Georgia · self-storage lien guide
This is informational, not legal advice. The Georgia Self-service Storage Facility Act can be amended and reinterpreted; verify every requirement below against the current official code and confirm with your own attorney before you act on it.
Not attorney-reviewed. We wrote this guide directly from the enacted Act text amending this article; it has not been reviewed by a licensed Georgia attorney.
Statutes change. This article was amended in both 2024 and 2025, and a consumer-protection bill aimed at it is sitting in the current session — see the gotchas below. This page reflects our reading of the law as written on 11 August 2026.
The lien is in O.C.G.A. Title 10, Ch. 4, Art. 5 (§§ 10-4-210 to 10-4-218) — the Georgia Self-service Storage Facility Act of 2013. Note the range: the article now runs through § 10-4-218, not § 10-4-215 as older summaries have it, because 2019 and 2024 added sections at the end.
Enforcement is § 10-4-213, and it does something Texas and Florida don't. It says the owner may enforce the lien without going to court "provided that it complies with the requirements of this Code section," and then requires the owner to have obtained from the occupant a written rental agreement which includes the following language — followed by a complete model rental agreement. The default definition, the 30-day gate, the notice contents, the 14-day demand, the advertisement, the sale and the redemption right are all written as contract terms inside that model lease, not as free-standing statutory subsections.
Two practical consequences. First, the non-judicial path is conditioned on your lease containing that language — the lease is the compliance instrument, and if it doesn't have the statutory text you may not have the self-help remedy at all. Second, § 10-4-213(a) has no internal sub-numbering, so precise pinpoint cites into it aren't really available; anything below cited to § 10-4-213(a) is a clause of that model-agreement language.
Whether verbatim inclusion is required or substantially similar language suffices is not something the text answers, and we're not going to guess at it — that's a question for counsel before you rely on a lease you didn't draft from the statute. Separately, § 10-4-215 leaves rental agreements entered before 1 July 2013 and not renewed since outside the Act entirely.
You don't create the lien with a notice. § 10-4-212 gives the owner a lien on all personal property located at the facility, attaching as of the date the property is brought there, covering rent, late fees, labor, other charges, and the expenses of preservation and sale. That lien is superior to other interests except ones evidenced by a certificate of title, ones perfected and recorded before the rental agreement date, tax liens, and liens otherwise disclosed or known — which is the reason titled vehicles are a trap (see the gotchas).
Georgia needs one notice to the occupant, plus a conditional notice to superior lienholders, plus the published advertisement. There is no Texas-style split between a notice of claim and a later notice of sale.
The occupant must be notified of the owner's intent to enforce the lien by written notice delivered in person, by verified mail, or by e-mail. § 10-4-213(a) "Verified mail" is defined broadly in § 10-4-211 — certified mail, registered mail, statutory overnight delivery, or any other method in which proof of sending is furnished. Don't hard-code certified mail; it is one option among several, not the requirement.
Unlike Texas, no lease opt-in clause is needed to use e-mail. But e-mail carries a catch: if notice of a pending sale goes to the occupant's last known e-mail address and the owner does not receive a nonautomated response or a receipt of delivery, the owner must send notice of the sale by verified mail to the occupant's last known address — or to the last known address of the occupant's designated agent — before proceeding with the sale. § 10-4-213(a) An unanswered e-mail turns one notice into two.
Where the mail goes matters, and "last known address" has two slightly different definitions in play. § 10-4-211's definition reaches the street or P.O. box address in the latest rental agreement, a later written change-of-address notice, and — on the reading we worked from — an e-mail address; the version written into the model lease inside § 10-4-213(a) speaks of a street or P.O. box address plus change-of-address notices. The divergence is small, but it bears on where the verified-mail fallback has to be sent, so reconcile the two against the current official code rather than picking one.
The statute says a notice is presumed sent when it is deposited with the Postal Service or a statutory overnight delivery service, properly addressed with fees prepaid, or sent by e-mail. § 10-4-213(a) Note the wording gap: the demand has to give at least 14 days after delivery, while the presumption is about sending. Whether deposit counts as delivery for the purpose of that clock isn't stated, so anchor the 14 days at the send date and add a buffer rather than scheduling to the theoretical minimum.
Georgia gives no lettered checklist — the requirements are sentences inside the model-agreement language. The labels in the left column below are ours, not the statute's.
| Required element | Cite |
|---|---|
| An itemized statement of the owner's claim, showing the sum due at the time of the notice and the date the sum became due | § 10-4-213(a) |
| Notification that the occupant is denied access to the personal property — a Georgia-specific element | § 10-4-213(a) |
| The name, street address, e-mail address and telephone number of the owner or a designated agent the occupant may contact — the e-mail address is a required field here, which it is not in Texas or Florida | § 10-4-213(a) |
| A demand for payment within a specified time, not less than 14 days after delivery of the notice | § 10-4-213(a) |
| A statement that unless the claim is paid within the time stated, the property will be advertised for public sale to the highest bidder and sold at public sale to the highest bidder, at a specified time and place | § 10-4-213(a) |
Because the last element requires a specified time and place, you have to have picked your sale date before the first notice goes out — the same constraint Florida imposes, and a real difference from Texas's two-notice sequence, where the sale notice is a separate later document.
The owner "also shall notify other parties with superior liens or security interests as defined in this rental agreement." § 10-4-213(a) That is the entire requirement — the statute enumerates no contents, no delivery method, and no separate deadline for this notice, and we're not going to invent them. The recipient set comes from the model lease's lien-disclosure blank (where the occupant attests the property is free of liens "except for ___") plus anything else the owner has been told in writing. Mirroring the occupant notice and sending it by verified mail is a conservative approach, not a statutory rule; ask counsel what minimum sufficient notice looks like.
After the time given in the owner's notice expires, the sale is advertised. The default channel is publication once a week for two consecutive weeks in the legal organ for the county where the facility is located. § 10-4-213(a) A legal organ is a specific thing in Georgia — the newspaper officially designated to carry a county's legal notices — not merely a paper of general circulation.
Since 1 July 2025, for property that is not a motor vehicle, motorcycle, trailer, watercraft or recreational vehicle, the advertisement "may be done in any other commercially reasonable manner" instead. § 10-4-213(a), as amended 2025 For vehicle-type property the two-week legal-organ route remains mandatory. That amendment applies to enforcement actions initiated on or after 1 July 2025; actions started earlier stay on the old rule.
The advertisement must contain:
| Required element | Cite |
|---|---|
| A brief and general description of the personal property, reasonably adequate to permit its identification | § 10-4-213(a) |
| The address of the facility, the number of the space (if any), and the name of the occupant | § 10-4-213(a) |
| The time, place and manner of the public sale | § 10-4-213(a) |
A single advertisement may cover more than one occupant's property. A "public sale" includes offering the property on a publicly accessible website that regularly conducts online auctions of personal property, and doing so is incidental to the business — no auctioneer license needed.
One more clause worth knowing: the advertisement and sale are deemed commercially reasonable if at least three independent bidders attend the sale at the time and place advertised, where an independent bidder is one not related to, and with no controlling interest or common pecuniary interest with, the owner or any other bidder. § 10-4-213(a) Read that as a safe harbor, not a minimum. A sale with two bidders isn't automatically void; it just doesn't get the benefit of the deeming clause. Document your bidder count either way.
Georgia's headline clock runs from the default date, not from the notice — that's the main thing to recalibrate if you're used to the Texas or Florida sequence. Under the model lease, rent is due on the 1st, and the occupant is in default if it isn't paid by the 7th calendar day (or if a check is dishonored), with the default dating back to the due date. Day 0 below is that due date.
Day ~60 is a floor, not a target. It's 30 days of continuous default, plus a 14-day demand, plus a first publication just after that, plus the 15-days-after-first-publication rule. Two soft spots to plan around. First, inclusive-versus-exclusive day counting isn't resolved anywhere in the text for any of those three numbers, so build a buffer and have counsel set the actual dates. Second, on the commercially-reasonable advertising route there may be no "publication" in the newspaper sense at all, and the 15-day sale floor is written around first publication — we'd treat the first appearance of the advertisement as the anchor, but that reading is ours, not the statute's.
Two related open questions the text doesn't answer. What a partial payment does to "continuously for thirty days" — it presumably breaks continuity and restarts the clock, but the statute doesn't say so, and neither will we. And whether the notice itself may be sent before day 30 so long as the later enforcement steps fall after it, or whether day 30 is the earliest send date. We put the notice at day 30 above because that's the conservative reading, not because the statute settles it.
Texas and Florida both have a "no newspaper available → post in conspicuous places" branch. Georgia does not, and the reason is structural: every Georgia county has a designated legal organ, so the statute never needs a fallback. While researching this page we found popular secondary guides asserting a specific Georgia rule about posting in a set number of conspicuous public places — language that appears nowhere in the enacted text we read. We're not naming anyone; summaries drift, and some of it looks like requirements imported from other states' statutes. The point is the general one: before you rely on any state-by-state summary, including ours, check the claim against the enacted law.
Because § 10-4-213(a) conditions non-judicial enforcement on having obtained a rental agreement containing the statutory language, a perfect notice on a non-conforming lease may not get you where you need to be. If your lease predates 1 July 2013 and hasn't been renewed, § 10-4-215 puts it outside the Act. This is the first thing to check, not the last.
A 2024 amendment added electronic execution and delivery of rental agreements at § 10-4-213(b), and enacted § 10-4-218, under which an unsigned rental agreement delivered by hand or verified mail becomes enforceable if the occupant keeps using the space 14 days after delivery — but only if the agreement carries a prescribed deemed-acceptance statement in bold type of at least 12 points. Both changes feed the lease precondition above rather than changing any notice.
The 2025 amendment kept the two-week legal-organ default and added the commercially-reasonable alternative for non-vehicle property; it also extended the three-independent-bidders deeming clause to cover the advertisement as well as the sale. Some summaries tracking an earlier version of that bill describe it as replacing the two-week rule with a single publication. The version that passed did not do that.
Three separate reasons to keep titled property off this track. The lien's priority carve-out in § 10-4-212 excepts interests evidenced by a certificate of title, so the title lienholder outranks the storage lien. § 10-4-213(a) offers a different route for a motor vehicle, trailer or watercraft where charges have gone unpaid for 60 days after the obligation matured — the owner may have the property towed in lieu of foreclosing, with a different clock and a hand-off to Georgia's abandoned-vehicle regime. And the 2025 commercially-reasonable advertising alternative expressly excludes vehicles, motorcycles, trailers, watercraft and RVs. If titled property is in the unit, this is counsel territory.
§ 10-4-217, added in 2019, caps the late fee at the greater of $20 per month or 20% of the monthly rent. That cap governs the late-fee line of the itemized claim in your notice — an overstated claim is an overstated notice.
§ 10-4-214 says that if the rental agreement is with a service member, the owner shall comply with all terms of the federal Servicemembers Civil Relief Act. No bold-print military statement is required in the notice the way Texas requires one, but the substantive protection is written into Georgia law itself — check status before any sale.
§ 10-4-218 also created a non-lien disposal path: after a termination or nonrenewal for reasons other than nonpayment, with at least 14 days' notice to remove property, the owner may dispose of what's left. It has no advertisement or sale machinery and it is not lien enforcement. Don't run one procedure's paperwork on the other's facts.
A bill styled as a protections-for-consumers act covering self-service storage facilities was introduced in the 2025–26 Georgia session and referred to second readers in January 2025. It has not moved since. Georgia's sessions run two years as one session, so a 2026 revival is possible, and it would land directly on the notice requirements described here. Nothing on this page changes unless and until it passes — but if you saw the bill reported somewhere, that's the status.
A good-faith purchaser takes free of prior rights. The owner satisfies the lien from the proceeds and holds any balance for the occupant or notified secured-interest holders; unclaimed after two years, it goes to the state under Georgia's unclaimed-property law. If nobody buys and the procedures were followed, the owner may otherwise dispose of the property and must notify the occupant of that action. Owner liability is capped at the sale proceeds. § 10-4-213(a)
LienFlow tracks these deadlines and generates the notice for you to review and file — $49/mo when your state launches.
Reserve your spotThis guide is built from the Georgia Self-service Storage Facility Act of 2013 — O.C.G.A. Title 10, Ch. 4, Art. 5 (§§ 10-4-210 to 10-4-218): § 10-4-211 for definitions, § 10-4-212 for the lien and its priority, § 10-4-213 for enforcement, § 10-4-214 for SCRA, § 10-4-215 for pre-2013 agreements, § 10-4-217 for the late-fee cap, and § 10-4-218 for deemed acceptance and the termination-removal path. The operative text of § 10-4-213 we worked from came from the enacted Acts that restated it — the 2024 Act that restated the section in full and the 2025 Act that restated subsection (a) — cross-checked against the Legislative Counsel's enacted-statute summaries and secondary compilations. What we did not pull is the codified O.C.G.A. itself, which is published commercially and which we could not retrieve; codification can renumber, and later sessions can amend. A consumer-protection bill aimed at this article was introduced in the 2025–26 session and has not moved, but a revival would land directly on these notice requirements. This page has not been reviewed by a licensed Georgia attorney. The statute is the authority, not this page — confirm every date and requirement against the current official code and your own counsel. Written 11 August 2026.