Broodmare Lease Agreement Template (Free PDF): Who Gets the Foal, Dates, Fees and Care (2026)

By Brian Bickell, who raises paint and quarter horses at Bickell Ranches in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

A breeding lease moves a mare for a season without moving her papers. Somebody has a mare they do not want to breed this year, or cannot; somebody else wants the cross and does not want to buy the mare to get it. The arrangement is common enough in stock horse country that most breeding operations have one or two running in a given year, and it is usually documented by a phone call and a handshake.

That works until the foal is on the ground. A live foal from a leased mare is an asset that two parties have a claim to, and a leased mare who comes home empty is a season two parties paid for. Both outcomes are settled in advance by a page of writing, or they are settled afterward by whoever argues harder.

A general template, not legal advice. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and reading it creates no attorney-client relationship. Have a lawyer who knows your state review a lease agreement before you rely on it.

The Same Agreement, Read From Two Sides

A lease is one document and two entirely different sets of worries, and drafting it from only one side is how the gaps get in.

Leasing a mare out. The owner is putting an asset worth real money in someone else's care for a year, and getting her back is the point. The clauses that matter to the lessor are the term and the return date, the condition she comes back in, who carries mortality insurance and who is named on it, what the lessee can and cannot authorize medically, whether she can be moved to a third property or sublet, and what happens if she is injured or lost. The lease fee is rarely the largest item at stake.

Leasing a mare in. The lessee is paying for a season and a foal, and the foal is the point. The clauses that matter to the lessee are the foal disposition, the breeding decisions and whether the stallion choice is theirs, whether there is any remedy if the mare turns out not to be breeding sound, what happens if she does not settle, and whether the owner can pull her mid-season. Their exposure is a year of board and stud fees against nothing.

A document that reads well from both chairs is the one that gets signed without a week of back and forth.

Term Dates

Two dates, both written as calendar dates.

The start date is the day the lease begins, which on most arrangements is the day she ships. The end date is the clearer of the two to get wrong, and the clean way to write it is as the day the mare goes home. The lease runs until that date, and on that date she is back in the owner's possession. A term written as "the 2027 breeding season" or "through foaling" is an argument waiting for the one month when the two parties want her in different places.

Two details are worth adding beside the dates. Who hauls her, each way, and who pays for the hauling. And whether the term can be extended, by whom, in writing, and by when notice has to be given, since a mare who foals late is a mare somebody wants to hold another six weeks.

Foal Disposition

The most important sentence in the agreement, and the one most often left implied.

• Foal to the lessee. The usual shape of a breeding lease. The lessee pays the lease fee, pays the stud fee and the care, and keeps the foal.
• Foal to the lessor. Less common on its own, and normally paired with the lessee getting something else: the mare's use, a reduced or waived fee, or a second foal in a multi-year arrangement.
• Shared. The parties split the foal on an agreed formula. This one needs the most writing by a distance. Who has possession of the foal and until when, who decides whether it is sold or kept, who sets the reserve, how the sale proceeds divide, how the costs of getting it to the sale divide, and what happens if the parties disagree.

Whichever arrangement applies, the agreement should say what happens to a second foal if the mare produces twins, and what happens if the foal does not survive. Those are unhappy sentences to write and they cost nothing to include.

Lease Fee, or a Share

Breeding leases are priced two ways and the agreement should be explicit about which one is in force.

A flat lease fee is a number, a due date, and a statement of whether it is refundable and under what circumstances. It is the simpler arrangement and it puts the whole risk of the season on the lessee.

A share arrangement replaces some or all of the fee with a claim on the outcome: a reduced fee plus a percentage of the foal, or no fee and a split. Share deals need the foal disposition clause above to be airtight, because the money and the foal are the same question. They also need a valuation method if one party is buying the other out of their share.

Either way, the agreement names who pays the stud fee and the shipping fees, since those are usually the larger numbers, and whether any breeding contract entered into for the mare is in the lessee's name or the owner's. The stallion breeding contract template covers what the mare owner side of that second document has to carry, and it is worth reading before signing a lease that commits somebody to it.

Board, Vet, and Farrier

Routine care normally follows possession: the lessee has her, so the lessee feeds her, shoes her, worms her, and pays for it. Two refinements keep that from becoming a fight.

A ceiling on veterinary spending. Above a stated dollar figure, the lessee has to reach the owner before authorizing treatment, with an exception for a genuine emergency when the owner cannot be reached. Below it, the lessee acts and pays. The figure is the whole clause, and it should be a number rather than the word "major."

A statement of who arranges what. Vaccinations, deworming, dental, and Coggins during the term, and who holds the paperwork at the end of it. A mare going home with a year of undocumented care is a mare whose record has a hole in it, which matters at the next sale and at the next registry filing.

Pre-lease and post-lease examinations belong here too. An examination by a licensed veterinarian at the start, and another at the end, gives both parties an agreed statement of the condition she left in and came back in.

Insurance and Risk of Loss

A leased mare is somebody's asset in somebody else's field, and the agreement names who insures her, for how much, who is the named beneficiary, and who pays the premium. Mortality coverage is the usual minimum on a mare of any value. Loss of use and major medical are separate products and separate decisions.

Risk of loss is the companion clause. Which party bears the loss if she dies or is permanently injured during the term, and whether that answer changes depending on cause. Insurance without a risk-of-loss clause leaves the question of who collects; a risk-of-loss clause without insurance leaves the question of who pays.

The agreement also states whether the lessee may move her to a third property, sublease her, or send her to a breeding farm for the season, and whether the owner has a right to inspect her on reasonable notice. Most disputes over a leased horse start as a surprise about where she is.

Breeding Decisions and the Stallion

The point of a breeding lease is a foal, so the agreement says who decides which stallion.

On a foal-to-the-lessee lease the choice normally sits with the lessee, and the owner may reserve a veto or a list of approved stallions. On a share arrangement the choice is usually joint, because both parties have an interest in what the foal is worth. The clause should also say how many cycles will be tried, whether embryo transfer or ICSI is permitted, and whether the mare may be bred to more than one stallion in a season.

Method matters to the owner separately from the outcome. Live cover, artificial insemination, and embryo transfer put different demands on a mare, and an owner who wants her handled one way should say so in writing rather than hope.

Registration of the Resulting Foal

Which party is recorded as the breeder of a foal from a leased mare is a registry question rather than a contract question, and the contract has to match the registry rule rather than override it.

Three things are worth knowing before the season, and one of them is not knowable from a blog post.

The registry has its own lease form, and a lease filed elsewhere does not count. APHA offers show leases and breeding leases, each with a separate form and fees, submitted online through PHcentral or on the printable forms from its registration guides page. APHA's own FAQ answers the cross-registry question directly: a breeding lease on file with AQHA does not carry over, and a separate breeding lease has to be filed with APHA as well. APHA also names a Breeding Lease Cancellation form, which is the piece an operation discovers it needed only after a lease ends early.

A lessee can be the party who registers the foal, at least at AQHA. AQHA's help center states that only the owner or lessee of the dam at the time of foaling, or at the time of breeding in an embryo transfer, can register the resulting foal online. That is a useful sentence for a lessee to have read before writing the foal disposition clause.

Whether the lessee or the lessor is recorded as the breeder is the part to confirm with the registry directly. That rule was not something this article could verify against a current registry page, and it is exactly the kind of detail that is wrong in half the forum threads about it. Call the registry or read the current rule book before the season rather than after the foal is born.

Then write three things into the lease: which party will be recorded as the breeder, which party is responsible for filing the lease with the registry and by what date, and which party files the foal registration application and pays for it. Both registries publish their current forms and fees: AQHA at aqha.com and APHA at apha.com.

The rest of the foal's paperwork chain runs the same way it does for any foal, and it is laid out in the foal registration paperwork guide. The piece that a lease adds is a fourth document that has to be on file before the others matter.

Return Condition

The mare comes home, and the agreement says in what state.

Sound, in stated body condition, with her feet done, current on the care listed earlier, and with her records. If she is returning in foal, the agreement should say so and say who pays for the remainder of that pregnancy and who owns the resulting foal, because a mare returned in foal is the most common way a lease produces a surprise.

A short list of what travels home with her prevents the other common surprise: her papers, her health paperwork, her records for the term, and any halters, blankets, or equipment that came with her.

If She Does Not Settle

Every lease should answer this, and most do not.

A mare who does not conceive is not a failure of either party and it happens on good mares in good hands. The available answers are a pro-rated refund of the lease fee, a carry-forward of the lease into the following season at no further fee, a reduced fee with the balance owed only on a live foal, or no adjustment at all with the lessee carrying the season's risk. All four are used in real agreements. The one that produces a dispute is the fifth option, which is not having written any of them down.

The same clause should cover a pregnancy lost during the term and a foal that does not survive, since those are the same question at a different point in the year.

Keeping the Lease on the Horse

A signed lease in a drawer answers the question a year later. It does not answer the question a manager asks on a Tuesday, which is which of these mares is actually mine right now.

HorseBook records a lease as an event on the horse rather than as a change to who owns her. Open a mare and the Lease card on her Overview carries the agreement: the direction, the other party, the dates, the foal disposition, and the fee.

• Direction. Leased in, meaning someone else's horse in the barn, or leased out, meaning an owned horse at their farm. Leasing a mare out keeps her ownership as owned, because she still is. Leasing one in marks her as an outside horse, which is a Pro plan capability.
• Other party. Picked from contacts, or typed in as a name if they are not a contact.
• Starts and Leased until. The end date is the day she goes home, so the card reads "until" that date and she stops reading as leased on it. Leaving the end blank means open-ended.
• Foal goes to. Lessee, lessor, or shared, matching the disposition clause in the agreement.
• Fee and Notes.

While a lease is running, her ownership label across the app reads Leased in or Leased out in place of Owned or Outside: on her page header with the other party and the until-date, and on the roster row. Ending a lease is a dated close rather than a delete, so the term stays in her history, and a lease booked for a future season shows as upcoming rather than disappearing until it starts. She stays on the roster and her reminders keep running either way, which is the behavior an owner wants on a mare they still own and a barn wants on a mare they are feeding.

The lease record is live on the web dashboard now, and it arrives on iPhone in the next update. The mare's breeding records sit where they always did, on her Breeding tab, so a season under lease reads as one timeline: the cover, the checks, the foaling window, and the foal. Across a band, the Broodmare Board shows where every mare stands regardless of who holds her papers.

The Handshake Version Is the Expensive One

Breeding leases work. They are how a good mare gets bred in a year her owner cannot use her, and how a program gets access to a mare it could not buy. What makes them go wrong is never the horse; it is the two or three questions nobody wrote down, and every one of those questions is cheap to answer in September and expensive to answer in May.

The template below covers the questions. Filling it in is a conversation, and having that conversation is most of the value.

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Brian Bickell is the founder of HorseBook and raises paint and quarter horses at Bickell Ranches in Stillwater, Oklahoma. This article is general information about what lease agreements contain, not legal advice.