Free Oregon Rental Application Fee Receipt & Screening Notice
Oregon does not cap the applicant screening charge at a dollar figure. ORS 90.295(2) ties it to your average actual cost of screening, or the customary amount screening companies charge for comparable work. Before you may require payment at all, § 90.295(3) requires written screening criteria, nine specified written notices, and an actual-notice estimate of how many comparable units are available and how many applications are already under consideration — and § 90.297(1) bars every other applicant fee or deposit. All of that assumes chapter 90 reaches your letting: § 90.110 excludes nine arrangements from the chapter, vacation occupancy and transient hotel or motel occupancy among them. This generator produces the receipt, the screening confirmation and the notice checklist as one dated record.
In Oregon the phrase “application fee” is a slight misnomer, and the mismatch is worth fixing before anything else, because it is where landlords go wrong. ORS 90.297(1) bars a landlord from charging an applicant “a deposit or fee, however designated”. The words however designated are there to stop the prohibition being avoided by renaming. What survives that bar is a narrow, conditional carve-out: the applicant screening charge under ORS 90.295, which exists “solely to cover the costs of obtaining information about an applicant”. It is a cost-recovery mechanism, not a fee for considering an application, and every rule attached to it follows from that. There is no flat cap because a cost-recovery charge does not need one — the limit is your actual cost. There is a one-per-60-days rule because the same information does not need buying twice. There is a refund where you filled the unit before screening, because you never incurred the cost. And there is a long pre-payment notice list because an applicant handing over money to be screened is entitled to know what they are buying, what standards they will be judged against, and how likely they are to get a unit at all. Read that way, § 90.295 stops being a compliance checklist and becomes a single coherent rule. One boundary comes before all of it. § 90.295 and § 90.297 are sections of ORS chapter 90, so they reach what the chapter reaches and no further. § 90.115 applies the chapter to a rental agreement, wherever made, for a dwelling unit located within this state; § 90.110, captioned “Exclusions from application of this chapter”, then provides that unless created to avoid the application of the chapter, nine arrangements are not governed by it — institutional residence incidental to detention or to medical, geriatric, educational, counseling or religious service; short pre-closing or post-closing occupancy by a purchaser or seller; a fraternal or social organization’s own member; transient occupancy in a hotel or motel; a squatter; vacation occupancy; a landlord’s employee whose right to occupy is conditional on employment about the premises; an owner of a condominium unit or a holder of a proprietary lease in a cooperative; and premises used by the occupant primarily for agricultural purposes. § 90.113 excludes residence in certain licensed programs, facilities and homes as well. Read that as a gate, not as a doubt: inside the chapter the rules below are exactly as described here.
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. 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.
The nine notices you must give before you may require payment — and the tenth thing most landlords miss
Start one step earlier than the notices, with the chapter they live in. § 90.295 is a section of ORS chapter 90, and § 90.110 is captioned “Exclusions from application of this chapter”: unless created to avoid the application of the chapter, nine arrangements are not governed by it — institutional residence incidental to detention or to medical, geriatric, educational, counseling or similar service (expressly not including off-campus nondormitory housing); occupancy of a dwelling unit for no more than 90 days by a purchaser before the scheduled closing of a sale or by a seller after it; 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 or motel; occupancy by a squatter; vacation occupancy; occupancy by a landlord’s employee whose right to occupy is conditional on employment in and about the premises; occupancy by an owner of a condominium unit or a holder of a proprietary lease in a cooperative; and occupancy under a rental agreement covering premises used by the occupant primarily for agricultural purposes. § 90.113 adds residence in a licensed program, facility or home in the care-and-treatment series. That is a gate on this page, not a doubt about the rule. Inside the chapter the preconditions below are unqualified; outside it the chapter does not govern the arrangement at all, and this page does not describe what does. The classification is a question of fact about your particular letting — whether a stay is a vacation occupancy or a tenancy, whether an employee’s right to occupy is truly conditional on the work — and no page can settle it for you. § 90.295(3) is a precondition, not a formality. Its opening words are that a landlord “may not require payment of an applicant screening charge unless prior to accepting the payment the landlord” does all of the following. First, under (3)(a), the landlord adopts written screening or admission criteria — adopts, in writing, as a standing policy, not improvises per applicant. Second, under (3)(b), the landlord gives the applicant written notice of nine specified things: (A) the amount of the screening charge; (B) the screening or admission criteria; (C) the process the landlord typically follows, including whether it uses a tenant screening company, credit reports, public records or criminal records or contacts employers, landlords or other references; (D) the applicant’s rights to dispute the accuracy of information provided by a screening company or credit reporting agency; (E) a right to appeal a negative determination, if any such right exists; (F) any nondiscrimination policy required by federal, state or local law plus the landlord’s own, including that a landlord may not discriminate because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, marital status, familial status or source of income; (G) the rent and the deposits the landlord will require; (H) whether renter’s liability insurance is required and if so how much; and (I) the applicant’s right to a refund under subsection (5) and right to recover damages under subsection (6)(b). Then there is the tenth thing, and it is the one that is almost never done. Subsection (3)(c) requires actual notice — not written notice — of an estimate, made to the best of the landlord’s ability at the time, of the approximate number of units of the type and in the area the applicant is looking for that are, or within a reasonable future time will be, available from that landlord; and that estimate “shall include the approximate number of applications previously accepted and remaining under consideration for those units”. In plain terms, Oregon requires you to tell an applicant how long the queue ahead of them is before you take their money. The statute softens it in one respect only: “[a] good faith error by a landlord in making an estimate under this paragraph does not provide grounds for a claim under subsection (6)(b)”. Nothing excuses not giving the estimate at all.
Watch: Oregon Rental Application Fee Receipt explained
Oregon application fee at a glance
Settle this first: may you charge an Oregon applicant anything at all?
Only a screening charge, and only on conditions. § 90.297(1) prohibits charging “a deposit or fee, however designated” to an applicant, “[e]xcept as provided in ORS 90.295 and in this section”. So the screening charge under § 90.295 and the post-approval deposit to secure execution of a rental agreement under § 90.297(2) are the only two applicant payments the chapter contemplates. Everything else is barred by name — on a letting the chapter governs. Both sections belong to ORS chapter 90, § 90.115 applies that chapter to a rental agreement, wherever made, for a dwelling unit located within this state, and § 90.110 excludes nine arrangements from it altogether
What you may charge
an amount no greater than “the landlord’s average actual cost of screening applicants or the customary amount charged by tenant screening companies or consumer credit reporting agencies for a comparable level of screening” (§ 90.295(2)). Actual costs may include the reasonable value of time you or your agents spend obtaining information yourselves
How often
one screening charge per applicant in any 60-day period, “regardless of the number of rental units owned or managed by the landlord for which the applicant has applied to rent” (§ 90.295(1)(b)). A second charge inside that window is a breach even where the applicant applied for a different unit
What must happen first, and what it costs to get wrong
written criteria, nine written notices and an availability estimate, all before payment may be required (§ 90.295(3)). Non-compliance lets the applicant recover twice the charge plus $250 (§ 90.295(6)(b))
What ORS 90.295 and § 90.297 permit, forbid and penalise
§ 90.115 — Territorial application. “This chapter applies to, regulates and determines rights, obligations and remedies under a rental agreement, wherever made, for a dwelling unit located within this state.” § 90.110 — Exclusions from application of this chapter. This is the gate on everything below, because § 90.295 and § 90.297 are sections of this chapter. “Unless created to avoid the application of this chapter, the following 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, counseling, religious or similar service, “but not including residence in off-campus nondormitory housing”; occupancy of a dwelling unit for no more than 90 days by a purchaser prior to the scheduled closing of a real estate sale or by a seller following the closing; occupancy by a member of a fraternal or social organization in the portion of a structure operated for the benefit of the organization; “[t]ransient occupancy in a hotel or motel”; “[o]ccupancy by a squatter”; “[v]acation occupancy”; occupancy by an employee of a landlord whose right to occupancy is conditional upon employment in and about the premises; oc