Free Texas Rental Application Fee Receipt
Texas puts no dollar limit on the rental application fee — and that is the least important thing about the Texas rule. Property Code § 92.3515 conditions your right to keep the fee on a notice you must make available at the time you hand over the application: a printed statement of your tenant-selection criteria and the grounds for denial, with the applicant’s signed acknowledgment — unsigned, and § 92.3515(b) raises a rebuttable presumption that the notice was not made available. Reject an applicant — or simply let § 92.352’s seventh day pass without giving notice of acceptance, which deems the applicant rejected — without having made that notice available and you must return the application fee and any application deposit — on a letting chapter 92 reaches, which § 92.002 limits to the relationship between landlords and tenants of residential rental property and § 92.001(1) narrows again to rooms rented as a permanent residence under a single lease. This generator produces the receipt and the acknowledgment record together, because in Texas they are the same transaction.
Most guidance on Texas application fees answers the wrong question. It asks what a Texas landlord may charge, reports correctly that the state sets no maximum, and stops — which leaves the reader with the impression that the application fee is unregulated in Texas. It is not. Property Code chapter 92, subchapter I regulates something more consequential than the amount: whether you are entitled to keep it. The mechanism is a notice, and the notice has to be made available at the front of the process rather than produced afterwards. At the time an applicant is given a rental application, the landlord must make available a printed notice of its tenant-selection criteria and of the grounds on which an application may be denied, and must take the applicant’s signed acknowledgment that the notice was made available. That acknowledgment is an evidence rule as much as a formality: where it is not signed, § 92.3515(b) raises a rebuttable presumption that the notice was not made available, and § 92.3515(c) prescribes wording the acknowledgment must be substantively equivalent to, which § 92.3515(d) permits to sit inside the rental application itself where the notice is underlined or in bold print. If the landlord then rejects the applicant without having made that notice available, it must return the application fee and any application deposit — and § 92.352 can supply the rejection on its own, deeming an applicant rejected where no notice of acceptance is given on or before the seventh day after a completed application is submitted. The amount is irrelevant to that duty; so is how much the screening actually cost. What matters is a step taken, or not taken, before the applicant filled anything in. Texas backs the rule with real money. Bad-faith retention of a fee or deposit that should have been returned exposes the landlord to $100, plus three times the amount wrongfully retained, plus attorney’s fees — a structure that makes a small fee worth litigating. And the right cannot be signed away: § 92.355 makes it non-waivable, so the nonrefundable-in-all-events clause printed on a great many Texas rental applications does not do the work its drafter thought it did. One thing precedes all of it. Subchapter I is part of chapter 92, so it governs what the chapter governs: § 92.002 applies the chapter only to the relationship between landlords and tenants of residential rental property, and § 92.001(1) defines a dwelling as rooms rented for use as a permanent residence under a single lease — which puts non-residential letting, hotel, motel, extended-stay, corporate-housing, vacation and short-term occupancy, and room-by-room letting under separate leases outside the chapter altogether. On an ordinary residential tenancy the duties below are unqualified; whether yours is one is a question of fact this page cannot decide for you. The practical upshot is that the Texas application fee is not a pricing question at all. It is a documentation question, decided at the moment the application is handed over.
Build the record
Fill in the fields below and the generator produces a dated PDF you can print, sign and give to the applicant, keeping a copy for your file. Nothing is stored and there is no charge. Fields you leave blank print as a dash so you can complete them by hand.
The notice is what earns the fee, and it has to exist before the applicant does
Start one layer up, with the chapter the subchapter sits in. Subchapter I carries no applicability section of its own, and its § 92.351 definitions key applicant, co-applicant and landlord to a dwelling, so chapter 92’s own gate reaches the fee rule directly. § 92.002: the chapter “applies only to the relationship between landlords and tenants of residential rental property”. § 92.001(1): “‘Dwelling’ means one or more rooms rented for use as a permanent residence under a single lease to one or more tenants”. Three kinds of letting fall outside on those words — one that is not a residential landlord-tenant relationship at all; one where the occupancy is not a permanent residence, which reaches hotel and motel stays, extended-stay and corporate housing, and vacation or short-term lettings; and one where rooms are let under separate leases rather than a single lease, which is how a good deal of co-living is papered. That is a gate on this page rather than a doubt about the rule: inside the chapter the notice condition below is unqualified, and outside it the chapter does not reach the arrangement at all and this page does not describe what does. Classification is a question of fact about your particular letting — how the stay is structured, what the lease covers — and no page can settle it for you. The order of events is the whole rule. The duty attaches at the time the applicant is given a rental application — not when the screening is ordered, not when the decision is made, and not when a rejected applicant asks for their money back. That means the printed notice of your tenant-selection criteria and grounds for denial has to be written, printed and available before the first applicant walks in. A landlord who drafts criteria in response to a complaint has not cured anything, because the condition was about availability at the moment of handover. Two things have to be in that notice, and landlords routinely produce only one. The statute describes a notice of the tenant-selection criteria and of the grounds on which an application may be denied. A list of thresholds — an income multiple, a credit standard, a rental-history standard — is criteria. The grounds for denial are the companion statement of what will cause a rejection. A one-line policy that says applications are considered on their merits satisfies neither, and a criteria sheet with no denial grounds satisfies half of what is asked for. The acknowledgment is the evidence, and it is signed by the applicant. The landlord takes the applicant’s signed acknowledgment that the notice was made available. Note what that signature records: availability, not agreement, and not that the applicant read the notice. It is a receipt for the notice. And the statute says exactly what happens when it is missing. § 92.3515(b) provides that where the landlord makes the notice available, the applicant shall sign an acknowledgment indicating it was made available, and then adds the mechanism: “If the acknowledgment is not signed, there is a rebuttable presumption that the notice was not made available to the applicant.” Read that word by word. It is a presumption, so without the signature the starting position is that you failed the condition, and the return duty follows unless you displace it. And it is rebuttable, so a missing signature is not automatic defeat — you may still prove availability by other means. What it costs you is the burden, in a dispute where the applicant otherwise had to make the case. § 92.3515(c) tells you what the acknowledgment has to say. It must include a statement substantively equivalent to this: “Signing this acknowledgment indicates that you have had the opportunity to review the landlord’s tenant selection criteria. The tenant selection criteria may include factors such as criminal history, credit history, current income, and rental history. If you do not meet the selection criteria, or if you provide inaccurate or incomplete information, your application may be rejected and your application fee will not be refunded.” Substantively equivalent is the operative standard — the statute does not demand these exact words, but a bare signature line reading “received” is not equivalent to a paragraph that tells the applicant what the criteria may cover and what happens if they are not met. § 92.3515(d) tells you where it may sit. The acknowledgment may be part of the rental application itself — if the notice is underlined or in bold print. That is a conditional permission, not a free one: fold the acknowledgment into your application and set it in ordinary body type, and you have taken the convenience without meeting the condition attached to it. Without a signed acknowledgment you have no ordinary way to show the condition was met, and the party who bears the consequence of that gap is you — the return duty triggers on a rejection made without having made the notice available. And a rejection is not always something you do. Under § 92.352 an applicant is deemed rejected if the landlord does not give notice of acceptance on or before the seventh day after the applicant submits a completed rental application on a form the landlord furnished — or, where the landlord furnished no application form, the seventh day after it accepted an application deposit. Silence is therefore a rejection with a date on it, and it triggers the return duty in exactly the same way an express refusal does where the criteria notice was never made available. The same section adds that rejecting one co-applicant is a rejection of all co-applicants, so a single disqualifying credit file rejects the whole group and the money goes back for the whole group. § 92.353 governs how that clock is met and stopped. A landlord is presumed to have given notice of acceptance or rejection where the notice is by telephone to the applicant, a co-applicant or a person living with them on or before the required date, or by United States mail addressed to the applicant and postmarked on or before that date — postmark, not delivery, which is the difference between meeting the seventh day and missing it. Where the applicant asks for an acceptance or a refund of the application deposit to be mailed, the landlord must mail it to the address the applicant furnished. And where a required date falls on a Saturday, a Sunday, or a state or federal holiday, it is extended to the end of the next day following it. § 92.351(6) ties the required date back to § 92.352, so the seventh day is the date all of this turns on. The consequence has two parts and landlords tend to remember only the first. Where the condition was not met and the applicant is rejected, both the application fee and any application deposit go back. The deposit is often the larger sum and is often the one an office is holding against the unit, so a process failure at handover can require returning materially more than the screening fee. And a nonrefundable label does not change any of it. § 92.351(1-a) itself describes the application fee as a nonrefundable sum given to offset screening costs, so the word appears in the statutory scheme — but the return duty in § 92.3515 operates on top of that description, and § 92.355 makes the right non-waivable. Printing NONREFUNDABLE across the top of your application changes nothing about what you owe a rejected applicant to whom no criteria notice was made available. The remedy is what makes this worth getting right. Bad-faith retention exposes the landlord to $100, three times the amount wrongfully retained, and attorney’s fees. The fee-shifting is the operative part: it converts a dispute over a small sum into one a lawyer will take, which is precisely why the notice-and-acknowledgment step is cheap insurance and the missing acknowledgment is expensive.
Watch: Texas Rental Application Fee Receipt explained
Texas application fee at a glance
Settle this first: is there a Texas cap on the application fee?
No — and asking the question that way is how landlords get caught. Property Code ch. 92 subch. I sets no maximum amount for a rental application fee. What it regulates instead is whether you are entitled to retain what you charged. The entitlement turns on a single act performed at the front of the process: making a printed notice of your tenant-selection criteria and grounds for denial available when the application is given, and taking a signed acknowledgment. Skip it and reject the applicant, and the money goes back — the fee and any application deposit — no matter how reasonable the amount was or how much the screening actually cost you. Settle one thing before that, though: whether chapter 92 reaches your letting at all. § 92.002, captioned APPLICATION, provides that the chapter “applies only to the relationship between landlords and tenants of residential rental property”, and § 92.001(1) defines a dwelling as “one or more rooms rented for use as a permanent residence under a single lease to one or more tenants”. Subchapter I has no applicability section of its own and its definitions key to a dwelling, so that gate reaches the fee rule directly. A non-residential letting, an occupancy that is not a permanent residence, and a room let under its own separate lease sit outside it. Which yours is, is a question of fact about your property that this page cannot answer for you
No cap, but a condition
on a letting chapter 92 reaches — § 92.002 confines it to residential rental property and § 92.001(1) to rooms let as a permanent residence under a single lease — Texas fixes no ceiling on the amount. § 92.351(1-a) describes an application fee as a nonrefundable sum given to offset the cost of screening an applicant, and the chapter leaves the figure to you. The regulation sits on the right to keep it, not on the number
The notice that earns the fee
at the time the applicant is given a rental application, the landlord must make available a printed notice of its tenant-selection criteria and the grounds on which an application may be denied, and take the applicant’s signed acknowledgment that the notice was made available. This is a front-of-process step, not a closing formality. § 92.3515(b) supplies the evidence rule: an unsigned acknowledgment raises a rebuttable presumption that the notice was not made available. Under § 92.3515(c) the acknowledgment must carry a statement substantively equivalent to one the statute sets out, and § 92.3515(d) lets it sit inside the rental application if the notice is underlined or in bold print
Rejection can happen by the calendar
§ 92.352 deems an applicant rejected if the landlord does not give notice of acceptance on or before the seventh day after the applicant submits a completed rental application on a form the landlord furnished — or, where no form was furnished, after the landlord accepts an application deposit. Rejecting one co-applicant is a rejection of all of them. § 92.353 presumes notice given by telephone, or by US mail postmarked on or before the required date, and extends a required date that falls on a Saturday, Sunday or state or federal holiday to the end of the next day
What subchapter I actually says — and what this page could not verify
§ 92.002 — APPLICATION. This is the gate on everything below, because subchapter I is part of chapter 92 and carries no applicability section of its own. “This chapter applies only to the relationship between landlords and tenants of residential rental property.” § 92.001(1) — ‘Dwelling’. “‘Dwelling’ means one or more rooms rented for use as a permanent residence under a single lease to one or more tenants.” Subchapter I’s own definitions in § 92.351 key applicant, co-applicant and landlord to a dwelling, so those two sections decide whether the rest of this applies to a given letting: non-residential letting is outside; occupancy that is not a permanent residence — hotel, motel, extended-stay, corporate housing, vacation and short-term — is outside; and rooms let under separate leases rather than one lease are outside. No cap. Texas sets no maximum on the amount of a rental application fee. § 92.351(1-a) describes it as a nonrefundable sum given to offset the cost of screening an applicant. The condition. Under § 92.3515, at the time an applicant is given a rental application the landlord must make available a printed notice of its tenant-selection criteria and the grounds on which an application may be denied, and must take the applicant’s signed acknowledgment that the notice was made available. The presumption — § 92.3515(b). “If the acknowledgment is not signed, there is a rebuttable presumption that the notice was not made available to the applicant.” The prescribed wording — § 92.3515(c). The acknowledgment must include a statement substantively equivalent to: “Signing this acknowledgment indicates that you have had the opportunity to review the landlord’s tenant selection criteria. The tenant selection criteria may include factors such as criminal history, credit history, current income, and rental history. If you do not meet the selection criteria, or if you provide inaccurate or incomplete information, your application may be rejected and your application fee will not be refunded.” Where it may sit — § 92.3515(d). The acknowledgment may be part of the rental application if the notice is underlined or in bold print. The return duty. If the landlord rejects the applicant without having made that notice available, it must return the application fee and any application deposit. Deemed rejection — § 92.352. An applicant is deemed rejected if the landlord does not give notice of acceptance on or before the seventh day after the date the applicant submits a completed rental application on an application form the landlord furnished, or the date the landlord accepts an application deposit where it furnished no form. Rejection of one co-applicant is deemed a rejection of all co-applicants. Notice and refund procedures — § 92.353. Notice of acceptance or rejection is presumed given if made by telephone to the applicant, a co-applicant or a person living with them on or before the required date, or by United States mail addressed to the applicant and postmarked on or before that date. Where the applicant asks that an acceptance or a refund of the application deposit be mailed, the landlord must mail it to the address the applicant furnished. And a required date falling on a Saturday, Sunday, or state or federal holiday is extended to the end of the next day following it. § 92.351(6) defines the required date as the required date for any acceptance under § 92.352. The remedy. § 92.354 exposes a landlord who retains a fee or deposit in bad faith to $100, plus three times the amount wrongfully retained, plus attorney’s fees. No waiver. § 92.355 makes the right non-waivable, so an application clause purporting to make the fee nonrefundable in all events cannot displace it. Where the text came from. The chapter was read on 31 August 2026 from the Texas Legislative Council’s own statute file server — the origin the official statute site reads from — with each section caption confirmed in the body of the response and a fabricated chapter returning an empty 404 in the same pass. The official front end remains unusable and still fails its own control, returning an identical non-statutory page for a real chapter, an invented chapter and several other routes alike; that is a fact about the front end, not about the code. Currency no longer rests on inference: the codified sections above read as described. A 2025 bill that would have barred taking a fee before the notice and added a criminal-record screening section did not pass, and nothing it proposed is law or is described here as law. One number is still not here. Nothing in § 92.352 or § 92.353 fixes an express number of days for refunding an application deposit: § 92.353(c) refers to “the date of required notice of acceptance or required refund of an application deposit” while § 92.351(6) defines the required date only by reference to § 92.352’s acceptance deadline. This page therefore states that seventh-day date and its weekend and holiday extension, and does not state a separate refund clock it cannot find in the text. There is no § 92.331 in this chapter; it was renumbered to § 92.351 in 1997. Four things are quoted here — § 92.002, the § 92.001(1) definition, the § 92.3515(b) presumption sentence and the § 92.3515(c) acknowledgment paragraph; everything else, including the fee provisions, § 92.352 and § 92.353, is described. No case law was researched, and no Texas municipal ordinance was researched.
How to take a Texas application fee you are entitled to keep
Write the criteria and the grounds for denial before you advertise
First check chapter 92 reaches the letting at all: § 92.002 confines it to the relationship between landlords and tenants of residential rental property, and § 92.001(1) confines the dwelling its subchapter I definitions turn on to rooms rented as a permanent residence under a single lease. Then: the condition attaches at the moment the application is handed over, so a notice drafted later cannot satisfy it. Write both halves: the tenant-selection criteria you will apply, and the grounds on which an application may be denied. Make them objective enough that an applicant reading them can predict the outcome, which is also what keeps them defensible under federal fair-housing rules.
Print it, and make it available with every application
The statute describes a printed notice made available at the time the applicant is given a rental application. Build it into the packet so it cannot be forgotten by a leasing agent on a busy Saturday — the failure mode here is never a decision, it is an omission.
Take the signed acknowledgment, and keep it with the application
The acknowledgment records that the notice was made available, and it is the applicant who signs it — § 92.3515(b) provides that where it is not signed there is a rebuttable presumption the notice was not made available. Give it the wording § 92.3515(c) prescribes, or something substantively equivalent to it: that signing indicates the applicant had the opportunity to review the tenant-selection criteria, that those criteria may include factors such as criminal history, credit history, current income and rental history, and that failing them or giving inaccurate or incomplete information may mean rejection with no refund of the application fee. § 92.3515(d) lets you put it in the rental application itself, but only if the notice is underlined or in bold print. File it with that applicant’s paperwork, dated, so it can be produced against the specific application it belongs to rather than as a general office practice.
Set the amount from your actual screening cost, even though nothing requires you to
Texas imposes no ceiling, but § 92.351(1-a) frames the fee as offsetting the cost of screening the applicant, and a fee visibly untethered from any screening cost is a poor fact in a bad-faith argument under § 92.354. Keep the vendor invoice.
If you reject and the notice was not made available, return the fee AND the deposit
Decide and communicate inside § 92.352’s window first: give notice of acceptance on or before the seventh day after the completed application is submitted, or the applicant is deemed rejected whatever you intended, and rejecting one co-applicant rejects them all. § 92.353 presumes that notice given by telephone or by US mail postmarked on or before the required date, and pushes a required date falling on a Saturday, Sunday or state or federal holiday to the end of the next day. Then: Both go back, not just the fee. Return them promptly and in a traceable form rather than arguing about the amount, because the exposure for retaining them in bad faith is $100, three times the amount retained, and attorney’s fees — a structure designed to make a small sum worth suing over.
About the Texas application fee receipt
The generator above produces the receipt for a Texas rental application fee together with the record of the tenant-selection criteria notice and the applicant’s acknowledgment that it was made available. Texas prescribes no form for any of this, so what you get is not a statutory form and is not captioned as one. It records the parties and the unit, the amount of the fee with its date and method, the screening company used, the criteria applied, the acknowledgment that the criteria notice was made available when the application was given, and the outcome with the return position if the applicant was rejected. It carries no separate application-deposit field — it is a receipt for the application fee — so where you also took an application deposit, keep its own record beside this one; § 92.3515(e) sends both back together where the condition was not met. Two dates are worth writing on it even though the form does not demand them: the date the application was given, which is when the notice duty attached, and the date the completed application came back, which starts § 92.352’s seventh-day clock. Deliberately, it prints no dollar ceiling, because Texas sets none, and no deadline for returning an application deposit — not because the timing sections were unread, but because § 92.352 and § 92.353 fix a required date for acceptance and extend it over a weekend or holiday without stating an express number of days for the refund itself. And one thing it assumes. It is written for a letting chapter 92 reaches — § 92.002 confines the chapter to the relationship between landlords and tenants of residential rental property and § 92.001(1) to rooms rented as a permanent residence under a single lease — and the record does not ask which yours is, because that is a question of fact about the property rather than a field. Nothing is stored and there is no charge. Fields left blank print as a dash.
What a Texas landlord should be able to show
- That your letting is one chapter 92 reaches. § 92.002 applies the chapter only to the relationship between landlords and tenants of residential rental property, and § 92.001(1) defines the dwelling subchapter I is keyed to as rooms rented for use as a permanent residence under a single lease.
- A printed notice of your tenant-selection criteria. Written and printed before the first application is handed over, not assembled after a complaint.
- A statement of the grounds on which an application may be denied. The companion half of the notice, and the half most often missing.
- The applicant’s signed acknowledgment that the notice was made available. Signed by the applicant, dated, and filed with that applicant’s application. Unsigned, § 92.3515(b) raises a rebuttable presumption that the notice was not made available.
- Acknowledgment wording substantively equivalent to what § 92.3515(c) sets out. A signature line is not a statement; the prescribed paragraph tells the applicant what the criteria may cover and what failing them costs. § 92.3515(d) allows it inside the rental application only where the notice is underlined or in bold print.
- The date the rental application was given to the applicant. The condition attaches at that moment, so the date is the fact the whole duty hangs on.
- The date the completed application came back, and the date you gave notice of acceptance. § 92.352 deems an applicant rejected where notice of acceptance is not given on or before the seventh day after that submission, so those two dates decide whether a rejection happened by operation of the calendar.
- A receipt for the application fee. Texas prescribes no form, but the amount taken, from whom, and for which unit is the minimum a dispute will ask about.
- A separate record of any application deposit. It is a different sum with a different character, and it is returnable alongside the fee when the condition was not met.
- Your screening vendor invoice. Not required by the chapter, but it is what answers a bad-faith allegation about an amount Texas does not otherwise limit.
- The outcome of the application, and the date. Rejection is the event that triggers the return duty where the notice was not made available.
- Evidence of any return you made, and of when. A traceable return is the cheapest possible answer to a § 92.354 claim.
- Your federal adverse-action record where a consumer report drove a denial. Federal law applies alongside subchapter I, and a note of any city rule you are also meeting — Texas municipal ordinances were not researched for this page.
Common mistakes with Texas application fees
- Concluding that no cap means no regulation. Texas leaves the amount to you and regulates your right to keep it instead. The absence of a ceiling is the least important feature of the Texas rule, and reading it as the whole rule is the error this page exists to correct.
- Printing NONREFUNDABLE on the application and treating that as the answer. § 92.355 makes the right non-waivable, so the clause does not displace the return duty however prominently it is set.
- Producing the criteria notice after the applicant is rejected. The condition is about a notice made available at the time the application was given. Producing it later does not retro-fit the moment that mattered.
- Giving criteria but no grounds for denial. The notice described in § 92.3515 has both halves. A thresholds sheet on its own is an incomplete notice.
- Skipping the signed acknowledgment because the notice was posted on the wall. The statute describes taking the applicant’s signed acknowledgment, and without it you have no per-applicant evidence that anything was made available to that person. § 92.3515(b) goes further and puts the starting position against you: an unsigned acknowledgment raises a rebuttable presumption that the notice was not made available.
- Returning the fee but keeping the application deposit. Where the condition was not met and the applicant is rejected, both are returnable. The deposit is usually the larger sum and is the more expensive half to get wrong.
- Assuming a small fee is not worth a lawsuit. § 92.354 adds $100 and three times the amount wrongfully retained, and it shifts attorney’s fees. The fee-shifting is what makes a small sum litigable.
- Relying on a general office practice instead of a per-applicant file. A disputed rejection is about one applicant, so the acknowledgment has to be findable against that applicant’s name and date.
- Assuming every letting you run is inside chapter 92. § 92.002 confines the chapter to the residential landlord-tenant relationship, and § 92.001(1) confines the dwelling its subchapter I definitions turn on to rooms rented as a permanent residence under a single lease. An extended-stay or short-term operation, and a room-by-room letting on separate leases, are not obviously inside it. That does not weaken the notice rule on a letting the chapter covers; it means the classification question comes first, and it is a question of fact about your property.
- Letting the seventh day pass and thinking no decision was made. § 92.352 deems an applicant rejected where notice of acceptance is not given on or before the seventh day after the completed application is submitted. Silence is a rejection with a date on it, and it triggers the return duty just as an express refusal does where the criteria notice was never made available.
- Rejecting one co-applicant and keeping everyone else’s money. § 92.352(b) deems the rejection of one co-applicant a rejection of all of them.
- Folding the acknowledgment into the application in ordinary type. § 92.3515(d) permits the acknowledgment to be part of the rental application if the notice is underlined or in bold print. Taking the convenience without the typography is taking a permission on a condition you did not meet.
- Reading a deposit-refund deadline into § 92.352 and § 92.353. Those sections fix a required date for acceptance — the seventh day — and extend it where it falls on a Saturday, Sunday or state or federal holiday. Neither states an express number of days for refunding an application deposit, so a specific refund deadline quoted elsewhere is not one this page can find in the text.
- Treating a 2025 bill’s proposals as current law. A Texas bill that would have barred taking a fee before the notice and added a criminal-record screening section did not pass. Guidance describing those provisions as Texas law is describing a bill, not the code.
Is there a limit on rental application fees in Texas?
No. Texas sets no maximum on the amount a landlord may charge to process a rental application. Property Code chapter 92, subchapter I describes the application fee at § 92.351(1-a) as a nonrefundable sum given to offset the cost of screening an applicant, and leaves the figure to the landlord.
That answer, on its own, is the one most Texas guidance gives, and it is the reason so many Texas landlords believe the application fee is unregulated. It is not. The chapter regulates something that matters more than the amount — whether you are entitled to keep what you charged — and it makes that entitlement depend on a step taken at the very front of the process.
One boundary belongs on that answer, and it comes before everything else on this page. Subchapter I is a subchapter of chapter 92, and it carries no applicability section of its own, so it reaches what the chapter reaches and no further. § 92.002, captioned APPLICATION, provides that “[t]his chapter applies only to the relationship between landlords and tenants of residential rental property.” And § 92.001(1) defines the term subchapter I’s own definitions are keyed to: “‘Dwelling’ means one or more rooms rented for use as a permanent residence under a single lease to one or more tenants.” Read together, three kinds of arrangement sit outside. A letting that is not a residential landlord-tenant relationship — commercial, industrial, mixed-use non-residential. An occupancy that is not a permanent residence — a hotel or motel stay, an extended-stay or corporate-housing arrangement, a vacation or short-term letting. And a room-by-room or co-living arrangement in which each occupant holds a separate lease rather than one lease over the rooms.
Read that as a gate, not as a doubt. Where your letting is one the chapter covers — the ordinary residential tenancy this page is written for — the notice condition and the return duty below apply to you exactly as stated. Where it is not, chapter 92 does not govern the arrangement, and whatever law does is not described here. Which side of the line a particular property falls on is a question of fact about the letting, and it is not one this page can settle for you: whether a stay is a permanent residence turns on how the occupancy is structured rather than on what the paperwork is called, and whether rooms are let under one lease or several is a question about the documents you actually signed. Answer it for your own property before you rely on anything that follows.
What does Texas actually require before you take an application fee?
Under § 92.3515, at the time an applicant is given a rental application the landlord must make available a printed notice of its tenant-selection criteria and the grounds on which an application may be denied, and must take the applicant’s signed acknowledgment that the notice was made available.
Three features of that sentence do the work. The timing is the moment the application is handed over, which means the notice must already exist. The content is two things, not one: the criteria you will apply, and the grounds on which you will deny. And the evidence is a signature from the applicant, recording availability rather than agreement — a receipt for the notice, not consent to anything.
The statute does not leave that signature as a suggestion. § 92.3515(b) says that where the landlord makes the notice available the applicant shall sign an acknowledgment indicating it was made available, and then supplies the consequence of a blank line: “If the acknowledgment is not signed, there is a rebuttable presumption that the notice was not made available to the applicant.” Both halves of that phrase matter to a landlord. Because it is a presumption, a missing signature means the law starts from the position that you did not do what § 92.3515(a) required, and the return duty follows from there unless you shift it. Because it is rebuttable, the missing signature is not the end of the argument — you may still prove the notice was made available by other means. What the unsigned acknowledgment actually costs you is the burden of proof in a dispute where it would otherwise have sat with the applicant.
The acknowledgment also has prescribed content. § 92.3515(c) requires it to include a statement substantively equivalent to the following: “Signing this acknowledgment indicates that you have had the opportunity to review the landlord’s tenant selection criteria. The tenant selection criteria may include factors such as criminal history, credit history, current income, and rental history. If you do not meet the selection criteria, or if you provide inaccurate or incomplete information, your application may be rejected and your application fee will not be refunded.” The standard is substantive equivalence rather than verbatim reproduction, so you may write it in your own words — but a line that says only “received” above a signature is not equivalent to a paragraph that tells the applicant what the criteria may cover and what failing them costs.
And § 92.3515(d) answers the practical question that follows: the acknowledgment may be part of the rental application if the notice is underlined or in bold print. That is a permission with a condition attached to it. Folding the acknowledgment into your application form is expressly allowed and is the easiest way to make sure it is never forgotten, but it is allowed on the footing that the notice is set off typographically. Do it in ordinary body type and you have taken the convenience without satisfying the term it was granted on.
How long does a Texas landlord have to accept an applicant?
Seven days. § 92.352 provides that the applicant is deemed rejected if the landlord does not give notice of acceptance on or before the seventh day after the date the applicant submits a completed rental application on an application form the landlord furnished — or, where the landlord furnished no application form, the seventh day after the date the landlord accepted an application deposit.
Read that alongside the return duty and the significance is obvious: a rejection is not always something a landlord does. An office that goes quiet on an application — the decision-maker is away, the screening report is slow, the file is simply forgotten — has rejected the applicant by operation of the calendar on the eighth day. If the criteria notice was never made available at handover, the return duty in § 92.3515(e) is now engaged over an application nobody ever formally refused.
The same section adds a rule about groups: a landlord’s rejection of one co-applicant is deemed a rejection of all co-applicants. One disqualifying credit file therefore rejects the household, not the individual, and the money position is a household position too.
§ 92.353 supplies the procedures around that date. A landlord is presumed to have given notice of an applicant’s acceptance or rejection where the notice is given by telephone to the applicant, a co-applicant, or a person living with the applicant or co-applicant on or before the required date, or by United States mail addressed to the applicant and postmarked on or before the required date. Postmark, not receipt, is what the statute measures, which is the difference between meeting the seventh day and missing it. Where a rental applicant asks that any acceptance, or any refund of the application deposit, be mailed, the landlord must mail it to the address the applicant furnished. And where the date of required notice of acceptance or required refund of an application deposit falls on a Saturday, Sunday, or state or federal holiday, the required date is extended to the end of the next day following it. § 92.351(6) defines that required date as the required date for any acceptance under § 92.352, which is what ties the whole mechanism back to the seventh day.
One limit belongs on this, stated plainly. Neither section fixes an express number of days for refunding an application deposit. § 92.353(c) speaks of “the date of required notice of acceptance or required refund of an application deposit”, and the defined term it uses points only at the acceptance deadline. So this page gives you the seventh-day required date and its weekend and holiday extension, and does not state a separate refund clock the text does not contain. Return promptly and in a traceable form; that is the answer § 92.354 rewards in any event.
When does a Texas landlord have to refund an application fee?
When it rejects an applicant without having made that notice available. In that case the landlord must return the application fee and any application deposit. The obligation does not turn on the size of the fee, on what the screening cost, or on whether the rejection was otherwise sound. It turns on whether the notice was made available at the time the application was given.
Note that both sums are named. The application deposit is frequently the larger of the two and is frequently the one an office is holding against the unit, so a process omission at handover can require returning considerably more than the screening fee itself.
Can a Texas application fee be made nonrefundable by the application form?
Not so as to displace this duty. § 92.355 makes the right non-waivable. The word nonrefundable appears in the scheme — § 92.351(1-a) uses it in describing what an application fee is — but the return duty in § 92.3515 operates on top of that description, and a clause in your own application cannot switch it off.
This is worth stating flatly because the nonrefundable-in-all-events line is close to standard on Texas rental applications. A landlord relying on it has a clause that reads well and does nothing to answer an applicant who was rejected without ever being shown the criteria.
What happens if a Texas landlord keeps a fee it should have returned?
§ 92.354 exposes a landlord who retains an application fee or application deposit in bad faith to $100, plus three times the amount wrongfully retained, plus attorney’s fees.
The attorney’s fees are the operative part. A dispute about a modest application fee is not ordinarily worth pursuing; a dispute with fee-shifting attached is. That is the design, and it is why the cheap step at the front of the process — printing the notice, taking the signature, filing it with the application — is the part to get institutionally right rather than the part to leave to whoever is covering the office.
How this page was verified, and what it does not tell you
This matters more than usual for Texas, because the routing is unusual. The official Texas statute front end is unusable and fails its own control: a real chapter URL, an invented chapter number, a PDF path and several other routes all return the same non-statutory page, so nothing on it can confirm anything. The Legislative Council’s own statute file server — the origin that front end reads from — does discriminate, returning the full codified text of chapter 92 for the real path and an empty 404 for a fabricated one. The provisions described here were read from that codified text on 31 August 2026, with each section caption confirmed in the body of the response rather than inferred from the address.
That corrects an earlier limitation on this page, which said the codified current text was never available and described the provisions from the enrolled 2007 bill that added subchapter I — H.B. 3101 of the 80th Legislature, effective 1 January 2008. The codified text confirms that reading: the notice duty, the acknowledgment, the return duty, the $100 plus three times the amount wrongfully retained plus attorney’s fees, and the void-waiver rule all stand as described. Currency no longer rests on inference. A 2025 bill that would have barred taking a fee before the notice, added a mitigating-evidence notice and created a criminal-record screening section did not pass, so none of that is Texas law and nothing on this page describes it as law. If you encounter guidance that does, it is describing a bill.
An earlier version of this page said § 92.352 and § 92.353 were not described because they had not been researched. They have now been read in the codified text and are described above, along with the § 92.3515(b) presumption, the acknowledgment wording § 92.3515(c) prescribes and the § 92.3515(d) placement rule. What remains absent is one number rather than two sections: neither timing section states an express deadline for refunding an application deposit, so this page states the seventh-day required date for acceptance and its weekend and holiday extension, and stops there. There is no § 92.331 in this chapter, so a citation to it is a citation to a number that was renumbered to § 92.351 in 1997 — the history line printed under § 92.351 in the code records that renumbering in terms. Four passages on this page are presented as quotations of the statute — § 92.002, the § 92.001(1) definition, the § 92.3515(b) presumption sentence and the § 92.3515(c) acknowledgment paragraph — and everything else is described rather than quoted. No Texas case law was researched, and no municipal ordinance was researched.
Where the application fee sits in the rest of Texas law
The tenant-selection criteria you print are the same criteria that govern the screening decision itself, and the federal rules on consumer reports and adverse action apply to that decision whatever Texas requires about fees. Our guide to Texas tenant screening laws covers what you may consider and what a denial requires.
An application fee is not security and an application deposit is not a security deposit. The security deposit regime is separate, with its own rules about deductions and return — see Texas security deposit laws for the money taken at signing.
For the wider framework, including notice periods, entry and repairs, see Texas landlord-tenant laws.
Bottom line
Texas does not cap the application fee — it conditions your right to keep it. There is no dollar limit in Property Code ch. 92 subch. I on what a Texas landlord may charge to screen an applicant. What the chapter regulates is a step that has to happen before the money is earned: at the time you give an applicant a rental application, you must make available a printed notice of your tenant-selection criteria and the grounds on which an application may be denied, and take the applicant’s signed acknowledgment that the notice was made available. That signature is an evidential device: § 92.3515(b) provides that if the acknowledgment is not signed, “there is a rebuttable presumption that the notice was not made available to the applicant” — rebuttable, so a missing signature is a burden you can still discharge, not an automatic loss. Reject an applicant without having done that and you must return the application fee and any application deposit. And rejection can happen without you doing anything: under § 92.352 an applicant is deemed rejected if you do not give notice of acceptance on or before the seventh day after the completed application is submitted. Retain them in bad faith and § 92.354 exposes you to $100, plus three times the amount wrongfully retained, plus attorney’s fees. Under § 92.355 the right is non-waivable — a clause in your application saying the fee is nonrefundable in all events does not survive it. Check the gate before any of that. § 92.002 provides that chapter 92 “applies only to the relationship between landlords and tenants of residential rental property”, and § 92.001(1) defines a dwelling as rooms rented for use as a permanent residence under a single lease — which leaves non-residential letting, occupancy that is not a permanent residence such as a hotel, motel or extended-stay, and room-by-room arrangements under separate leases outside the chapter altogether.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a maximum rental application fee in Texas?
No. Texas sets no cap on the amount. Property Code ch. 92 subch. I describes the application fee as a nonrefundable sum given to offset the cost of screening an applicant and leaves the figure to the landlord. What Texas regulates is the landlord’s right to keep the fee, not its size. That is an answer about chapter 92, and the chapter states its own reach: Sec. 92.002 applies it only to the relationship between landlords and tenants of residential rental property, and Sec. 92.001(1) defines a dwelling as rooms rented for use as a permanent residence under a single lease. A non-residential letting, an occupancy that is not a permanent residence such as a hotel, motel or extended-stay, and rooms let under separate leases are outside it, and may be governed by another body of law this page does not describe.
When must a Texas landlord refund an application fee?
When it rejects an applicant without having made available, at the time the application was given, a printed notice of its tenant-selection criteria and the grounds for denial. In that case the landlord must return the application fee and any application deposit. The rejection need not be express: Sec. 92.352 deems the applicant rejected where the landlord does not give notice of acceptance on or before the seventh day after the completed application is submitted.
What notice does a Texas landlord have to give an applicant?
On a letting chapter 92 reaches: at the time the applicant is given a rental application, the landlord must make available a printed notice of its tenant-selection criteria and of the grounds on which an application may be denied, and must take the applicant’s signed acknowledgment that the notice was made available. Sec. 92.3515(b) adds the evidence rule: if the acknowledgment is not signed, there is a rebuttable presumption that the notice was not made available. Sec. 92.002 confines the chapter to the relationship between landlords and tenants of residential rental property, and Sec. 92.001(1) confines the dwelling its subchapter I definitions turn on to rooms rented as a permanent residence under a single lease, so which side of that line a particular letting falls on is a question of fact this page does not answer.
Can a Texas rental application say the fee is nonrefundable?
It can say so, but Sec. 92.355 makes the right non-waivable, so the clause does not displace the duty to return the fee and any application deposit where the applicant was rejected without the criteria notice having been made available.
What is the penalty for wrongly keeping a Texas application fee?
A landlord who retains an application fee or application deposit in bad faith is exposed under Sec. 92.354 to $100, plus three times the amount wrongfully retained, plus attorney’s fees.
Does a Texas landlord have to return the application deposit as well as the fee?
Yes, where the return duty is triggered. Sec. 92.3515 names both: the application fee and any application deposit go back if the applicant is rejected and the criteria notice was not made available at the time the application was given.
How long does a Texas landlord have to accept or reject an applicant?
Seven days. Under Sec. 92.352 the applicant is deemed rejected if the landlord does not give notice of acceptance on or before the seventh day after the date the applicant submits a completed rental application on a form the landlord furnished, or, where the landlord furnished no form, the seventh day after the date it accepted an application deposit. A rejection of one co-applicant is deemed a rejection of all co-applicants. Sec. 92.353 presumes notice given if it is by telephone to the applicant, a co-applicant or a person living with them on or before the required date, or by United States mail addressed to the applicant and postmarked on or before that date, and it extends a required date falling on a Saturday, Sunday or state or federal holiday to the end of the next day following it.
How quickly must a Texas landlord return an application deposit?
This page does not state a deadline, and the reason is now specific rather than a gap in research. Sec. 92.352 and Sec. 92.353 have been read: they fix a required date for ACCEPTANCE — the seventh day after a completed application is submitted — and extend that date where it falls on a Saturday, Sunday or state or federal holiday. Neither states an express number of days for refunding an application deposit. Sec. 92.353(c) refers to the date of a required refund of an application deposit, while Sec. 92.351(6) defines the required date only by reference to Sec. 92.352’s acceptance deadline. Sec. 92.353(b) does add that where the applicant asks for the refund to be mailed, the landlord must mail it to the address the applicant furnished. Return promptly and traceably: Sec. 92.354 penalises bad-faith retention, not slow paperwork alone.
What must a Texas tenant-selection criteria acknowledgment say?
Sec. 92.3515(c) requires the acknowledgment to include a statement substantively equivalent to this: ‘Signing this acknowledgment indicates that you have had the opportunity to review the landlord’s tenant selection criteria. The tenant selection criteria may include factors such as criminal history, credit history, current income, and rental history. If you do not meet the selection criteria, or if you provide inaccurate or incomplete information, your application may be rejected and your application fee will not be refunded.’ The standard is substantive equivalence, not verbatim reproduction. Sec. 92.3515(d) allows the acknowledgment to be part of the rental application itself if the notice is underlined or in bold print.
What happens if the Texas applicant does not sign the acknowledgment?
Sec. 92.3515(b) provides that if the acknowledgment is not signed, there is a rebuttable presumption that the notice was not made available to the applicant. It is a presumption, so the starting position is that the landlord did not meet the Sec. 92.3515(a) condition and the return duty follows; it is rebuttable, so the landlord may still prove the notice was made available by other means. The practical effect of a missing signature is that the burden of proof moves onto the landlord.
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