water backs up into the ceiling, and the compressor works harder than it was built to.
One category belongs on neither side. A cracked casing, a snapped louvre, or a bent fan blade is a physical event rather than deterioration. Wear is the wrong frame for it, and forcing it into the wear conversation usually confuses a question that was otherwise simple. The table below sorts what turns up most often at an end-of-tenancy inspection.
| What the unit shows at handover | What that usually points to | Which side it falls on |
|---|---|---|
| What the unit shows at handoverDulled fins, faded casing, discoloured coil | What that usually points toAge and normal running | Which side it falls onWear |
| What the unit shows at handoverCompressor stopped, servicing history complete | What that usually points toThe asset reaching the end of its life | Which side it falls onWear |
| What the unit shows at handoverDrain line packed solid, ceiling stained below | What that usually points toServicing that did not happen | Which side it falls onNot wear |
| What the unit shows at handoverFilter matted shut, coil iced, airflow weak | What that usually points toCleaning skipped through the tenancy | Which side it falls onNot wear |
| What the unit shows at handoverCracked casing, snapped louvre, bent fan blade | What that usually points toA physical event on a specific day | Which side it falls onNeither: it is damage |
The middle where both readings are honest
A genuine middle exists, and unreasonable people are not what fills it. It holds the faults where one end state has more than one true history behind it.
Refrigerant loss is the common one. A system low on gas at move-out has more than one plausible history behind it. A flare joint may never have been quite right at installation. The same joint may have worked loose under years of ordinary vibration. The coil may have corroded in the air where the condenser sits. None of those is the tenant's doing, and none is provable from a pressure reading alone. What a technician can establish is the leak point itself, and that finding usually moves the fault out of the argument.
Position accounts for a second group. A condenser facing the sea corrodes faster than one inland. A condenser boxed into a hot service yard with no clearance runs hotter and wears faster than one with air around it. Both are choices made long before the tenant arrived.
Room conditions account for a third. A unit beside an open kitchen, or one running through a renovation, fouls faster than the servicing rhythm assumed. Whether that reads as tenant neglect or as an under-specified servicing interval is a fair argument, and it is usually settled by whether the agreed servicing actually happened.
Electronics sit in the middle for a different reason. A control board that fails after a power event is neither wear nor neglect. It is an event, and the question moves to what the agreement says about faults that are nobody's fault.
Why the maintenance record usually decides it
Paperwork settles most of these, not inspection. Both parties are looking at the same unit and reading it differently, so the tiebreaker has to come from outside the room. A dated servicing history is almost always that tiebreaker.
This is why tenancies ask for receipts at all. Where the agreement puts routine servicing on the tenant, it usually asks for proof as well. The CEA template does exactly that. It calls for a copy of the servicing contract early in the term, and for servicing receipts on request at the end. The same clause makes the landlord responsible for breakdowns and parts, then withdraws that responsibility where the failure traces back to servicing the tenant did not carry out.
Missing records are not neutral. They hurt whoever carried the maintenance obligation, because that party is the one who cannot show the alternative history. A tenant holding a full set of receipts can point at a failed compressor and say it went despite everything being done. A tenant with nothing cannot separate a unit that aged from a unit that was ignored, so only the landlord's reading is left on the table.
The same logic runs the other way, and landlords underestimate it. Where the landlord kept servicing in hand, a landlord who cannot show what was done between tenancies has no evidence that the system was in good order on day one. Claiming a decline from a baseline nobody recorded is a weak position, however confidently it is argued.
A receipt proves a visit happened. It does not prove the visit was any good. A servicing round that never opened the drain line still produces a receipt, and a landlord staring at a blocked drain beside a folder of receipts has a fair question to ask. Read what the report says was done to each unit, not what the invoice was for. Which records a landlord should hold between tenancies has a guide to itself.
How the length of the tenancy moves the line
Time is the quiet variable in all of it. The same worn coil reads differently after a long tenancy than after a short one, because the deterioration that time alone can explain grows with the term.
A short tenancy leaves little room for the ageing argument. If a unit cooled properly at move-in and does not now, almost none of that gap can be put down to time passing, so the cause has to be found elsewhere. That cuts both ways. A tenant cannot easily call a sharp decline normal. A landlord cannot easily claim a fault appeared from nowhere in a system that was already marginal.
A long tenancy shifts weight toward wear and raises the evidential bar at the same time. More of the system's life has genuinely been used up. More servicing cycles have also passed, so more history should exist, and more needs explaining if it does not.
The unit's age at move-in matters as much as the length of the term. Landlords leave that variable out more often than any other. Handing over a system already well into its life means a fair share of what remains will be consumed during the tenancy, whoever lives there. Asking for it back in the condition of a newer unit is not a wear claim. It is a replacement requested under another name.
What to record at move-in and at move-out
The question is answerable at the end only if someone answered it at the start. Nearly every unresolvable handover argument traces back to a move-in where nobody wrote down what the aircon actually did.
Run every unit at move-in and record behaviour, not appearance. A photograph of a closed faceplate proves the plastic was intact. What it leaves out is whether the room cooled, whether the drain ran clear, or whether the outdoor unit sounded settled. Both parties benefit from the same note, so make it jointly and give each side a copy.
Keep the reporting written during the tenancy. A tenant who reports a symptom in writing when it starts holds a dated record that the fault predates move-out. A landlord who replies in writing holds the same protection. Most contested arguments at handover exist because the fault was raised in a phone call and nowhere else.
Inspect together at the end, with the units running. The CEA template treats the joint inspection as the point where condition is settled, after which the tenant is not answerable for damage that was not identified there. Compare against the move-in note unit by unit rather than as a whole property.
Where the two sides read the same evidence differently, get the cause named before anyone talks about money. A diagnosis turns an argument about fairness into a question of fact, and the fact usually points at one side or clears both. The neighbouring pages carry the rest: how the split usually works between landlord and tenant, what the aircon clause in a tenancy agreement should say, and what scope a service before tenant handover should have. Where the parties cannot settle it themselves, the Small Claims Tribunals is the route commonly taken in Singapore, and that deserves its own page.
- Which rooms cooled properly, and which took noticeably longer
- Any unit already dripping, rattling, or cycling on and off
- The install date and the last service date, where either is known
- Anything that could not be tested, written down as untested rather than normal
Ready to get started?
Tell us what’s going on. Symptoms, setup, photos, anything we should know. We’ll assess and come back with the right next step.