I've personally never heard of a case where you'd pay out the year's lease. Usually you just forfeit a portion of your deposit, which half a month's rent or so, in Canada at least.

I had that once, in an apartment I rented in the US (TX). If you broke the lease early, you were on the hook for the remainder of the lease, UNTIL the apartment was rented again. This was called "rent acceleration" as I remember it. This was also ~25 years ago so maybe it is different now, but it definitely existed and I was subject to it.

At the time I bought a house so I broke the lease to move in. Fortunately, the apartment rented within the month so I didn't owe additional fees.

Out of curiosity I googled "rent acceleration" and see it is a hot topic now - mostly with commercial real estate and businesses break their leases due to the impact of covid on them. See https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/what-landlords-need-to-kno... for a summary. Also interesting is some US states make residential leases exempt from rent acceleration.

I think that's the typical outcome in the end. I've never actually heard of anyone being charged the full amount (not that I would have any way of knowing though). Also sometimes local law will place an upper limit on the size of the fee.

Several of my past leases specified that if broken I would be responsible for monthly rent on a prorated basis until a new tenant moved in.

In my current province, it's regulated that after the first year's lease is up, it defaults on an ongoing basis to a month-to-month agreement, whereby only a month's notice is required and that's it, unless you explicitly agree to another term lease. That's what I'm on now. Our deposit is the regulated max of half a month's rent.

In Poland if you signed a contract for a set period of time and there is no clause about breaking the contract early, you are on the hook for the entire duration of the contract.

For rent specifically, you can arrange to have a mutual agreement with the landlord if you for example find a new tenant, but by law the landlord does not have to accept anything.

Some contract also have punitive clauses in it, saying that you can break the contract at any point with 1 months notice, but you have to pay 3 months' worth of rent.

Wow, I'm glad this isn't how it works where I live.