Free New Hampshire Rental Application Fee Receipt

Most state application-fee rules are about a number. New Hampshire’s is not, and that is why summaries of it tend to be either far too permissive or far too strict. There is no statutory maximum. A landlord in Manchester and a landlord in Berlin may each set whatever fee the market will bear, and neither is capped by RSA 540-A:3, VIII. What the paragraph does instead is bracket the fee with two duties. In front of it sits a disclosure: before you collect any fee as part of the rental application or renewal process, you must clearly disclose, in writing, to prospective tenants, the amount of the fee and the requirement for a satisfactory criminal background and credit check, if any. Behind it sits a refund: if the fee is collected from an applicant but the unit is not rented to that applicant, you must return any amount beyond the actual cost of the documented background check, credit check, and/or reasonable administrative costs, within 30 days of receipt. The paragraph then adds a savings clause that is easy to skim past and worth reading twice, because it protects you: nothing in it requires you to conduct a criminal background or credit check at all, and nothing in it prohibits you from renting to an applicant who does not pass one. The consequence for a landlord is that the compliance question is never “is my fee too high?” It is “did I put the amount in writing before I took it, and can I document what I spent?” The rest of this page is about those two questions, the unusually narrow remedy that sits behind them, and the federal screening rules that apply to the report the fee pays for whatever the state requires about the money.

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. Because the disclosure has to be made before the fee is accepted, print it once for the applicant before you take the money and again once the outcome is known. Nothing is stored and there is no charge. Fields you leave blank print as a dash so you can complete them by hand.

Watch: New Hampshire Rental Application Fee Receipt explained

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The generator above produces a dated record of the fee taken and the costs set against it — the subtraction RSA 540-A:3, VIII turns on. New Hampshire 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 received with its date and method, the screening company and product used, the documented cost of the background and credit checks, any administrative cost claimed, the criteria applied, the outcome, and the resulting refund position. One thing it does not do. It is not the pre-collection disclosure. That has to be clearly made in writing to the prospective tenant before you take the fee, and a receipt issued afterwards cannot discharge a duty the paragraph expressly places earlier in time. Print the disclosure separately, hand it over first, and use this record for what happens after. Nothing is stored and there is no charge. Fields left blank print as a dash.

• That a written disclosure existed before the fee was collected. The duty is sequenced — “prior to collecting any fee” — so the date on the disclosure matters as much as its content.
• That the disclosure was clear. The paragraph says “clearly disclose”. A figure in small print inside an unrelated document is a weak answer to that adjective.
• The amount of the fee, as disclosed. The first of the two content items, and it should match the amount actually taken to the cent.
• Any satisfactory criminal background and credit check requirement. The second content item, qualified by “if any” — conditional on your having such a requirement, not optional if you do.
• That renewals were covered too. The trigger reaches a fee taken as part of the rental application or renewal process, and renewal fees are the ones most often taken on habit.
• Whether the unit was rented to that applicant. That single fact is what engages the refund duty, and it should be recorded with its date.
• The actual cost of the documented background check. Vendor, product, date, amount, tied to the individual applicant. “Documented” is doing evidentiary work.
• The actual cost of the credit check. Recorded the same way, and separately, because the paragraph lists it separately.
• Any reasonable administrative costs claimed, and why they are reasonable. The limb with no invoice behind it, and therefore the one that needs the clearest contemporaneous note.
• The date the fee was received. On the reading described here it is what starts the thirty days, and it is the field most often left off an informal receipt.
• The amount actually returned, when, and to whom. The duty runs to the individual applicant, so a refund posted to the wrong person or the wrong address is not performance.
• Your federal adverse-action record where a consumer report drove the outcome. Federal consumer report law applies alongside RSA 540-A:3 and is not displaced by it.
• Any local requirement you are also meeting. Municipal ordinances were not researched for this page, and no case law was researched for it either.

• Disclosing the fee on the receipt. The paragraph requires the disclosure prior to collecting the fee. A receipt is by definition after, so it cannot be the disclosure however accurate it is.
• Assuming there is a cap and pricing to an imagined one. There is no dollar figure in the paragraph at all. Landlords who invent a ceiling tend to also invent the reasoning behind it, and the reasoning is what actually governs.
• Assuming that because there is no cap the fee is unregulated. The opposite error, and the more expensive one. Disclosure and refund are both mandatory and the remedy reaches all monies provided as part of the application.
• Disclosing the amount but not the check requirement. The paragraph names two items. A disclosure of the fee alone answers half of it.
• Forgetting renewal fees. The trigger says “rental application or renewal process”. A renewal fee taken from a sitting resident without a prior written disclosure is inside the paragraph.
• Retaining a flat processing amount with nothing behind it. What you may keep is the actual cost of the documented checks plus reasonable administrative costs. A round number that exists whether or not anything was done is neither documented nor obviously reasonable.
• Working from a monthly screening bill. The refund is owed to one applicant, so an aggregated vendor invoice cannot evidence what that applicant’s file actually cost.
• Keeping the fee because the applicant withdrew. The trigger is that the unit was not rented to that applicant. It does not ask whose decision it was.
• Running the thirty days from your decision letter. The paragraph says “within 30 days of receipt”, and receipt of the fee is the nearest antecedent. Working to the later reading is a bet on an ambiguity you do not need to take.
• Reading the savings clause as a general permission. It says only that you need not run a check and need not reject someone who fails one. It does not soften the disclosure, the refund, or anything in federal consumer report law.
• Treating security deposit rules as the source of the fee rule. The deposit provisions of RSA 540-A are a separate regime and do not reach application fees.
• Relaxing because the remedy is narrow. RSA 540-A:4, IX(f) removes multiple damages and attorney’s fees, but what it leaves is return of all monies provided as part of the application, plus court costs — not the shortfall.
• Reading IX(f) as your total exposure. It is expressed “notwithstanding the provisions of subparagraph (a)”, so it displaces IX(a) alone. III preserves any other available civil or criminal remedy, and XI bars a possession action — and any reprisal — against a tenant who proves a 540-A:3 violation, which matters because renewal fees are taken from sitting tenants.

No. RSA 540-A:3, VIII contains no dollar figure and imposes no ceiling. A landlord may set the application fee at whatever level it chooses.

That is the direct answer, and it is only half the picture. The paragraph regulates the fee at two other points instead. Before it is collected, the amount must be clearly disclosed in writing to prospective tenants, together with the requirement for a satisfactory criminal background and credit check, if any. After it is collected, if the unit is not rented to that applicant, everything above the actual cost of the documented background check, credit check, and/or reasonable administrative costs must be returned within thirty days of receipt. So the effective ceiling is not set by the legislature. It is set by your own invoices, on every application that does not end in a tenancy.

Two things, in writing, clearly, and before the money changes hands: the amount of the fee, and the requirement for a satisfactory criminal background and credit check, if any.

The sequencing is the part that fails most often. The paragraph opens with the words “prior to collecting any fee”, which places the duty ahead of payment rather than alongside it. A landlord who states the fee accurately at the moment of payment, or on the receipt, or in the lease that follows, has disclosed — but not prior to collecting. The practical fix is structural rather than procedural: put both items into the listing and into the application form itself, so there is no sequence of events in which the fee is taken before the writing exists.

The second content item is worth dwelling on because it is so often omitted. “The requirement for a satisfactory criminal background and credit check, if any” is not a request for your screening criteria in detail; it is notice that passing such a check is a condition. The words if any make the item conditional on your process, not optional within it. If you reject applicants who fail a credit check, you have such a requirement, and the applicant is entitled to know before paying to be screened.

When the fee was collected from an applicant and the unit was not rented to that applicant. The amount refundable is any amount beyond the actual cost of the documented background check, credit check, and/or reasonable administrative costs, and it is due within thirty days of receipt.

Notice what the trigger does not ask. It does not ask why the tenancy did not happen, or whose decision it was, or whether the applicant was rejected as against simply not chosen. An applicant who withdraws the next morning, an applicant who is turned down, an applicant who is second in a queue and never reaches the front, and an applicant whose intended unit is taken off the market are all in the same position: the unit was not rented to them, so the subtraction runs.

Notice also what it is not. It is not a full refund rule and it is not a rebate of a fixed percentage. It is a subtraction, and the three retainable categories are each qualified. The cost must be actual, so your list price is irrelevant. The background and credit checks must be documented, which is an evidentiary requirement rather than a descriptive one. And administrative costs must be reasonable, which is the only category with a judgment word in it and therefore the only one you should expect to have to justify.

Yes, if they are reasonable. The paragraph expressly permits retention of “reasonable administrative costs” alongside the documented cost of the background check and the credit check.

This is a genuine point of difference from stricter cost-recovery regimes, and it is one of the few places where the statute is unambiguously in the landlord’s favor. The time spent reviewing an application, verifying references, and communicating an outcome is real cost, and New Hampshire does not require you to absorb it. What it does require is that the amount be reasonable, which in practice means proportionate to the work and to the screening it accompanies. An administrative component several times the size of the report it administers invites the obvious question, and unlike a vendor invoice it has no document behind it. Write down what it covers at the time you set it, not when it is challenged.

The paragraph says “within 30 days of receipt” and does not say receipt of what. The nearest antecedent in the sentence is the collection of the fee, so the reading described here is thirty days from receipt of the money.

It would be more convenient to read it as thirty days from receipt of a decision, or from the point the unit is rented to somebody else, and you will find guidance that does. This page does not, for two reasons. The first is that the text does not support it: the sentence is about a fee collected from an applicant, and receipt of that fee is the event it has just described. The second is practical. If the shorter reading is right, a landlord working to it is compliant; if the longer reading is right, a landlord working to the shorter one is merely early. There is no version of the ambiguity in which the cautious reading hurts you, and there is an obvious version in which the convenient one does.

The operational consequence is that a slow vacancy is your problem, not the applicant’s. If you take fees from four applicants at the start of the month and the unit is still not let at the end of it, three refunds are becoming due on a clock that started when you banked the money.

RSA 540-A:4, IX(f) provides that a landlord who violates RSA 540-A:3, VIII “shall be subject only to returning to the applicant all monies provided by the applicant as part of their application, plus court costs.”

Two words in that sentence pull in opposite directions and you need both. The first is only. Paragraph VIII is deliberately carved out of the general remedy in IX(a), which subjects a landlord who violates any provision of RSA 540-A:3 to the civil remedies of RSA 358-A:10, including costs and reasonable attorney’s fees, and which treats each day a violation continues after a temporary order as a separate violation. None of that applies to an application-fee violation. There are no multiple damages here and no fee-shifting for the applicant’s lawyer.

But read what only is doing, because it is doing less than it appears to. IX(f) opens “notwithstanding the provisions of subparagraph (a)”. It displaces IX(a) and nothing else, so it caps the money a paragraph VIII violation costs you; it does not narrow RSA 540-A:4 as a whole. Two paragraphs of the same section are unqualified and do reach a violation of RSA 540-A:3, paragraph VIII included. Paragraph III provides that any proceeding under the subdivision “shall not preclude any other available civil or criminal remedy.” Paragraph XI provides that no action for possession may be maintained against a tenant who proves a violation of RSA 540-A:3 — except for nonpayment of rent, violation of a substantial obligation of the rental agreement or lease, or violation of the subdivision — within six months of an action the tenant instituted under the subdivision, nor may the landlord take any other action in reprisal.

Paragraph XI is the live one on this page. The disclosure duty in paragraph VIII reaches a fee taken as part of the rental application or renewal process, and an applicant for a renewal is a sitting tenant. A landlord who takes an undisclosed renewal fee, is met with a 540-A petition, and then moves for possession is inside XI’s bar and its reprisal prohibition, whatever IX(f) says about the money.

The second is all monies. What the applicant recovers is not the amount you should have refunded and did not. It is everything they provided as part of their application. A landlord who genuinely spent forty dollars screening someone, and kept forty dollars, but never made the pre-collection disclosure, has committed a violation of paragraph VIII to which the answer is return of all monies provided — the documented cost included. The narrow remedy and the total object sit in the same sentence, and a landlord who reads only the first half will draw the wrong conclusion about how much the paperwork is worth.

It is also worth knowing how these proceedings run, because the procedural design lowers the barrier to bringing one. Under RSA 540-A:4, district courts have concurrent jurisdiction with the superior court, a petition may be filed in the district or county where the rental premises are located, no filing fee is charged, and the plaintiff may proceed without legal counsel. That is a forum designed to be used by people without lawyers, which matters more than the size of any individual claim.

But read paragraph II before assuming a rejected applicant is the one who will use it. RSA 540-A:4, II names who may bring the petition: “Any tenant or landlord or non-rental owner shall have the right to seek relief from a violation of RSA 540-A:2 or RSA 540-A:3 by filing a petition in the district or county where the rental premises are located.” Three classes, and an applicant is not among them. A person who applied, was rejected and never became a tenant is outside the named classes on the face of the paragraph, so the 540-A petition is not the route their claim obviously takes.

Do not read that as comfort, for two reasons that are both in the text. Paragraph VIII of RSA 540-A:3 reaches a fee taken as part of the rental application or renewal process, and a person applying for a renewal is a sitting tenant — squarely inside paragraph II, and the same reason paragraph XI bites. And RSA 540-A:4, III provides that “[a]ny proceeding under this subdivision shall not preclude any other available civil or criminal remedy”, so what paragraph II decides is which door a claim comes through, not whether the duty in paragraph VIII is enforceable. This page does not research what other route a non-tenant applicant might take; it records only that RSA 540-A:4, II is not it.

No. The closing sentence of paragraph VIII says that nothing in it requires the landlord to conduct a criminal background or credit check, or prohibits the landlord from renting to an applicant who does not pass one.

That savings clause does two useful things for a landlord and nothing else. It confirms that the disclosure duty is not a screening mandate in disguise, so a landlord who screens by reference and income verification alone is not brought into breach by the absence of a credit report. And it confirms that a failed check is not a legal bar to letting, which protects a landlord who chooses to rent to somebody with an imperfect record.

What it does not do is exempt anything. It does not soften the pre-collection disclosure, it does not touch the refund subtraction, and it has nothing at all to say about the federal rules that attach the moment you order a consumer report. Read as a general licence, it is the most over-extended sentence in the paragraph.

Alongside, not underneath. RSA 540-A:3, VIII governs the money. Federal consumer report law governs the report the money buys, and it applies whatever the state says about fees.

The practical points for a landlord are these. A consumer report on an applicant may be obtained only for a permissible purpose, and screening a prospective tenant is one. If you deny an application, increase a deposit, or otherwise act adversely to the applicant based in whole or in part on information in a consumer report, the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act requires an adverse action notice: it identifies the consumer reporting agency that supplied the report, states that the agency did not make the decision and cannot explain it, and tells the applicant of the right to a free copy of the report from that agency within sixty days and the right to dispute its accuracy (15 U.S.C. § 1681m). None of that is displaced by the state paragraph, and none of it is satisfied by the state disclosure.

There is a neat point of overlap worth using. The state disclosure tells the applicant, before payment, that a satisfactory background and credit check is required. The federal adverse action notice tells them, after the decision, that a report drove it. A landlord who has both documents dated and on file has covered the two ends of the same screening decision, and the cost record that justifies your retention under paragraph VIII will usually name the same vendor as the notice does.

The disclosure trigger does. It reaches a fee collected “as part of the rental application or renewal process”, so a fee charged to an existing resident at renewal must be clearly disclosed in writing before it is collected, exactly as a new applicant’s fee must be.

The refund limb reads differently, and honestly so. It is triggered where the fee is collected from an applicant “but the unit is not rented to that applicant”. On a renewal that is granted, the unit plainly is rented to that person, so the subtraction has nothing to bite on. On a renewal that is refused after a fee has been taken, the position is less obvious, and the text does not resolve it. This page will not tell you which way that falls; it tells you that the disclosure duty clearly applies to renewals, that the refund duty is written around a unit not being rented to an applicant, and that the safe operational answer is to disclose renewal fees in writing in advance in every case.

One document per applicant, created at the time, showing four things: what you disclosed and when, what you took and when, what it cost you and with what evidence, and what went back and when.

That is not a statutory form — New Hampshire prescribes none. It is simply the smallest set of facts that answers every question paragraph VIII can put to you. The disclosure date defends the sequencing. The receipt date starts the refund clock. The vendor invoice supports the retention. The refund record closes it out. Any one of those missing turns a defensible position into an argument, and given that the remedy reaches all monies provided as part of the application, the argument is about the whole fee rather than the difference.

Keep it per applicant rather than per vacancy. Four applicants for one unit generate four disclosures, four receipts, potentially four separate screening costs, and up to three refunds, and the duty in each case is owed to an individual person.

The text described here was read from the New Hampshire General Court’s own statute host on 31 August 2026. The source note printed with RSA 540-A:3 reads: 1979, 305:1. 1991, 373:2, eff. Jan. 1, 1992. 1998, 25:8. 2001, 277:2. 2003, 271:1, eff. Jan. 1, 2004. 2011, 247:1, eff. Jan. 1, 2012. 2013, 48:4, 5, eff. Jan. 1, 2014. 2015, 225:1, eff. Jan. 1, 2016. 2024, 46:1, eff. Jan. 1, 2025; 370:4, eff. Jan. 1, 2025. 2025, 176:1, eff. Jan. 1, 2026.

What the note establishes is that the section has been amended repeatedly and recently. What it does not establish is which of those acts inserted paragraph VIII. Guidance that dates the application-fee duty to a specific year is asserting something the official text does not show, and this page deliberately does not repeat it. The paragraph is in force; the paragraph is quoted; the enactment year is left where the source note leaves it.

One nearby amendment is worth flagging so you do not misread it as an application-fee rule. RSA 540-A:3, X now provides that a landlord shall not require a tenant or prospective tenant to pay any amount due under a residential lease, renewal, or extension agreement solely by electronic funds transfer, and must allow at least one other non-electronic form of payment. Its subject is amounts due under a lease, renewal, or extension agreement, which is not the same thing as an application fee, so this page does not present it as governing how an application fee may be paid. It is, however, a live constraint on payment method elsewhere in your operation and worth checking separately.

The fee pays for a screening decision, and the standards you apply to that decision, and what a denial requires once a consumer report has driven it, are separate questions from what the money may be. Our guide to New Hampshire tenant screening laws covers that ground.

An application fee is not a deposit, and the deposit provisions of RSA 540-A are a distinct regime with their own limits and their own return clock — they do not reach application fees, and an application fee rule cannot be derived from them. See New Hampshire security deposit laws for the money taken at signing.

For the wider framework of the tenancy, including notice periods, entry and termination, see New Hampshire landlord-tenant laws.

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