Lease Break in PA - Landlord required to mitigate damages?

[trismegistus]

I live in an apartment in Pennsylvania with 7 months left on my lease. I'm a quiet freak, and before I moved here, I knew nothing about apartment life. Needless to say, if I had known what apartments were like, I never in a million years would have signed a lease on one. (No, my neighbors are not obnoxiously loud, I have no legal recourse there; it's just that any sound at all drives me nuts.) I want to start looking for a house to rent and be prepared to break my lease when I find one, but only if I won't be held liable for the remainder of the payments. I've been told that in most states, landlords are required to "mitigate the damages," but I don't know if this is the case in Pa., and I can't find the state laws on the web. Are landlords in Pennsylvania required to try to re-rent the apartment when a tenant breaks his lease? Please, somebody help and provide a citation... my sanity depends on this!

 

[LL]

You probably won't find a statute that says that the landlord is required to mitigate his loss. That comes from a general principle of contracts, that the injured party is required to do whatever they can to minimize their loss in order to recover the balance. Without knowing anything about PA law, I am sure that the same holds in PA.

But you have forgotten that the landlord is not required to do this for free. While he has to mitigate the loss on the basic rent, you are responsible for all of the extra costs that he will incur in performing this mitigation. These costs can add up very quickly.
See
https://forum.freeadvice.com/showthread.php?threadid=52170