Snow, Ice, and Virginia Landlords: Who Is Responsible When You Fall at Your Apartment?
A frozen morning, an untreated sidewalk between your building's door and the parking lot, and a fall that breaks a wrist or a hip. Few injuries feel more avoidable — the property manager knew it snowed, everyone used that walkway, and a bag of salt costs a few dollars. Yet tenants hurt this way are routinely told by insurance adjusters that "weather isn't anyone's fault." Virginia law says otherwise, within limits worth understanding before next winter.
The landlord's duty: common areas, reasonable care, reasonable time
In Virginia, a landlord generally owes tenants a duty of reasonable care in maintaining the common areas it retains under its control — the shared sidewalks, steps, stairwells, parking lots, and entrances of an apartment community. The Supreme Court of Virginia recognized decades ago, in Langhorne Road Apartments, Inc. v. Bisson, 207 Va. 474, 150 S.E.2d 540 (1966), that this duty extends to snow and ice: a landlord must use ordinary care to remove natural accumulations of snow and ice from common walkways within a reasonable time after the weather ends.
The statutory backdrop points the same way. The Virginia Residential Landlord and Tenant Act requires landlords to comply with building and housing codes materially affecting health and safety and to keep common areas in a clean and safe condition. Va. Code § 55.1-1220. A lease cannot simply wish those obligations away.
Two features of the rule deserve emphasis:
- "Reasonable time" is the battleground. A landlord is not an insurer, and no one is liable for failing to shovel mid-blizzard. But once the storm ends, the clock starts. Overnight snow untreated by the evening commute, or ice that has refrozen across days of thaw-freeze cycles, presents a very different case than a fall during active snowfall.
- Control matters. The duty follows the common areas the landlord retains. Conditions inside your own leased unit, or on a walkway the lease genuinely assigns to the tenant, are analyzed differently.
The defenses you should expect
Virginia remains a pure contributory negligence state: if the defense persuades a jury that the fallen tenant was even slightly careless — and that the carelessness contributed to the fall — recovery is barred entirely. Expect these arguments in every case:
| Defense argument | What it really turns on |
|---|---|
| "The ice was open and obvious" | Whether a reasonable person would have seen and appreciated the danger — and whether the tenant had any safe alternative route to work, car, or door |
| "She should have known it was slippery" | Knowledge of general wintry conditions is not the same as knowledge of the specific hazard — black ice is dangerous precisely because it is invisible |
| "We had no notice" | Whether the landlord knew or should have known of the condition — weather records, prior complaints, and the landlord's own snow-removal log answer this |
The "safe alternative route" point matters more than tenants realize. Where the only way from your door to your car runs across the untreated walkway, the argument that you should simply have stayed home for days is far less compelling to juries than adjusters pretend.
A word about leases. Many Virginia leases contain clauses purporting to shift snow-and-ice responsibility to tenants or to disclaim liability for injuries in common areas. Read skeptically. A landlord's statutory obligations for common areas and code compliance are not so easily contracted away, and boilerplate disclaimers do not automatically defeat a negligence claim arising from areas the landlord actually controlled. What the lease says, what the landlord's snow-removal contract says, and what actually happened on the ground are three different questions — and the second two usually matter more than the first.
What this means for injured people in Virginia
- Document immediately. Ice melts and evidence disappears faster in these cases than in almost any other. Photograph the spot, the wider walkway, and the sky; note the time; keep the shoes.
- Get the weather record. Certified climatological data establishing when precipitation ended is often the backbone of the "reasonable time" argument.
- Request the landlord's snow-removal policy and logs. Many complexes contract snow removal; the contractor may be an additional defendant, and the contract shows what everyone agreed was necessary.
- Report the fall in writing to management promptly, and see a doctor the same day if possible — gaps in treatment become defense exhibits.
- Be careful what you say. "I'm so clumsy" in an email to the leasing office will appear in the defense's contributory negligence argument verbatim.
Winter falls are among the most defensible-sounding and most winnable cases we see — the difference is nearly always the quality of the evidence gathered in the first week.
If you or a loved one has been hurt, call Posey Lebowitz at (202) 524-0123 or send us a message for a free consultation.
Part of our DMV case law archive, compiled in 2026 to reflect the archive of some of the most important decisions in injury law.