Free Florida Rental Application Fee Receipt

Most state pages in this family are about a rule you have to follow. Florida is about the absence of one, which is a harder thing to write honestly and a much easier thing to get wrong. The position is this: no Florida statute caps a residential landlord’s application or screening fee, requires any part of it to be refunded, requires it to be itemized against actual costs, or sets a deadline for accounting for it. That is not an oversight in this page’s research; it is the state of the law, and it was established by reading the whole of the residential landlord and tenant chapter rather than by failing to find something. The second half of the answer is newer and more consequential. Until 2023 a Florida landlord had to worry about local ordinances, because a city or county could in principle regulate what landlords charged applicants. § 83.425, created by chapter 2023-314, ended that: the regulation of residential tenancies and all other matters covered under that part of the law are preempted to the state, and the section supersedes local government regulation of a list that names both the screening process a landlord uses in approving tenancies and rental agreement applications and the fees associated with them. The preemption is bounded by its own words, though, and the boundary is the first thing to check: it reaches “matters covered under this part”, and § 83.42 excludes five categories of letting from that part altogether, so the question of whether your letting sits inside Part II of chapter 83 comes before any of this. Where it does, there is no cap above you and no cap beside you. What there is instead are two things constantly mistaken for a cap. The first is a set of ceilings on lease-approval fees charged by community associations under an entirely separate body of law — a different charge, billed by a different party. The second is a seven-day processing duty for applications from servicemembers, which is a timing rule with no fee content whatsoever. This page separates all three and then does the thing that actually matters for an unregulated charge: it sets out what your own written application has to do, because in the absence of a statute your paperwork is the only law your fee has.

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 dated record of the money taken from an applicant. Florida prescribes no form for this and imposes no receipt duty at all, so what you get is not a statutory form and is not captioned as one — it is a business record you are choosing to create. It captures the parties and the unit, the amount received with its date and payment method, what the money was for, the screening company used, the criteria applied, the outcome and the refund position. In an unregulated state that record is doing more work than in a regulated one, because there is no statutory account of the charge to fall back on: the file is the account. Two things it does not do. It is not the disclosure that belongs on your application form — the amount, the refund position and what the fee pays for have to reach the applicant before they pay, and a receipt issued afterwards cannot do that job. And it does not record any charge a community association levies on the same letting, which is a separate transaction between the applicant and that body. Nothing is stored and there is no charge. Fields left blank print as a dash.

• What you charged, and that the applicant was told before they paid. No statute requires the disclosure, which is precisely why the document you can produce is the whole of your position.
• Whether the fee was refundable, and on what events. Rejection, withdrawal, the unit going to another applicant, an incomplete application — named individually rather than covered by one adjective.
• What the fee paid for. The report, the search, the processing time, or a combination, described in the application itself.
• The date, amount and method of payment. The four facts that make an unregulated charge reconstructable later.
• Which body charged which amount. Where an association also levies an approval charge on the same letting, the applicant should be able to see which charge came from whom.
• Your screening record for the applicant. Vendor, date, product and outcome, kept per application rather than as a monthly total.
• The written criteria you applied. An unregulated fee is not an unregulated decision, and criteria that exist only as judgement cannot be shown to have been applied consistently.
• Your adverse-action record where a consumer report drove a rejection. Federal consumer-report law is untouched by the absence of a state fee rule and by § 83.425.
• For a servicemember applicant, the date of submission and the date of your written decision. § 83.683 runs 7 days from submission and requires written notice of approval or denial with the reason for a denial.
• That no local ordinance was relied on as authority over your fee — and that your letting is one Part II of chapter 83 covers. § 83.425 supersedes local government regulation of rental agreement applications and the fees associated with them for matters covered under that part, and § 83.42 excludes five categories of letting from it.

• Believing your screening fee is capped at one hundred and fifty dollars. That ceiling belongs to a condominium association’s lease-approval fee under a different statute. Your own application fee is not capped by any Florida provision.
• Treating a local ordinance as binding on a Part II letting — or as superseded on a letting Part II excludes. § 83.425 preempts the regulation of these matters to the state and supersedes local government regulation of rental agreement applications and the fees associated with them, but only as to matters covered under that part, and § 83.42 puts five categories of letting outside it.
• Reading ‘no fee regulation’ as ‘no screening regulation’. The federal consumer-report framework applies in full, and the preemption section is directed at local government rather than at federal law.
• Leaving the refund position unstated. With no statutory rule, an unstated refund position is not a favourable one — it is an absent one, and the argument happens without a document.
• Using the word ‘nonrefundable’ and nothing else. It does not say whether it covers a withdrawal, an incomplete application, or a unit let to somebody else. Name the events.
• Charging without describing what the fee buys. One sentence on the application distinguishes a charge for screening work from a charge for nothing in particular.
• Letting an applicant discover an association’s approval charge late. It is a separate charge levied by that association, but an applicant who meets it unexpectedly will attribute it to you.
• Treating the servicemember rule as a fee rule. § 83.683 is a processing deadline and a written-notice duty. It regulates time, not money.
• Missing the seven days, or notifying by telephone. The notice of approval or denial must be in writing and inside the 7-day window, and absent a timely denial the landlord must lease if all other terms are complied with.
• Trying to contract out of the servicemember provision. Subsection (3) states that the section may not be waived or modified by the agreement of the parties under any circumstances.

No. No Florida statute caps a residential landlord’s application or screening fee, and no Florida statute requires any part of it to be refunded, itemized or accounted for. A landlord may set the amount, and the amount is a commercial decision rather than a regulated one.

That negative was established by reading the residential landlord and tenant chapter through rather than by failing to find a rule. Nothing in it caps, refunds, itemises or otherwise regulates an application or screening fee. The words that appear near this subject in the chapter are doing other jobs entirely: the background-screening provisions concern employee screening, and the single mention of a nonrefundable amount belongs to the separate arrangement under which a landlord may offer a fee in lieu of a security deposit, which is not an application fee and is not described on this page.

One boundary belongs on that negative. It is a negative about chapter 83, and § 83.42 puts five categories of letting outside the relevant part of that chapter altogether — a transient occupancy in a hotel, condominium, motel, roominghouse or mobile home park, a letting incidental to medical, geriatric, educational, counseling or religious services, an occupancy under a contract of sale on the terms that section states, occupancy by a holder of a proprietary lease in a cooperative apartment, and occupancy by an owner of a condominium unit. If your letting is one of those, the law that governs it may sit in another chapter entirely, and this page does not describe it.

It follows that most of the questions this family of pages usually answers do not arise in Florida. There is no threshold that switches a duty on, no clock for returning anything, no comparison between the fee and what the screening actually cost, and no prescribed disclosure. What replaces all of that is your own document, and the rest of this page is largely about writing it.

No. § 83.425, created by chapter 2023-314, provides that “[t]he regulation of residential tenancies, the landlord-tenant relationship, and all other matters covered under this part are preempted to the state”, and that the section “supersedes any local government regulations on matters covered under this part”.

The section then lists what that supersession reaches, and the list names this subject twice. It includes “the screening process used by a landlord in approving tenancies”; “rental agreement applications and fees associated with such applications”; and, separately again, “fees charged by the landlord”. It also names security deposits, the terms and conditions of rental agreements, the rights and responsibilities of the landlord and tenant, disclosures concerning the premises or the rental agreement, and notice requirements. The list is expressly inclusive rather than exhaustive — the section says “including, but not limited to”.

The practical effect for a landlord is that a municipal or county rule purporting to cap your application fee, to require it to be refunded, or to prescribe how you screen, is superseded — provided the letting is one the relevant part of chapter 83 covers. Three cautions on acting on that, and the first is the one that decides whether the other two arise.

First, read § 83.425 together with § 83.42. The preemption operates on “matters covered under this part”, and § 83.42 is captioned “Exclusions from application of part”. It provides that “[t]his part does not apply to”: residency or detention in a facility, whether public or private, when residence or detention is incidental to the provision of medical, geriatric, educational, counseling, religious or similar services; occupancy under a contract of sale of a dwelling unit, or of the property of which it is a part, in which the buyer has paid at least 12 months’ rent, or at least 1 month’s rent and a deposit of at least 5 percent of the purchase price; “[t]ransient occupancy in a hotel, condominium, motel, roominghouse, or similar public lodging, or transient occupancy in a mobile home park”; occupancy by a holder of a proprietary lease in a cooperative apartment; and occupancy by an owner of a condominium unit. For a letting in one of those five categories the preemption does not, by its own words, supersede a local government regulation of that letting. A landlord letting rooms in a roominghouse, running transient occupancies in a mobile home park, or letting incidentally to the provision of care should not treat a municipal ordinance as dead on the strength of § 83.425.

Second, an ordinance can cover several subjects at once, and preemption operates on the matters covered under the relevant part of state law rather than on the ordinance as an object; read it before dismissing it. Third, preemption is a rule about the relationship between state and local government. It does nothing to federal law, and this page does not suggest otherwise.

The date matters too. The preemption section was created in 2023, so guidance written before then — and the many local ordinances passed before then — sit on the wrong side of the change. An article explaining how to comply with a city application-fee rule is not necessarily wrong about what the ordinance said; it is describing a rule that, for a letting Part II covers, has since been superseded.

Legally, nothing. Practically, four things, because in the absence of a statute your written application is the only instrument that defines the charge you are taking.

The amount. On the document the applicant signs, not only in the listing. A listing changes, an email thread gets lost, and a conversation is not evidence of anything. The application is the one artefact that reliably survives the process.

Whether it is refundable, and on which events. This is where an unregulated charge most often goes wrong, because a single adjective is doing work it cannot do. Name the events individually: the applicant is rejected; the applicant withdraws; the unit is let to another applicant; the application is never completed. Each of those is a different situation and an applicant reading the word ‘nonrefundable’ will not know which ones it was meant to cover.

What the fee pays for. One sentence. A consumer report, a background search, processing time, or a combination. The point is not formality; it is that a charge with a stated purpose is a different thing from a charge with none, and the distinction becomes visible the moment somebody questions it.

Who is charging it. This matters more in Florida than in most states, because an applicant for a unit in a community with an approving association may face a second, separate charge from that association. Making clear which charge is yours prevents the second one from being attributed to you.

The association charges them, not you. These are ceilings on the fee an association may levy for approving a transfer of a unit — a sale, a mortgage, a lease, a sublease or another transfer — where the association is required to approve it. They are not ceilings on a landlord’s application or screening fee, they arise under a different body of law, and they are the single most common source of the false belief that Florida caps application fees at one hundred and fifty dollars.

Condominium associations. § 718.112(2)(k) provides that an association may not charge a fee in connection with the sale, mortgage, lease, sublease or other transfer of a unit unless the association is required to approve the transfer and a fee for that approval is provided for in the declaration, articles or bylaws. Where it may be charged, the fee under § 718.112(2)(k) “may be preset but may not exceed $150 per applicant”. For calculating the fee, spouses, or a parent or parents and any dependent children, are considered one applicant. Where the lease or sublease is a renewal with the same lessee or sublessee, “a charge may not be made”. The same paragraph permits the association to require a prospective lessee to place a security deposit of no more than the equivalent of one month’s rent into an escrow account maintained by the association, where the declaration, articles or bylaws give it that authority.

The printed figure is indexed, so check the published amount. The same paragraph requires that such fees “must be adjusted every 5 years in an amount equal to the total of the annual increases occurring in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, U.S. City Average, All Items during that 5-year period”, and directs the Department of Business and Professional Regulation to calculate the fees, round them to the nearest dollar, and publish the adjusted amounts on its website. The number printed in the statute is therefore a base rather than necessarily the operative ceiling. This page did not retrieve the department’s published figure, and does not guess at it — if the current amount matters to you, read it from the department’s own publication.

Cooperative associations. § 719.106(1)(i) is built the same way for an association in that setting: no charge in connection with a sale, mortgage, lease, sublease or other transfer unless the association is required to approve it and a fee is provided for in the governing documents, and any such fee under § 719.106(1)(i) may be preset “but in no event shall it exceed $100 per applicant other than husband/wife or parent/dependent child, which are considered one applicant”. Again no charge may be made on a renewal with the same lessee or sublessee, and again the association may require an escrowed security deposit of up to one month’s rent where the governing documents allow. The retrieved text of that paragraph contains no indexing sentence, so the asymmetry with the condominium association provision is real and not an omission here.

Two consequences for a landlord letting a unit in such a community. First, budget and disclose: the applicant may face the association’s approval charge in addition to your own fee, and the one thing guaranteed to sour an application is discovering the second charge at the last moment. Second, do not let the ceiling migrate. It constrains what the association may bill for approving the transfer. It has no application at all to what you charge to screen an applicant, and no Florida provision imports it into your side of the transaction.

A processing deadline with a written-notice duty attached, and it has nothing to do with fees. § 83.683 provides that if a landlord requires a prospective tenant to complete a rental application before residing in a rental unit, the landlord must complete processing of an application submitted by a prospective tenant who is a servicemember within 7 days after submission, and must within that 7-day period notify the servicemember in writing of an approval or denial and, if denied, the reason for the denial.

Who counts as a servicemember is not left to the section. § 83.683 says “servicemember, as defined in s. 250.01”, and § 250.01(19) defines the term as “any person serving as a member of the United States Armed Forces on active duty or state active duty and all members of the Florida National Guard and United States Reserve Forces”. That is wider than a serving regular: a Florida National Guard member and a member of the United States Reserve Forces are inside it, on the face of the definition, without any further condition. If your intake process only flags an applicant who names a current active-duty posting, it will miss applicants the seven days actually run for.

The consequence of missing it is stated in the section itself: “Absent a timely denial of the rental application, the landlord must lease the rental unit to the servicemember if all other terms of the application and lease are complied with.” That is an unusual structure — silence produces an obligation to let rather than merely a breach — and it is worth reading twice before treating the seven days as advisory.

Three details are easy to miss. The clock runs from submission, not from when the file reaches whoever decides. The notice must be in writing, so a telephone call inside the window does not discharge it. And a denial must carry the reason for denial, which is a state duty in its own right, distinct from anything the federal adverse-action rules require.

Subsection (2) extends the identical duty to three named bodies, not to ‘an association’ at large: a condominium association as defined in chapter 718, a cooperative association as defined in chapter 719, and a homeowners’ association as defined in chapter 720. Where one of those associations requires a prospective tenant of a unit or parcel within its control to complete a rental application, that association must itself complete processing within 7 days and give the same written notice; absent a timely denial it must allow the owner to lease, and the landlord must then lease, on the same terms. So where such an association is in the approval chain it carries its own seven-day obligation rather than borrowing yours — and the naming matters, because an association outside those three chapters is not brought inside the subsection by calling itself one. Subsection (3) then closes the section off: it “may not be waived or modified by the agreement of the parties under any circumstances”. A clause in your application or lease purporting to extend the period is ineffective.

No, and this is the inference most worth resisting. § 83.425 preempts local government regulation in favor of the state. It says nothing about federal law, and the absence of a state fee rule says nothing about how a tenant screening decision may be made.

The federal consumer-report framework applies in Florida in full. You need a permissible purpose before obtaining a consumer report on an applicant. You need the applicant’s written authorisation. And where information in a consumer report contributes to a rejection, the adverse-action steps are owed — identifying the agency that supplied the report, telling the applicant the agency did not make the decision, and setting out the applicant’s right to a free copy and to dispute what it contains. Charging nothing at all for the report would not change any of that.

The same point applies to the criteria themselves. An uncapped fee is not an unconstrained decision, and the practical protection against a challenged rejection is the same everywhere: written criteria, settled before the applications arrive, applied in the same order to everybody, with the result recorded. Florida’s statutory silence about the fee removes a rule about money. It removes nothing about how a decision is made or evidenced.

The four facts that make an unregulated charge reconstructable: what was taken, when, from whom, and for what. No statute requires a receipt, which is the reason to issue one — there is no statutory account of the transaction to fall back on, so the file is the account.

Alongside the receipt, keep the screening record per application rather than as a monthly total: which vendor, which product, which date, what outcome. Keep the version of the application form the applicant actually signed, because your fee disclosure lives in it and forms get edited. And where a consumer report contributed to a rejection, keep the adverse-action record with the file rather than in a separate system, since the two documents answer questions about the same decision.

For a servicemember applicant, add two dates: the date of submission and the date your written decision went out. The seven days in § 83.683 run between those two points, and a file that does not record the first cannot demonstrate compliance with a period measured from it.

Nothing here is prescribed. Florida sets no retention period for an application record and this page does not invent one. What it reflects is that in a state which regulates neither the charge nor its documentation, the only evidence that a charge was fair, disclosed and earned is evidence you chose to create at the time.

The money taken at signing is a different subject with real rules attached, including the separate arrangement under which a landlord may offer a fee in lieu of a security deposit. See Florida security deposit laws for the deposit itself, how it is held and how it is returned.

What you may consider when screening an applicant, and what a denial requires once a consumer report has driven it, are the questions the fee actually pays for. Our guide to Florida tenant screening laws covers that ground, including the federal rules that apply whatever the state says — or does not say — about the charge.

For the wider framework of the tenancy — notice periods, entry, maintenance and termination — see Florida landlord-tenant laws.

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