Free Rhode Island Rental Application Fee Receipt

Most states that regulate rental application fees do it with a number. Rhode Island did it with a prohibition. Since 1 January 2024, § 34-18-59 has provided that a landlord, lessor, sub-lessor, real estate broker, property management company or designee shall not be allowed to require or demand any prospective tenant to pay for a rental application fee. There is no capped version of that charge and no compliant way to levy a smaller one; the category is closed. What the section leaves in place is a carefully bounded cost recovery, and for a landlord that carve-out is the entire subject. You may still require an official state criminal background check — a term the section defines by naming its sources, the bureau of criminal identification, the department of attorney general, the state police, and the local police department where the prospective tenant resides — and you may still require a credit check. But the money attached to those requirements is conditional on a single fact. If the applicant provides a qualifying check or report issued within ninety days of the application, no fee may be charged. If they do not, you may charge a fee representing not more than the actual cost of obtaining it, and you must give the applicant a copy of what they paid for. Underneath all of that sits a third limitation that reads as a protection: nothing prevents you obtaining an independent background check or credit report at your own expense. So a portable report the applicant hands you decides who bears the cost of screening. It does not decide what you are entitled to look at. One thing precedes all of it. § 34-18-59 is a section of chapter 34-18, so it governs what the chapter governs: § 34-18-7 applies the chapter to a rental agreement for a dwelling unit located in this state, and § 34-18-8 excludes eight arrangements from it — transient lodging subject to the lodging taxes, commercial letting, contract-of-sale occupancy, a cooperative proprietary lease, institutional residence incidental to detention or care, a fraternal or social organization’s own member, a resident employee on premises of more than eleven units, and a transitional housing facility — unless the parties expressly agree to be governed by the chapter. On an ordinary residential letting the prohibition is unqualified; whether yours is one is a question of fact this page cannot decide for you. This page works through that gate, the structure inside it, the drafting asymmetry inside that, and the several things the section conspicuously does not say.

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.

Watch: Rhode Island Rental Application Fee Receipt explained

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The generator above produces a dated record of any lawful screening cost charged and the evidence behind it. Rhode Island prescribes no form, so this is not a statutory form and is not captioned as one. It records the parties and the unit, whether the applicant supplied a qualifying official state criminal background check or credit report and the date it was issued, which screening you required, the actual cost of anything you obtained and from whom, the amount charged, the date the copy of the check or report was provided to the applicant, and the outcome. One thing it is not. It is not a receipt for a rental application fee, because there is no lawful rental application fee in this state to receipt. If you find yourself completing it for a charge that is not the actual cost of a background check or credit report you obtained, the charge is the problem rather than the paperwork. And one thing it assumes. It is written for a letting chapter 34-18 governs; § 34-18-8 excludes eight arrangements from that chapter unless the parties expressly agree otherwise, 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 for the tool. Fields left blank print as a dash.

• That your letting is one chapter 34-18 governs. § 34-18-59 is a section of that chapter; § 34-18-7 applies the chapter to a rental agreement for a dwelling unit located in this state, and § 34-18-8 excludes eight arrangements from it unless the parties expressly agree to be governed by it.
• That no rental application fee was required or demanded. Subsection (a) is an outright bar, so the first question is not how much but whether.
• That no such fee was charged anywhere else in the chain. The prohibition names brokers, property management companies and designees as well as landlords.
• What screening you actually required. The carve-out is framed around a required official state criminal background check or credit check, so your requirement is the reference point.
• Whether the applicant supplied a qualifying document. The single fact that decides whether any charge is permitted at all.
• The issue date of any document supplied. The ninety days run from issue, measured against the application for the rental unit.
• That a supplied criminal check was an official state one. From the bureau of criminal identification, the department of attorney general, the state police, or the local police department where the applicant resides.
• Which of the two documents was supplied, and which was not. Whether the extinguisher in (b)(1) reaches only the supplied document or both is genuinely open on its wording, so the record has to show which was which before any charge is defended.
• The actual cost of anything you obtained. The invoice or receipt from the issuing body or the reporting agency, per applicant and dated.
• That the amount charged did not exceed that cost. The ceiling is cost, not a schedule figure, and there is no administrative allowance in the words.
• That a copy of the check or report was provided to every applicant charged. Triggered by the charge, not by the outcome and not by a request.
• When that copy was provided. The section sets no deadline, which is a reason to date the delivery rather than a reason to delay it.
• That any independent report you obtained was at your own expense. The (b)(3) limb permits it on that condition and no other.
• Your federal adverse-action record where a consumer report drove the outcome. Federal consumer report law applies alongside the section 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.

• Charging a reduced application fee and assuming a smaller number is safer. Subsection (a) is a prohibition, not a cap. There is no compliant application fee at any price.
• Moving the fee to the letting agent or the portal. The bar names real estate brokers, property management companies and designees alongside landlords, so relocating the charge does not change its character.
• Renaming it a processing or administration charge. The section does not define “rental application fee”, which cuts against a label-based defence rather than for one. What the charge does is what it is.
• Charging a fee even though the applicant handed you a recent report. Where a qualifying check or report issued within ninety days is provided, (b)(1) says no fee for such check and/or credit report may be charged. That is the whole point of the carve-out.
• Treating the severability of the two documents as settled, in either direction. (b)(1)’s no-fee clause says “no fee for such official state criminal background check and/or credit report may be charged”, which is readable as extinguishing one charge and readable as extinguishing both. Charging for the unsupplied document is a position, not a certainty.
• Counting the ninety days from when the document reached you. The subsection says issued within ninety days of the application, so the issue date on the face of the report is what matters.
• Accepting a commercial vendor’s criminal product as an official state check. The subsection identifies the document by its source, and a private screening report is not one of the named sources. This error usually costs the landlord a charge it could lawfully have made.
• Adding your own time to the actual cost. The ceiling is a fee representing not more than the actual cost of obtaining the check or report. There is no administrative component in those words.
• Setting the charge from a fee schedule instead of an invoice. A cost ceiling needs a cost document, per applicant, dated. A standing figure cannot show what this applicant’s check actually cost.
• Giving the applicant a copy only if they are rejected. The copy duty is triggered by being charged, so it reaches the approved applicant too.
• Waiting for the applicant to ask for the copy. Nothing in (b)(2) conditions it on a request.
• Ordering your own report and billing the applicant for it. (b)(3) permits an independent report at the landlord’s own expense. It is not a route around (b)(1).
• Assuming a supplied report binds your decision. It does not. It governs who pays, and (b)(3) expressly preserves your ability to obtain your own.
• Assuming the ban reaches every arrangement you let. § 34-18-59 sits inside chapter 34-18, and § 34-18-8 puts eight arrangements outside that chapter — a transient hotel, motel or other taxed lodging occupancy, a commercial letting, occupancy under a contract of sale, a cooperative proprietary lease, institutional residence incidental to detention or care, a fraternal or social organization’s own member, a resident employee on premises of more than eleven units, and a transitional housing facility. That does not weaken the prohibition on a letting the chapter covers; it means the classification question comes first, and it is a question of fact about your property. The same trap runs the other way: parties to an excluded arrangement can expressly agree to be governed by the chapter, and then the ban applies.
• Relying on guidance written before 2024. The section took effect on 1 January 2024, so older material describes a state with no application-fee rule at all.

No. R.I. Gen. Laws § 34-18-59(a) provides that a landlord, lessor, sub-lessor, real estate broker, property management company, or designee shall not be allowed to require or demand any prospective tenant to pay for a rental application fee.

That is a prohibition rather than a limit, and it is worth being precise about what it closes. There is no compliant version of the charge at a lower figure, no version that becomes lawful because it is disclosed in advance, and no version that survives being moved onto somebody else’s invoice — the six categories of person named in the subsection cover the whole chain from owner to designee. What the section leaves available is not a smaller application fee. It is a different thing entirely: a bounded recovery of what a specific screening document actually cost you.

One boundary belongs on that answer, and it comes before everything else on this page. § 34-18-59 is a section of chapter 34-18, the Residential Landlord and Tenant Act, so it reaches what the chapter reaches and no further. § 34-18-7 applies the chapter to a rental agreement, wherever made, for a dwelling unit located within this state. § 34-18-8, captioned “Exclusions from application of chapter”, then provides that unless the parties expressly agree to be governed by the chapter, eight arrangements are not governed by it: residence at an institution incidental to detention or to medical, geriatric, educational, counseling, religious or similar service; occupancy under a contract of sale by the purchaser or a successor to that interest; occupancy by a member of a fraternal or social organization in the part of a structure run for the organization’s benefit; transient occupancy in a hotel, motel or other lodging subject to the state sales and use tax or a lodgings tax; occupancy by a paid employee whose right to occupy is conditional on employment substantially for services, maintenance or repair of premises of more than eleven units; occupancy by a holder of a proprietary lease in a cooperative; commercial letting and any other estate governed by chapter 18.1; and residence at a transitional housing facility.

Read that as a gate, not as a doubt. Where your letting is one the chapter covers — the ordinary residential tenancy this page is written for — the prohibition in (a) is unqualified and everything below applies to you exactly as stated. Where it is one of the eight, chapter 34-18 does not govern the arrangement at all, and whatever law does is not described here. Which side of that line a particular property falls on is a question of fact about the letting, and it is not one this page can settle for you: a lodging house can be transient occupancy or a tenancy depending on how it is run, and an employee’s unit turns on the size of the premises and the terms of the employment. Answer it for your own property before you rely on anything that follows — and note that the exclusion is defeasible in your favor, because parties to an excluded arrangement may expressly agree to be governed by the chapter.

The actual cost of an official state criminal background check and/or a credit report, and only where the applicant did not supply a qualifying one issued within ninety days of the application.

Subsection (b) preserves your ability to require those checks. Read its opening words carefully, because they are about the requirement rather than the money: nothing in the section prohibits requiring an official state criminal background check from the bureau of criminal identification, the department of attorney general, the state police or the local police department where the prospective tenant resides, or requiring a credit check — subject to three limitations. The limitations are where the money lives, and they are conditional throughout.

So the sequence for a landlord is: decide what screening you require, ask whether the applicant already has it, and only then consider whether a charge arises at all.

Under (b)(1), if a prospective tenant provides a required official state criminal background check or credit report issued within ninety days of the application for a rental unit, no fee for that check or report may be charged.

Three elements have to line up. The document must be one you required — the subsection speaks of a required check, so a report volunteered against a requirement you never had does not engage the limb. It must be the kind of document described, which for the criminal limb means one of the four named official sources. And it must have been issued within ninety days of the application, which is a date on the face of the document rather than the date it reached you.

Where all three line up, the charge is gone. Not reduced, not deferred — no fee may be charged. This is the carve-out working as intended: an applicant whohas already paid once for a recent check should not pay again for the same information at every door they knock on.

One issued by the bureau of criminal identification (BCI), the department of attorney general, the state police, or the local police department where the prospective tenant resides. The section identifies the document by its source, and those four are the sources it names.

This is the definition landlords are most likely to get wrong, and the error runs in the direction of over-compliance. An applicant who arrives with a comprehensive criminal report from a commercial screening vendor has produced something that may be perfectly good for your screening purposes but is not, on the face of the subsection, an official state criminal background check. A landlord who treats it as one concludes the charge is extinguished when it may not be, and absorbs a cost it was entitled to recover.

The credit report limb reads differently and deliberately so. The words “official state” do not attach to it, which is unsurprising given that no state agency issues consumer credit reports. A credit report from a consumer reporting agency, issued within the window, is the natural reading of that limb.

The section does not settle it, and the connectives inside (b)(1) point in different directions. Its antecedent is disjunctive — the applicant “provides a required official state criminal background check or credit report” — but its operative clause is not: “no fee for such official state criminal background check and/or credit report may be charged”.

Work through the severable reading first, because it is the commercially useful one. You require both a criminal check and a credit check. The applicant hands you a credit report issued six weeks ago and nothing else. On that reading the credit report is a qualifying document, so no fee may be charged for a credit report; the criminal check was not supplied, so you may obtain one and charge a fee representing not more than its actual cost. Your invoice covers one document, not two.

Now read the same facts against the “and/or” in the no-fee clause. What that clause extinguishes is a fee for “such… check and/or credit report”, which is at least readable as extinguishing the whole charge once either document is supplied. On that reading the criminal check comes out of your own pocket.

Both readings are available on these words, and this page will not pretend otherwise. Note in particular that no contrast between (b)(1) and (b)(2) supports the severable reading: guidance that draws one has quoted only half of (b)(1), whose own no-fee clause carries the same “and/or” that (b)(2) does. Getting this wrong is expensive in both directions — the severable reading, if it is wrong, has you charging for a document the section forbids charging for. No case law was researched for this page. Where only one document is supplied and the cost matters, charge nothing for either until you have advice.

What obtaining the document actually cost you, and nothing beyond it. The words are “a fee representing not more than the actual cost of obtaining the official state background check and/or credit report”.

That is a pass-through ceiling, and the absent words are as informative as the present ones. There is no allowance for staff time, no processing component, no administrative margin and no rounding. Nor should any be inferred: a section whose first subsection abolishes the application fee is an unpromising place to find an implied permission for an administrative charge under a different name.

What makes such a charge defensible is documentation of the cost itself. The fee schedule of the issuing body, or the invoice from the consumer reporting agency, dated and tied to the individual applicant, is the evidence. A standing figure applied to every applicant cannot show what this applicant’s check cost, and where your vendor pricing changes or varies by product, a standing figure will eventually be wrong in the direction that matters.

Yes, whenever you charge for it. Subsection (b)(2) provides that any prospective tenant who is charged a fee under it for a background check or credit report shall be provided with a copy of the background check or credit report.

Note what the trigger is not. It is not a rejection, so the applicant you approve and the applicant who withdraws both get their copy if they paid. It is not a request, so waiting to be asked is not compliance. And it is not conditioned on the amount. The single question is whether the applicant was charged a fee under the subsection.

The section sets no deadline for delivery, which is a reason to send it promptly and record the date rather than a reason to let it drift. In practice the cleanest process is to deliver the copy with the receipt for the charge, since both documents concern the same transaction and the receipt already needs to exist for your own evidential purposes.

Yes. Subsection (b)(3) provides that nothing in the section shall be construed to prohibit the landlord, lessor, sub-lessor, real estate broker, property management company or designee from obtaining an independent background check or credit report at the landlord’s own expense.

This limb is left out of most summaries of the section and it is the one that protects your screening judgment. The structure it creates is worth stating plainly: a report the applicant supplies controls who pays. It does not control what you may rely on. If a supplied document is stale in your view, or is not the kind the subsection describes, or does not contain the product your process needs, you are free to obtain your own.

The condition is the price of that freedom. At your own expense means exactly that, and it closes the obvious route around (b)(1): a landlord may not respond to a qualifying supplied report by ordering a duplicate and billing the applicant for it. Screening as you see fit, and pay for the screening you chose to duplicate.

The section does not say. As retrieved, § 34-18-59 contains no damages clause, no penalty, no deadline, no named enforcement agency and no record-retention period. It states a prohibition and three limitations and stops.

That silence is worth reporting honestly rather than filling. The general remedial provisions of the residential landlord and tenant chapter were not read for this page, and no case law was researched for it, so any figure or mechanism this page offered you would be imported from somewhere it did not look. What can be said is structural: the section sits inside the Residential Landlord and Tenant Act rather than standing alone, and a prohibition inside a code is not usually a prohibition without consequence. If the consequence matters to a decision you are making, that is a question for a lawyer who has read the chapter’s remedial provisions and the case law, not for a form page.

What follows practically is that the record is the defence. If you can show, per applicant, whether a qualifying document was supplied, what you obtained, what it cost, what you charged and when you delivered the copy, you have answered every question the section itself puts.

Yes, expressly. Subsection (a) names a landlord, lessor, sub-lessor, real estate broker, property management company, and designee. Six categories, one bar.

The drafting anticipates the obvious avoidance route. In markets where an agent handles the letting, an application fee has historically been an agent’s charge as often as an owner’s, and a prohibition aimed only at landlords would have relocated the fee rather than removed it. The inclusion of designee is the catch-all: whoever you appoint to take applications is inside the bar.

For an owner using an agent, this makes the agent’s fee schedule part of your compliance picture. It is worth asking to see it, and worth asking specifically what happens at the point an applicant pays for anything, because a charge collected through a portal at the application step is the shape the prohibition is aimed at.

Alongside, not underneath. The section governs whether and how much you may charge. Federal consumer report law governs the report itself, and it applies whatever the state says about the money.

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 an 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 point of overlap worth using. The state copy duty in (b)(2) is triggered by the charge; the federal notice is triggered by an adverse decision. They are different duties with different triggers that frequently concern the same document, and an applicant who was charged and then rejected is owed both. A landlord whose file shows the copy delivered and the adverse action notice sent, each dated, has covered both ends.

One further practical note. Where an applicant supplies their own credit report under (b)(1), you have not obtained a consumer report about them at all — they have handed you a document. That does not exempt your decision from fair housing law or from your own consistency obligations, but it does mean the federal adverse action machinery keyed to a report you obtained may not be engaged in the same way. If you want the certainty of a report you procured, (b)(3) is the route, at your own expense.

1 January 2024. The history line printed with the section reads: P.L. 2023, ch. 319, § 1, effective January 1, 2024; P.L. 2023, ch. 320, § 1, effective January 1, 2024.

Two parallel public laws enacting the same section with the same commencement date is a normal legislative pattern where companion bills pass in both chambers, and it does not indicate a conflict or a later amendment. Both are named here; neither is presented as having superseded the other.

The date matters for a practical reason. Guidance written before 2024 describes a state with no rental application fee rule at all, and a good deal of such material is still in circulation and still ranks. If a source tells you there is no limit on what may be charged to process an application here, check when it was written before you price anything against it.

One document per applicant that answers the section’s own questions in order: what you required, whether a qualifying document was supplied and when it was issued, what you obtained and from whom, what it cost, what you charged, and when the copy went out.

That is not a statutory form — the section prescribes none, and prescribes no retention period either. It is simply the smallest set of facts that makes a lawful charge look lawful. The supplied-document question is the one to record most carefully, because it is the fact the whole carve-out turns on and it is the fact most likely to be remembered differently by the two parties a year later.

Keep it per applicant rather than per unit. Several applicants for one vacancy can be in different positions under the same section: one supplied a recent credit report, one supplied nothing, one supplied a commercial vendor product that is not an official state check. Each of those generates a different lawful charge, and only a per-applicant record can show it.

The screening the charge pays for is governed by its own rules — what you may consider, how consistently you must apply it, and what a denial requires once a consumer report has driven it. Our guide to Rhode Island tenant screening laws covers that ground.

Money taken at signing is a separate regime again, with its own limits and its own return clock, and the abolition of the application fee says nothing about it. See Rhode Island security deposit laws.

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

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