Free New Mexico Rental Application Fee Receipt

If you have read a one-line summary of New Mexico’s screening fee rule, you have read the word “fifty” and almost nothing that matters. The fifty-dollar figure is the opening clause of a section that spends the rest of its length attaching conditions to it, and an owner who complies only with the number is out of compliance with the section. The permission in subsection A is expressly qualified — you may charge a screening fee not exceeding fifty dollars provided that you give written or digital notice of the fee and the applicant agrees in writing to pay it, provided that you do not charge it when you know or should know that no dwelling unit is available now or will be at the start of the residency, provided that you give the applicant a written or digital receipt, provided that you place a hold on the card or delay depositing cash or checks until all prior applicants have been screened and rejected or have been offered the unit and declined it, and provided that you charge no other fees at all to process the application. Behind that sits a thirty calendar day return duty with four named triggers and a prescribed method of return. Behind that again sits a private remedy: an owner who charges an unauthorized screening fee is liable for two hundred fifty dollars and must return all fees paid by the applicant, and a prevailing party in a suit to enforce the Act is entitled to reasonable attorneys’ fees and court costs. The whole structure took effect in 2025, which is recent enough that a great deal of published New Mexico guidance predates it or reproduces the cap without the conditions. One question comes before all of it and is asked almost nowhere: whether the act reaches the arrangement at all. § 47-8-19.2 is a section of the Uniform Owner-Resident Relations Act, and § 47-8-9 of that act, captioned Exemptions, exempts six arrangements from it unless they were created to avoid its application — institutional residence incidental to detention or care, contract-of-sale occupancy by the purchaser, a fraternal or social organization’s own member in the part of a structure run for its benefit, transient occupancy in a hotel or motel, an employee whose right to occupy is conditional on employment under a written agreement, and premises used by the occupant primarily for agricultural purposes. Inside the act the rules below are exactly as stated; outside it the act does not reach the arrangement and this page does not describe what does. This page is written from the enacted text, including a candid account of the questions that text leaves open for your own application form to settle.

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 Mexico Rental Application Fee Receipt explained

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The generator above produces the written receipt § 47-8-19.2(A)(3) requires, and the record that evidences the conditions the fee depends on. New Mexico 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 of payment, whether the payment is being held or has been deposited and why, the applicant’s position in the queue, the screening company and products used, the outcome, the return route the applicant selected, and the refund position. One thing it does not do. It is not the applicant’s written agreement to pay the fee. That is a separate requirement under (A)(1), it must exist before the fee is taken, and a receipt issued afterwards cannot supply it — put the amount and an express acceptance in the application document itself. And one thing it assumes. It is written for a letting the Uniform Owner-Resident Relations Act governs; § 47-8-9 exempts six arrangements from that act unless they were created to avoid its application, 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 the arrangement is one the Uniform Owner-Resident Relations Act governs. § 47-8-19.2 is a section of that act, and § 47-8-9 exempts six arrangements from it unless created to avoid its application — institutional residence incidental to detention or care, contract-of-sale occupancy, a fraternal or social organization’s own member, transient hotel or motel occupancy, conditional employee occupancy under a written agreement, and premises used primarily for agricultural purposes.
• That written or digital notice of the screening fee was given. The first limb of (A)(1), and the one most owners already satisfy.
• That the applicant agreed in writing to pay it. The second limb, and the one most often missing. Notice is not agreement.
• That a dwelling unit was actually available. (A)(2) is drafted around what the owner knows or should know, so the listing history and the letting date both matter.
• That the fee did not exceed fifty dollars. A flat statutory ceiling, not a cost test — the section does not require the fee to match what screening cost you.
• That no other fee was charged to process the application. (A)(5) is an outright prohibition, not a cap on extras.
• A written or digital receipt for the fee paid. (A)(3), owed on every fee, without a request and without a threshold.
• The order applications were received. The queue rule in (A)(4) makes sequence a legally operative fact rather than an administrative convenience.
• The status of every prior applicant at the moment you banked this one. Screened and rejected, or offered and declined — those are the only two resolved states.
• That the payment was held, or the deposit delayed, until the queue cleared. A card authorisation record or a deposit date is what evidences this.
• Whether a screening for this applicant was completed within the previous ninety calendar days at any property under the same ownership. The § 47-8-19.3 one-fee rule is portfolio-wide.
• That the applicant was given a copy of any reports used to screen them. § 47-8-19.3(B), and it is not conditioned on the outcome.
• Whether a return trigger fired, and when. A prior applicant taking the unit, or your not having obtained a report, performed a reference check, used a screening service or processed the application.
• That the return was made within thirty calendar days and by a prescribed route. Certified mail, destruction of the check on request, or availability for collection.
• Your federal adverse-action record where a consumer report drove the outcome. Federal consumer report law applies alongside the state section and is not displaced by it.

• Assuming the act reaches every arrangement you let. § 47-8-19.2 sits inside the Uniform Owner-Resident Relations Act, and § 47-8-9, ‘Exemptions’, exempts six arrangements from that act — institutional residence incidental to detention or care, contract-of-sale occupancy by the purchaser, a fraternal or social organization’s own member, transient hotel or motel occupancy, an employee whose right to occupy is conditional on employment under a written agreement, and premises used by the occupant primarily for agricultural purposes. That does not weaken the rule on a letting the act covers; it means the classification question comes first, and the trap runs both ways — an arrangement created to avoid the act is expressly not exempted.
• Treating fifty dollars as the whole rule. It is the opening clause of a conditional permission. Five provisos, a return duty and a prescribed return method follow it, and most published summaries stop at the number.
• Giving notice of the fee and calling that consent. (A)(1) requires notice and the applicant’s written agreement to pay. A listing, a sign or a rent schedule satisfies only the first half.
• Banking the fee on receipt. (A)(4) requires a hold on the card or a delay in depositing cash or checks until all prior applicants are resolved. Depositing on day one is a condition failure even if you would have refunded later.
• Treating an applicant still under review as resolved. The two exit routes are screened and rejected, or offered and declined. Anything in between leaves the queue uncleared.
• Charging an administration fee alongside the screening fee. (A)(5) forbids any other fee to process an application. There is no headroom above the fifty dollars for a second charge under a different name.
• Collecting fees against a unit that is not really available. (A)(2) reaches what the owner should know, so a stale listing or a waiting list is the classic exposure.
• Issuing a receipt only when asked. (A)(3) is unconditional. Every screening fee generates a written or digital receipt.
• Charging the same applicant twice across your portfolio. § 47-8-19.3 bars a second screening fee where the screening was completed within ninety calendar days for any properties under the same ownership, so a per-property view of the rule will get this wrong.
• Refunding by ordinary post or by store credit. Subsection (C) prescribes the routes: certified mail, destruction of the check on the applicant’s request, or availability for the applicant to retrieve.
• Deducting your costs from the return. Subsection (B) returns the screening fee. It is not framed as a refund of the excess over what you spent, and no cost subtraction appears in it.
• Withholding a screening report from the applicant. § 47-8-19.3(B) requires a copy of any reports used to screen them, whatever the outcome.
• Assuming the only downside is refunding the fee. § 47-8-48(B) makes an owner who charges an unauthorized screening fee liable for two hundred fifty dollars and the return of all fees paid, and subsection A gives a prevailing party reasonable attorneys’ fees and court costs.
• Relying on pre-2025 guidance. The section and the private remedy both date from a 2025 act, so a good deal of otherwise reputable material describes a regime that no longer exists.

Fifty dollars. NMSA 1978, § 47-8-19.2(A) permits an owner to charge an applicant a screening fee that shall not exceed fifty dollars, to cover the cost of obtaining information about the applicant, including the cost of a consumer credit report, a reference check or a screening service.

Two things about that figure are widely misunderstood. It is a flat ceiling, not an actual-cost test: the section does not say the fee may not exceed what the screening cost you, and this page does not import a cost-recovery rule the text does not contain. And it is a conditional ceiling. The permission is granted “provided that the owner” does five specified things, so the fifty dollars is only lawful inside those conditions. An owner who charges forty dollars without the applicant’s written agreement to pay is further from compliance than one who charges the full fifty with every condition met.

One boundary belongs on that answer, and it comes before everything else on this page. § 47-8-19.2 is a section of the Uniform Owner-Resident Relations Act, so it reaches what the act reaches and no further. NMSA 1978, § 47-8-9, captioned “Exemptions”, provides that unless created to avoid the application of the act, the following arrangements are exempted by it: residence at an institution, public or private, if incidental to detention or the provision of medical, geriatric, counseling, religious or educational service; occupancy under a contract of sale of a dwelling unit or the property of which it is part, where 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 the benefit of the organization; transient occupancy in a hotel or motel; occupancy by an employee of an owner under a written rental or employment agreement that specifies the employee’s right to occupancy is conditional upon employment in and about the premises; and occupancy under a rental agreement covering premises used by the occupant primarily for agricultural purposes.

Read that as a gate, not as a doubt. Where the letting is one the act governs — the ordinary residential tenancy this page is written for — the fifty-dollar ceiling, the five provisos, the thirty-calendar-day return duty, the prescribed return method and the § 47-8-48(B) liability all bind you exactly as set out below. Where it is one of the six, the act does not reach the arrangement at all 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: whether a hotel occupancy is genuinely transient, whether an employee’s conditional right to occupy is recorded in the written agreement paragraph E requires, and whether premises are used primarily for agricultural purposes are all facts about the arrangement. Note the opening words as well, because they cut against a landlord rather than for one: an arrangement constructed to fall inside an exemption is expressly not exempted.

Written or digital notice plus the applicant’s written agreement to pay; no fee where the owner knows or should know no unit is available; a written or digital receipt; a hold on the payment until prior applicants are resolved; and no other fees to process the application.

Taken together they describe a process rather than a price. The first condition is about consent, and it fails most often on its second limb — owners are good at publishing a fee and much less good at capturing an express written agreement to pay it. The second is about honesty of the vacancy, and its knowledge standard reaches what you ought to know rather than only what you did. The third is administrative and absolute. The fourth changes cash handling, and is dealt with on its own below. The fifth removes the workaround: if a charge exists because someone is applying, it is inside the fifty dollars or it is not permitted at all.

Not necessarily. § 47-8-19.2(A)(4) requires the owner to place a hold on a credit card, or to wait to deposit cash or checks, until all prior applicants have either been screened and rejected, or been offered the dwelling unit and declined to enter into a rental agreement.

This is the condition most likely to require an actual change to how you run a vacancy, because it makes the order in which applications arrived into a legally operative fact. If yours is the first application, there is no queue and nothing to wait for. If yours is the third, the owner may not bank the money until applicants one and two are each in one of two states: screened and rejected, or offered the unit and having declined it. An applicant whose screening is still running is not resolved. An applicant sitting on an offer is not resolved. A queue with an unresolved applicant at the front freezes every payment behind it.

The practical consequences are worth setting out plainly. You need a timestamped record of application order, because you will be asked to justify a deposit date against it. Card authorisations rather than captures are the cleanest mechanism, since a hold is exactly what the subsection names first. And cash is the awkward case: the section says wait to deposit, which means holding the cash undeposited and identifiable, not spending it and intending to refund. If your process cannot cope with that, taking application fees by card is the simpler route.

Within thirty calendar days, in two situations named in § 47-8-19.2(B): where a prior applicant is offered the dwelling unit and agrees to enter into a rental agreement, and where the owner does not obtain a consumer credit report, perform a reference check, use a screening service to obtain information about the applicant, or process the application.

The first trigger is the queue resolving against your applicant. Somebody ahead of them took the unit, so their fee goes back. Note that the subsection returns the screening fee, without any subtraction for what you may have spent in the meantime. That is a real commercial consequence of the queue rule: if you screen everyone in parallel and the first applicant then takes the unit, you have paid for screening you cannot recover from the later applicants.

The second trigger is drafted as a list of things the owner did not do, and the limbs are joined by or: the owner does not obtain a consumer credit report, perform a reference check, use a screening service, or process the application. On the enacted wording the ordinary reading is that the duty fires on any single failure — an owner who pulled a credit report but never performed a reference check has, on the words, triggered the limb. The narrower reading, that the four limbs together describe an owner who took the money and did nothing with it, is a reading against the connective rather than what the face of the text says, and no case law was researched for this page. The deadline is thirty calendar days and § 47-8-48(B) sits behind it, so the defensible course is to treat any unperformed limb as engaging the duty.

By one of three prescribed routes. § 47-8-19.2(C) provides that a returned screening fee shall be returned by certified mail, destroyed upon the applicant’s request if paid by check, or made available for the applicant to retrieve.

Prescribing the method is unusual and it has an obvious practical wrinkle: certified mail is a material cost against a fifty-dollar refund, and it is the first route the subsection names. The sensible response is to settle the question early. Ask the applicant, at the point they pay, how they would want a refund handled if one becomes due, and record the answer on the receipt. The destroy-the-check route is only available on the applicant’s request, so it does not exist unless somebody asks; the make-available-for-collection route needs the applicant to know where and when. Both are cheaper than certified mail and both depend on a conversation you can only usefully have at the start.

A great deal, and the gaps are as useful to a landlord as the duties. The section says nothing about your screening criteria, nothing about when the receipt has to be delivered, nothing about how long you must keep records, nothing about what “process the application” means, and nothing about an applicant who was properly screened and simply rejected on the merits.

It does not require you to disclose your screening criteria. The written notice is about the fee, not the standards. Nothing in the section obliges you to publish your income multiple, your credit threshold or your policy on criminal history. That is a genuine freedom, and it is also a reason to write those criteria down internally and apply them consistently — because the federal and fair housing constraints on how you screen are entirely untouched by the state section’s silence.

It does not set a deadline for the receipt. The receipt is mandatory but untimed. Issue it at the point of payment anyway; an untimed duty is not a duty you can defer indefinitely, and the receipt is where you will want the queue position and the chosen refund route recorded in any event.

It does not define “process the application”. That phrase carries one of the four negative limbs of the return trigger and it is not defined in the text read for this page. Your own application form can settle it usefully by describing what processing consists of in your operation — verification steps, references contacted, decision recorded — so that what you did is documented rather than argued about.

It does not, in terms, require a refund to an applicant who was fully screened and rejected on the merits. Read the condition strictly, though, because the four limbs of the second trigger are joined by or. Only where you obtained a consumer credit report and performed a reference check and used a screening service and processed the application, and no prior applicant took the unit, is no trigger in subsection B engaged. Fail any one of them and the thirty-day duty fires on the face of the text, so the rejection by itself is not what keeps the money. That is also why the fifty dollars is not framed as a cost subtraction in the way that several other regimes frame their fees.

It does not set a record retention period. Nothing tells you how long to keep the receipt, the queue record or the invoice. Given that the enforcement provision entitles a prevailing applicant to attorneys’ fees, keep them for as long as a claim could realistically be brought, and keep them per applicant rather than per vacancy.

And it does not define “unauthorized screening fee”, the phrase that carries the two hundred fifty dollar liability in § 47-8-48(B). The natural reading is a fee charged outside the conditions of § 47-8-19.2, and that is the reading a cautious owner should work to, but the text read for this page does not say so and this page will not pretend otherwise.

Everything the statute leaves open that you will later be asked to prove. The section fixes the price and the process; your document has to fix the evidence.

Five items earn their place. First, the fee amount together with an express line the applicant signs or digitally accepts agreeing to pay it — that single line answers both limbs of (A)(1). Second, a statement of where this application sits in the queue and what that means for when the payment will be taken, which turns the (A)(4) obligation into something the applicant has been told rather than something you have to reconstruct. Third, the applicant’s election of a refund route under subsection (C), captured before a refund is due rather than after. Fourth, a plain description of what processing the application consists of, so that the negative limb of the return trigger has a factual answer. Fifth, an acknowledgment that a copy of any screening report will be provided, which is the § 47-8-19.3(B) duty and one of the few in this area that applies equally to applicants you approve.

None of that is required drafting. All of it is the difference between a compliant process and a provable one.

Generally not within ninety days across the same ownership. § 47-8-19.3 provides that an owner shall not charge more than one screening fee to the same applicant if the screening was completed within ninety calendar days of the application date for any properties under the same ownership.

Read the scope words. It is any properties under the same ownership, not this unit and not this building, so the rule operates at portfolio level and cannot be administered from a single property’s file. It is ninety calendar days, measured from the application date against a screening that was completed. And it is keyed to the same applicant, which under the Act’s definitions includes a person who agrees to act as a guarantor or cosigner on a rental agreement — so a guarantor is an applicant in their own right, may be charged a screening fee in their own right, and enjoys the same one-fee protection in their own right.

The operational answer is a single register of who you have screened, when the screening completed, and under which ownership entity. Without it you cannot answer the question, and a “we did not know” is not a defence the subsection offers.

§ 47-8-48(B), added by the same 2025 act, provides that an owner who charges an unauthorized screening fee shall be liable for two hundred fifty dollars and shall return all fees paid by the applicant.

That is a fixed sum plus full restitution, and it sits alongside § 47-8-48(A), under which a suit brought by an applicant or any party to the rental agreement to enforce the rental agreement or any provision of the Uniform Owner-Resident Relations Act entitles the prevailing party to reasonable attorneys’ fees and court costs. The word applicant in subsection A is doing work: a person who never became a tenant has standing to sue on the Act, and if they win, the fee award follows.

Two hundred fifty dollars is not a large figure against a single fifty-dollar fee. It is a substantial figure against a process defect repeated across every application a portfolio takes, which is exactly the shape a missing written-agreement line or a habitual same-day deposit has.

The same act also enacted a new section of the Unfair Practices Act, captioned prohibited conduct in renting of dwelling units, which declares it an unfair or deceptive trade practice for an owner to charge an applicant a fee that is not a screening fee or a deposit, or that was not published in a listing for rental of a dwelling unit, in violation of the Uniform Owner-Resident Relations Act, and likewise to charge fees not included in the rental agreement in violation of that Act. This page cites that provision by its caption and by the session law that created it, because the probes for its codified section number did not return a confirmable answer and a guessed citation is worse than an honest gap.

Yes, in a separate section of the same act. Captioned owner disclosure to applicants, it requires an owner to disclose to applicants in plain language all costs of a rental agreement in a published listing of the dwelling unit, including the base rent that will be assessed and a description of all fees or charges that will be assessed during the residency, itemized and readily identifiable in the listing. It also provides that an owner is not liable under the Act for a third-party website’s failure to represent all costs the owner provided.

That duty is about the costs of the tenancy rather than about the screening fee, and the two should not be conflated: the screening fee’s own notice requirement lives in § 47-8-19.2(A)(1) and is owed to the applicant directly. But the listing duty matters here for a practical reason. The Unfair Practices Act addition treats a fee that was not published in a listing as an unfair or deceptive trade practice, so the listing is where the two regimes meet. As with the Unfair Practices Act section, this page cites the disclosure section by caption and session law rather than by a codified number it could not confirm.

Alongside, not underneath. The state section governs the money and the process. Federal consumer report law governs the report the money buys, and it applies whatever the state requires about fees.

The points that matter to 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, require a larger 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 identifying the consumer reporting agency that supplied the report, stating that the agency did not make the decision and cannot explain it, and telling 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).

There is a useful overlap with the state duty. § 47-8-19.3(B) requires you to give the applicant a copy of any reports used to screen them, regardless of outcome, which is broader than the federal notice in one respect and narrower in another: broader because it is not conditioned on an adverse action, narrower because it does not carry the federal notice’s content requirements. Doing both is not duplicative work — it is two duties that happen to concern the same document.

The provisions described here were enacted by Laws 2025, chapter 122, and the text was read on 31 August 2026 from the Legislature’s own final bill publication and cross-checked against an independent publication of the codified sections. The two agree exactly on the operative text.

On timing, the act contained no effective-date provision. The annotation on the corroborating source states that it took effect on 20 June 2025, ninety days after the adjournment of the legislature, under article IV, § 23 of the state constitution. That is a derivation from a constitutional default rather than a date printed in the act, and it is stated here as such.

The practical significance of a 2025 enactment is that guidance written earlier is not merely incomplete, it is describing a different regime. If a source tells you this state has no application fee rule, or gives you the fifty-dollar cap with none of the conditions, check its date before you rely on it.

The fee pays for a screening decision, and what you may consider in 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 Mexico tenant screening laws covers that ground.

A screening fee is not a deposit — the Unfair Practices Act addition treats the two as distinct categories — and the money taken at signing runs on its own regime with its own limits and its own return clock. See New Mexico security deposit laws.

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

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