Free Nevada Rental Application Fee Receipt

Nevada is a state most guidance describes in a single line — no cap on application fees — and that line, while true as far as it goes, now leaves out everything a landlord actually needs to know. Since A.B. 121 of the 2025 session added NRS 118A.306, Nevada regulates the application, credit-report and background-check fee in two narrow but sharply drawn ways. The first is a refund duty, and its structure is the thing to get right: the refund arises where the landlord rented the unit to a different applicant and did not perform the activity the fee paid for. Two conditions, joined, both required. That is not the same rule as refund-if-you-reject-them, and it is not the same rule as refund-if-you-did-not-screen. It sits precisely at the intersection, and it is aimed at the practice of collecting a fee for screening that never happened while the unit quietly went to somebody else. The second rule is shorter and even easier to breach without noticing: no application, credit-report or background-check fee may be charged for a minor household member. Any property manager running a flat per-adult-and-per-occupant fee schedule — and plenty do, because the software makes it the path of least resistance — is charging for children every time a family applies. Neither rule involves a dollar figure, which is why a page that only reports the absence of a cap tells you nothing useful. What follows works through the conjunction in detail, explains what evidence actually proves you performed the activity, sets out how per-occupant pricing breaches the minor rule, and is explicit about the several things the research behind this page did not establish. One thing precedes all of it. NRS 118A.306 is a section of chapter 118A, so it governs what the chapter governs: NRS 118A.180 applies the chapter to a rental agreement for a dwelling unit or premises located in this State, and then excludes eleven kinds of occupancy from it — a rental agreement subject to chapter 118B, a public housing authority’s low-rent program, institutional residence incidental to detention or care, contract-of-sale occupancy by the purchaser, a fraternal or social organization’s own member, a hotel or motel stay of less than 30 consecutive days, a resident employee whose occupancy is solely conditional on employment, a condominium owner or cooperative proprietary lessee, premises used primarily for agriculture, a forcible entry or detainer, and a sub-90-day purchase-and-sale occupancy by the seller. On an ordinary residential letting both rules below are unqualified; whether yours is one is a question of fact this page cannot decide for you.

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.

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The generator above produces a record of an application, credit-report or background-check fee taken in Nevada, built around the two facts NRS 118A.306 actually turns on. Nevada prescribes no form, so this is not a statutory form and is not captioned as one. It records the parties and the unit, the amount taken, the specific activity the fee was paid to perform, the screening company used, whether the activity was in fact performed, and the refund position that follows — which is where the rule’s two limbs are recorded together. It has no field for household members or their ages: the bar on charging for a minor is a rule about whom you may charge at all, so the compliance step is not charging, not recording. Deliberately, it prints no dollar ceiling, because the provision verified for this page sets none and a number invented for a form would be a number a landlord relies on. It also prints no refund deadline, for the same reason: the research did not establish one. And one thing it assumes. It is written for a letting chapter 118A governs; NRS 118A.180 excludes eleven kinds of occupancy from that chapter, 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.

• That your letting is one chapter 118A governs. NRS 118A.306 is a section of that chapter; NRS 118A.180 applies the chapter to a rental agreement for a dwelling unit or premises in this State and excludes eleven kinds of occupancy from it, including a chapter 118B letting, a public housing authority’s low-rent program and a hotel or motel stay of less than 30 consecutive days.
• Which activity the fee was taken to pay for. Named specifically — credit report, criminal background check, eviction search, screening product — because the refund limb is defined by that activity.
• That the activity was actually performed. The vendor invoice, the report in the file, or the account log showing the pull, each tied to the applicant and the date.
• Whether the unit was rented to a different applicant. The first limb of the refund test, and the one that fixes the date from which the second limb matters.
• That no fee was charged for a minor household member. Which means a record of who was in the household and which of them the fee covered.
• Your fee schedule as applied, not as advertised. A per-occupant schedule that charges for children breaches the minor rule regardless of what the listing said.
• The refund you made, its amount, its date and its method. No deadline was established by the research behind this page, so the record of promptness is your own.
• The date the fee was taken. Relevant because the section is 2025 legislation and this page does not assert a verified commencement date.
• Your adverse-action record where a consumer report drove a rejection. Federal consumer-reporting law applies alongside NRS 118A.306 and was not researched from primary sources for this page.
• Consistent treatment of applicants across the household. Fair-housing exposure sits alongside the fee rules and is a separate body of law, described here only in general terms.
• A note of any local requirement you are also meeting. No Nevada county or city ordinance was researched for this page.

• Stating the refund rule as refund-the-rejected-applicant. It is not. The duty arises where the unit went to a different applicant and the activity the fee paid for was not performed. Dropping the second limb invents a refund duty the provision does not impose.
• Stating it as refund-if-you-did-not-screen. Equally wrong in the other direction. Without the unit having been rented to a different applicant, the first limb is not satisfied on the face of the provision.
• Charging a per-occupant fee that sweeps in children. No application, credit-report or background-check fee may be charged for a minor household member, and a flat per-person schedule breaches that automatically the first time a family applies.
• Treating ‘no cap’ as ‘no rules’. Nevada sets no dollar ceiling, and it still imposes two duties. The absence of a number is not the absence of regulation.
• Assuming a cap exists because other states have one. The provision verified for this page contains no maximum and no actual-cost limit. Importing California’s or Washington’s structure into Nevada is inventing law.
• Running the screening but keeping nothing that proves it. The second limb is a fact only you can evidence. An unevidenced screening is, in a dispute, indistinguishable from one that never happened.
• Describing the fee so vaguely that its activity is unidentifiable. If the receipt says only ‘application fee’, you have made it harder to show which activity was performed and easier for an applicant to say none was.
• Waiting to refund because no deadline was found. The research behind this page did not establish one, which is not the same as there being none, and it is certainly not permission to hold the money indefinitely.
• Relying on pre-2025 Nevada guidance. Until NRS 118A.306 was added, Nevada had no provision of this kind, so any summary written before the 2025 session describes a different state.
• Assuming the two rules reach every letting you run. NRS 118A.306 sits inside chapter 118A, and NRS 118A.180 puts eleven kinds of occupancy outside that chapter — a manufactured-home-park letting under chapter 118B, a public housing authority’s low-rent program, a hotel or motel stay of less than 30 consecutive days, a condominium owner or cooperative proprietary lessee and premises used primarily for agriculture among them. That does not weaken either rule on a letting the chapter covers; it means the classification question comes first, and it is a question of fact about your property.
• Ignoring the federal and local layers. Consumer-reporting and fair-housing law apply alongside the section, and no Nevada county or city ordinance was researched for this page.

No. The provision verified for this page, NRS 118A.306, sets no dollar ceiling on an application, credit-report or background-check fee, and it imposes no actual-cost limit of the kind several other states use. A Nevada landlord may set the fee at what the screening costs, or at some other figure, without a statutory maximum standing in the way.

That answer, on its own, is misleading — and it is the answer most published Nevada guidance stops at. Nevada does regulate these fees. It simply does it by regulating two situations rather than the size of the charge. One is a conditional refund duty. The other is an outright bar on charging any such fee for a child in the household. Neither involves a number, which is precisely why a page organised around the question of a cap reports the absence of one and then falls silent about the rules that actually bind.

One boundary belongs on all of that, and it comes before everything else on this page. NRS 118A.306 is a section of chapter 118A, so it reaches what the chapter reaches and no further. NRS 118A.180, captioned “Applicability”, applies the chapter to rights, obligations and remedies under a rental agreement, wherever made, for a dwelling unit or premises located within this State — and then says the chapter does not apply to eleven kinds of occupancy: a rental agreement subject to chapter 118B of NRS; a low-rent housing program operated by a public housing authority under the United States Housing Act of 1937; residence in an institution, public or private, incidental to detention or to medical, geriatric, educational, counseling, religious or similar service; occupancy under a contract of sale where the occupant is the purchaser or a successor in interest; occupancy by a member of a fraternal or social organization in the portion of a structure operated for its benefit; occupancy in a hotel or motel for less than 30 consecutive days unless the occupant clearly manifests an intent to remain for a longer continuous period; occupancy by an employee of a landlord whose right to occupancy is solely conditional on employment in or about the premises; occupancy by an owner of a condominium unit or a holder of a proprietary lease in a cooperative apartment; occupancy under a rental agreement covering premises used by the occupant primarily for agricultural purposes; occupancy by a person guilty of forcible entry or forcible detainer; and occupancy under an agreement for the purchase and sale of a dwelling unit for a period not to exceed 90 days where the occupant is the seller or a successor in interest.

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 — both rules below apply to you exactly as stated. Where it is one of the eleven, chapter 118A does not govern the arrangement at all, and whatever law does is not described here. Three of the exclusions matter commercially rather than theoretically, because they describe operations that routinely take application fees: a manufactured-home-park letting, which sits under chapter 118B instead; a public housing authority’s low-rent program; and a hotel or motel stay of less than 30 consecutive days. Which side of the line a particular property falls on is a question of fact about the letting — how long the stay is, what the occupant manifests, which chapter the agreement is made under — and it is not one this page can settle for you.

Where two things are true at the same time: the landlord rented the unit to a different applicant, and the landlord did not perform the activity the fee paid for. Both limbs. The refund duty in NRS 118A.306 is a conjunction, and reading it as anything looser changes the rule.

This is the single easiest thing on this page to state backwards, and a great deal of secondary writing does state it backwards, in one of two ways. The first is to describe it as a duty to refund rejected applicants — which drops the second limb entirely and manufactures an obligation the section does not impose on a landlord who genuinely ran the screening. The second is to describe it as a duty to refund whenever no screening was performed — which drops the first limb and manufactures an obligation where the unit never went to anyone else.

Set the four combinations out and the target of the rule becomes obvious:

• Screening performed, unit rented to someone else. On the face of the provision, no refund duty. The applicant paid for an activity, and the activity happened.
• No screening performed, unit rented to someone else. Both limbs met. The refund is owed. This is the conduct the section exists to reach.
• No screening performed, unit rented to this applicant. First limb fails — the unit did not go to a different applicant.
• Screening performed, applicant withdrew before anyone was chosen. Neither limb is satisfied on those facts.

Only the second row triggers the duty, and it describes a recognisable abuse: money collected for a background check nobody ever ordered, on a unit that was always going elsewhere. Understanding the rule that way makes it easy to apply and hard to misremember.

Once the unit has gone to a different applicant, the whole question collapses into a matter of evidence: did you perform the activity the fee paid for? That is a fact about your own operations, and it is one only you are in a position to document.

The artefacts that answer it are unglamorous and always the same. A screening vendor’s invoice or order confirmation carrying a date and the applicant’s name. The consumer report itself, retained in the application file. An account log or order history from the screening platform showing the pull. A criminal or eviction search result with a timestamp. Any one of those ties the money to the activity; none of them takes any effort to keep at the moment the screening is run, and all of them are difficult to reconstruct months later.

There is a second, quieter reason to be specific at the point of collection. The refund limb is framed around the activity the fee paid for. If your receipt says nothing more than “application fee”, you have left the activity undefined, and an applicant is free to say that whatever you did was not what they paid for. If it says the fee covers a named credit report and a named background search, the question of whether you performed it has an answer that a document can supply. Specificity at intake is what makes the evidence usable at the end.

No — on a letting chapter 118A governs. NRS 118A.306 bars charging an application, credit-report or background-check fee for a minor household member. This is the second of Nevada’s two rules; inside the chapter it is unconditional, and it is almost never mentioned in guidance aimed at landlords. It is unconditional in the sense that no further fact about the applicant switches it off — but it is still a rule of chapter 118A, and NRS 118A.180 puts eleven kinds of occupancy outside that chapter.

It is also the rule most likely to be breached without anyone deciding to breach it. Property management software commonly prices screening per applicant or per occupant, because that is how the vendor prices its own product, and a schedule set up that way charges for every person listed on the application. When a single adult applies, nothing goes wrong. When a family applies — two adults and three children — a per-occupant schedule bills for five, and three of those charges are for minors. Nobody made a decision; a default did it. Multiply that across a portfolio and a per-occupant schedule breaches this rule on a large fraction of every family application received.

The fix is structural rather than procedural, and it belongs in the fee schedule rather than in a member of staff’s memory. Charge per adult applicant. Make the application form capture each household member’s status so the exclusion is applied when the fee is calculated, not remembered when someone complains. And check what the screening vendor is actually invoicing you for, because a vendor that bills per occupant will happily bill you for the children even when you cannot pass that cost on — which is a commercial problem for you rather than a licence to charge.

One point of scope, stated because the page should not over-claim: the provision as verified bars the fee for a minor household member. It says nothing this page can rely on about whether or how minors may otherwise be considered in a tenancy decision, and no Nevada case law was researched here. Treat the rule as what it is — a pricing prohibition — and take screening-criteria questions to the separate body of law that governs them.

NRS 118A.306 was added by A.B. 121 of the 83rd (2025) session, Sec. 4.5, published at 2025 Nev. Stat. p. 1413. That much was verified directly against both the Legislature’s publication of Chapter 118A and the enrolled bill.

The commencement date was not. The enrolled bill contains no effective-date section, which means the operative date falls to Nevada’s default commencement rule — conventionally 1 October of the enactment year — and that default was not independently verified against the governing provision in preparing this page. So the honest statement is this: the section is 2025 legislation, it is very likely in force, and this page declines to assert a commencement date it did not check. If you are working out the position for a fee taken close to the changeover, confirm the operative date against the enrolled bill and the Legislature’s own text before relying on it.

The related point is about everything you may have read before now. Until this section was added, Nevada had no application-fee provision of this kind at all. Any guidance written before the 2025 session is therefore describing a different regulatory position — not an out-of-date number, but the absence of the rules entirely. If a Nevada page you are reading says only that the state does not cap application fees, that is a strong sign it predates the section this page is about.

Depth on a short statute has to come from analysis, not from filling gaps, so the gaps are named here instead. The research behind this page did not establish any of the following:

• A refund deadline. The provision as verified sets no period within which the refund must be made. That is a real practical gap, and it is not evidence that any period you choose is acceptable.
• A required refund method. Nothing verified here dictates cash, check, reversal or credit against rent.
• A receipt duty. Nevada, on this research, does not require an itemized receipt for the fee the way some states do. Issuing one is a matter of evidence and good practice, not compliance with a duty this page can point to.
• A disclosure duty. No requirement was established to tell applicants in advance what the fee covers or what will be done with it.
• A duty to publish screening criteria. No such requirement was established in this provision.
• A penalty or enforcement mechanism. No damages figure, fee-shifting rule or enforcement route was established, and none is asserted.

Two further limits belong in the same list. No Nevada case law was researched for this page, so nothing here reflects how a court has read the conjunction or the minor rule in practice. No county or city ordinance was researched either, which matters more in Nevada than the sentence suggests, because Clark and Washoe counties hold the large majority of the state’s rental housing and local rules can sit on top of a state provision.

Everything above concerns the fee. The screening it pays for is governed by a separate, federal body of law, and this page describes that layer in general terms only — it was not researched from primary sources here, and nothing in this section should be treated as a verified statement of federal requirements.

In broad outline: where a landlord obtains a consumer report about an applicant and that report contributes to a decision to reject them, to charge them more, or to impose different terms, federal consumer-reporting law generally requires the applicant to be told, and to be given the information needed to identify the reporting agency and to dispute what it holds. This is the adverse-action framework, it operates independently of anything Nevada says about fees, and it is a common source of claims precisely because it is procedural — it is breached by not sending a notice, regardless of whether the underlying decision was sound.

Separately, federal fair-housing law governs the substance of screening decisions and the way applicants are treated across protected characteristics. That has an obvious point of contact with the Nevada minor rule: household composition, and the presence of children in particular, is territory where a fee practice and a screening practice can both create exposure. Charging for children is a fee problem under NRS 118A.306; treating an application differently because there are children in the household is a different and more serious problem under a different statute.

The practical takeaway is that satisfying NRS 118A.306 does not finish the job. Nevada tells you when a fee must come back and whom you may not charge; it says nothing about what you must tell a rejected applicant, or how you must decide. Those come from elsewhere, and a compliant fee record sits alongside an adverse-action record rather than replacing it.

The fee pays for screening, and the screening decision is governed by rules of its own — what you may consider, how you must treat applicants consistently, and what a denial requires. Our guide to Nevada tenant screening laws covers that side of the transaction, which is where most of the practical risk in a vacancy actually sits.

An application fee is not a deposit, and the two should never share a ledger line. Money taken to consider an applicant is governed by NRS 118A.306; money taken to secure performance under a tenancy is a deposit, with its own limits and its own return obligations. See Nevada security deposit laws for the money taken at signing.

For the wider framework — notice periods, entry, repairs and the rest of the landlord-tenant relationship — see Nevada landlord-tenant laws.

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