Free Connecticut Application Screening Fee Receipt
Connecticut does two opposite things to the money a landlord takes from an applicant. Under Conn. Gen. Stat. § 47a-4d a processing or application fee is banned outright — along with any other pre-tenancy charge outside a closed list of four, and move-in and move-out fees — while a tenant screening fee is permitted but capped at fifty dollars plus a consumer-price-index adjustment determined annually by the Commissioner of Housing, so fifty dollars is the base and not today’s ceiling. The practical work is classification: decide which of the two your charge really is before you take it. Charging the screening fee also obliges you to hand the applicant a copy of the screening report and a copy of the vendor’s receipt or invoice. All of it runs on a letting chapter 830 governs: § 47a-2 exempts six arrangements from that chapter — transient hotel, motel or similar lodging, a condominium owner’s own occupancy and institutional residence among them — plus a mobile manufactured home park lot let to a resident home-owner. This generator produces a plain record of the charge, what it paid for, and the vendor cost behind it.
Most states that regulate the rental application fee do it with a single instrument: they cap the charge, or they tie it to cost, or they require a refund. Connecticut does something structurally different, and it is the reason a landlord can comply with the number and still be charging unlawfully. Conn. Gen. Stat. § 47a-4d, enacted by Public Act 23-207 and confirmed unamended through the 2025 session, separates the money an applicant hands over into two categories and treats them oppositely. A processing or application fee — the charge for the administrative work of taking and reviewing the application — is banned, and so is any other payment, fee or charge demanded before or at the beginning of the tenancy apart from a security deposit under § 47a-21, advance first month’s rent, a deposit for a key or special equipment, and the screening fee itself; move-in and move-out fees are banned by name. A tenant screening fee — the charge for obtaining screening information about the applicant — is permitted, but capped at a figure the statute expresses as fifty dollars plus an adjustment for any increase in the consumer price index for urban consumers, as determined annually by the Commissioner of Housing. Charging that fee also obliges the landlord to give the applicant a copy of the screening report, or the means of obtaining it, together with a copy of the screening company’s receipt or invoice. The consequence is that the first question a Connecticut landlord has to answer is a classification question rather than an arithmetic one. A fee for your own labour in reviewing an application is unlawful at any amount, so a landlord who charges a modest sum for paperwork handling has not merely over-charged; it has charged something the statute does not permit at all. Meanwhile the screening fee, which is allowed, carries a ceiling that moves. Fifty dollars is the base the index runs on, not the amount in force, and a page that reports “Connecticut caps the application fee at fifty dollars” is quoting a figure the statute itself supersedes by its own indexing clause. This page states the mechanism and declines to state a number it has not verified. One question precedes both halves. § 47a-4d is a section of chapter 830, so it governs what that chapter governs, and § 47a-2 — “Arrangements exempted from application of title” — provides that six arrangements are not governed by it: institutional residence incidental to detention or to medical, geriatric, educational, counselling or religious service; occupancy under a contract of sale by the purchaser or a successor; occupancy by a member of a fraternal or social organization in the part of a structure run for its benefit; transient occupancy in a hotel, motel or similar lodging; occupancy by an owner of a condominium unit; and occupancy by a personal care assistant housed in the residence of the person with a disability who employs them. Subsection (b) adds the rental of a space or lot in a mobile manufactured home park to a resident who owns the home — though the chapter does apply where the home and premises are let by someone other than the home’s owner. On an ordinary residential letting the ban is unqualified; whether yours is one is a question of fact this page cannot decide for you.
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 classification is the whole rule: one charge is banned, the other is only capped
Start one section earlier than the ban, with the chapter it lives in. § 47a-4d is part of chapter 830, and § 47a-2 is that chapter’s scope section, captioned “Arrangements exempted from application of title”. Six arrangements “are not governed by this chapter”: residence at an institution, public or private, if incidental to detention or the provision of medical, geriatric, educational, counselling or religious service or any similar service; occupancy under a contract of sale of a dwelling unit or the property of which it is a part, if the occupant is the purchaser or a person who succeeds to that interest; occupancy by a member of a fraternal or social organization in the portion of a structure operated for that organization’s benefit; transient occupancy in a hotel or motel or similar lodging; occupancy by an owner of a condominium unit; and occupancy by a personal care assistant or other person employed by a person with a disability to assist with daily living activities or housekeeping and provided dwelling space in that person’s residence as a benefit or condition of the employment. Subsection (b) removes one more: the rental of a space or lot in a mobile manufactured home park by a resident of the park who is also the owner of the mobile manufactured home. Read that second one carefully in both directions, because the same subsection says the chapter does apply to the rental of a mobile manufactured home and premises in such a park by a person other than the home’s owner. Two limits sit inside the exemption itself. Subsection (a) opens with an anti-avoidance clause — an arrangement created to avoid the chapter’s application is governed by it after all — and subsection (c) defines the transient limb rather than leaving it to impression: occupancy in a hotel, motel or similar lodging for less than thirty days is transient, except where the unit is occupied as the occupant’s primary residence from the beginning; occupancy for thirty days or more is not transient, except where the unit is not the occupant’s primary residence and the occupancy is for less than ninety days. That is a gate on this page, not a doubt about the ban. Inside the chapter the prohibition below is absolute; outside it, chapter 830 does not reach the arrangement at all and this page does not describe what does. The classification is a question of fact about your particular letting and no page can settle it for you. Start from what the two labels actually describe, because they are doing different work. A processing or application fee is a charge for the landlord’s own administration — receiving the form, reading it, checking the references, keeping the file, answering the applicant. It is a charge for your time. A tenant screening fee is a charge for obtaining screening information about the applicant — the consumer report, the background product, the search you pay a vendor to run. It is a charge for a thing you buy. Connecticut bans the first and permits the second up to a ceiling, so the label is not cosmetic. It decides lawfulness. The practical trap is the single undifferentiated charge. Most landlords ask for one sum at the point of application and think of it as one fee. If that sum is set at a level that covers a vendor product plus something for the office work, then part of it is a processing fee whatever it is called on the form. Calling the whole thing a screening fee does not convert it into one; the label follows what the money pays for, not what the receipt says. The reverse is equally true — a charge described as an application fee that in fact does nothing but reimburse a screening product is being mislabelled in a way that invites a complaint the substance would not support. So the defensible practice is to charge for the screening, and to be able to point at what the screening cost. Take the vendor invoice, set the charge against it, and say on the record what product was bought and from whom. § 47a-4d does not impose an itemization duty, and this page does not claim one — but it does require you to give the applicant a copy of that receipt or invoice, along with a copy of the screening report or the information needed to obtain it from the provider. So the invoice is doing two jobs at once: it is the fact that answers the classification question, and it is a document the applicant is entitled to receive. A landlord who can produce the invoice has an answer. A landlord holding a round number with nothing behind it has a charge that looks like a fee for its own sake, and nothing to hand over. And the ceiling is a ceiling, not an entitlement. The statute permits a screening fee up to the indexed maximum; it does not tell you that the maximum is what you may routinely collect. Where the screening genuinely cost less, charging the ceiling anyway pushes the surplus back toward the category Connecticut prohibits, because a sum above what the screening cost is by definition paying for something other than the screening. Whether Connecticut would treat that surplus as a banned processing fee was not established by the research behind this page, and it is not asserted here — but it is the obvious argument, and it costs a landlord nothing to avoid making it available.
Watch: Connecticut Rental Application Fee Receipt explained
Connecticut application fee at a glance
Settle this first: is your charge a banned fee or a capped one?
Connecticut has two answers, not one. A processing or application fee — a charge for the administrative work of receiving, reviewing and handling an application — is prohibited, and no amount makes it lawful; so is any other payment, fee or charge demanded before or at the beginning of the tenancy outside the statute’s closed list of four. A tenant screening fee — a charge for obtaining screening information about the applicant — is allowed up to a ceiling the statute states as fifty dollars plus a CPI-for-urban-consumers adjustment determined annually by the Commissioner of Housing. Getting the label right therefore decides whether the money may be taken at all. This page deliberately does not state a current dollar amount, because the operative figure is the Commissioner’s determination and it was not retrieved for this page. And settle one thing ahead of the classification. § 47a-4d is a section of chapter 830, and § 47a-2, “Arrangements exempted from application of title”, puts six arrangements outside that chapter — among them transient occupancy in a hotel, motel or similar lodging, occupancy by an owner of a condominium unit, and institutional residence incidental to detention or care — along with a mobile manufactured home park lot rented to a resident who owns the home. Which one your letting is, is a question of fact about your property that this page cannot answer for you
The outright ban
a processing or application fee may not be charged. This is not a cap that a small figure satisfies; it is a prohibition, so a modest administrative charge is in the same position as a large one. The same subsection goes further and bars any other payment, fee or charge before or at the beginning of the tenancy except a § 47a-21 security deposit, advance first month’s rent, a key or special-equipment deposit and the screening fee — and bans move-in and move-out fees outright
The capped permission, and what charging it obliges you to hand over
a tenant screening fee is permitted, subject to a maximum the statute sets at fifty dollars plus an adjustment for any increase in the consumer price index for urban consumers, as determined annually by the Commissioner of Housing. Fifty dollars is the base the index runs on, which is why quoting it flat as the ceiling mis-states t