To address these concerns with off-balance sheet financing, the FASB and the IASB (collectively, the boards) recently proposed that all leases in excess of one year should be recognized as assets and liabilities on a lessee’s balance sheet. More importantly, the boards tentatively decided in the exposure draft of a proposed leasing standard to make the unit of account the ‘‘whole’’ leasing contract, which would account for not only the fixed-term lease obligations, but also the optional renewal periods as a single leasing obligation. This proposed treatment essentially treats payments associated with renewal options as present obligations (and treats access to the leased assets as present resources), even though the lessee has not yet exercised its right to renew, nor is the lessee obligated to do so. Although the proposed treatment minimizes structuring opportunities, we argue that this approach lacks representational faithfulness and can lead to problems with comparability. The purpose of this study is to examine how such unit of account choices, like the one tentatively made in the newly proposed standard on lease accounting, are likely to affect decision making.