Did my tenant break his month to month lease?

[Kumar Gaurav]

My current tenant who is on a month to month lease gave me notice on May 1st at around 8:00 PM that he will be vacating 

his apartment end of month due to a job change.He had the capacity to give me ample notice at least a week earlier than that and it would have given me enough time to find another tenant for June as I am seeing  Prospecive tenants also need to give one month notice before moving to their current landlords,so I will end up losing rent for June.

Did my tenant technically break his lease by not informing me by 11:59 pm the previous day?

I think the tenant delayed relaying this information to me about vacating the apartment  by few hours and defaulted the month to month lease agreement.Is it reasonable for me to withhold at least half month of security deposit? appreciate inputs from other members.

[Kyle J.]

@Kumar Gaurav  Since none of us have read your lease, or even know what state you're in, it would be a straight up guess for us to say.  But I'll venture a guess.

In my opinion, you're being unreasonable.  My lease (and the law in my state) requires 30 days notice to terminate a month-to-month tenancy.  It sounds like your tenant complied with that.  (And 30 days notice is pretty common.)  The fact that they COULD have (or you believe had the "capacity" to have) given more notice is irrelevant.  

As a side note, it sounds like you're worried about a mere hours difference in the timing of the notice (8pm on May 1st vs 11:59pm on April 30th).  It's not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.  What would you realistically have done on midnight had you received the notice at that time?  I'm guessing not much.  

Lastly, there's no reason you have to be out all of June's rent.  Leases don't have to begin on the first of the month.  I just had tenants move out a couple months ago on March 1st, and had new tenants that signed a lease and began paying by the middle of March.  Now, they didn't move in on that date, but if they wanted the place that's when they signed the lease and started paying.  

Point is, you could make the new lease start whenever you want....June 2nd, June 5th, June 15th etc.  But there's no reason you need to lose out on all of June's rent.