The apathetic attitude towards self-cultivation resulting from the social contempt for manual labour, alleged by many social scientists in South-Asia does not fully explain the existence of tenancy in Bangladesh, where a major portion of land in the tenancy market comes from resident households cultivating a part of their holding by themselves. Other factors mentioned in the literature, e.g., the level of natural risks and the wage also do not explain much of the variation in the incidence of share tenancy. This paper argues that in a monsoon dominated rice agriculture such as Bangladesh the nature of property distribution can substantially affect the existence and regional variation of tenancy, because it can influence the relative advantages of ownership cultivation with wage labour and cultivation through share tenants. The hypothesis has been tested with cross-section data at both macro and micro level.