Free Vermont Rental Application Fee Receipt

The ban is written as a rule about the property, not about the applicant — which is why classification decides it

Read the two halves of subsection (a) as a pair, because the second half is doing as much work as the first. The prohibition reaches an application fee charged “in order to apply to enter into a rental agreement for a residential dwelling unit”. The saving clause preserves a fee charged “in order to apply to rent commercial or nonresidential property”. Neither limb says anything about the applicant. Neither turns on the size of the landlord, the number of units held, the length of the tenancy or whether the applicant is ultimately approved. The operative fact in both is the character of the thing being let. That is unusual, and it is good news for a landlord who keeps clean records, because a fact about a property can be documented once and relied on repeatedly, whereas a fact about an applicant has to be re-established every time. The chapter supplies the definition, and it is a use test rather than a zoning test. § 4451(3) defines a dwelling unit as “a building or the part of a building that is used as a home, residence, or sleeping place by one or more persons who maintain a household”. Three elements are worth separating. It can be a whole building or a part of one, so a single room let within a larger structure is capable of qualifying. The test is used as a home, residence or sleeping place, which is a question about actual use rather than about how the space is described in a planning consent or a listing. And there must be one or more persons who maintain a household. A landlord who reaches for the nonresidential limb because the building is on a commercial street, or because the lease is drawn on a commercial form, is answering a different question from the one the definition asks. The chapter’s exclusions are the second filter, and they come with an anti-avoidance rule attached. § 4452(a) opens with the words “[u]nless created to avoid the application of this chapter” and then lists ten categories of occupancy the chapter does not reach: occupancy at an institution operated to provide medical, geriatric, educational, counseling, religious or similar service; occupancy under a contract of sale by the purchaser; occupancy by a member of a fraternal, social or religious organization in a part of a building operated for that organization’s benefit; transient occupancy in a hotel, motel or lodgings while subject to the rooms tax; occupancy by the owner of a condominium unit or the holder of a proprietary lease in a cooperative; rental of a mobile home lot governed by a different chapter of Vermont law; transient residence in a campground; transient occupancy in a hotel, motel or lodgings while the occupant is a recipient of General Assistance or Emergency Assistance temporary housing assistance, or occupancy in a hotel or motel funded by federal Emergency Rental Assistance administered by the Department for Children and Families through 30 September 2025; occupancy of a dwelling unit without right or permission by a person who is not a tenant; and transient occupancy by an occupant placed in a hotel, motel or lodgings in connection with health care treatment or recovery where the occupancy is paid for by a licensed hospital, a designated agency or a specialized service agency operating under an agreement made under the mental health chapter. The opening words matter as much as the list. An arrangement constructed to fall inside an exclusion is expressly outside it. And the rooms-tax condition does not travel across all three lodging exclusions. This is the part a careful reader of the fourth item gets wrong. Only the fourth — ordinary transient hotel, motel or lodgings occupancy — is conditioned on the occupancy being “subject to a tax levied under 32 V.S.A. chapter 225”. The General Assistance and Emergency Rental Assistance exclusion and the health-care-placement exclusion each end with the words “regardless of whether the occupancy is subject to a tax levied under 32 V.S.A. chapter 225”. So a landlord housing a General Assistance or Emergency Assistance recipient, or an occupant placed by a hospital or a designated agency, cannot reason from the absence of the rooms tax to the conclusion that the chapter reaches the letting. Those two paragraphs put the occupancy outside chapter 137 whether the tax is payable or not. And a practical warning about the agent limb. The prohibition binds “a landlord or a landlord’s agent”. Where a property manager, a leasing platform or a broker collects a processing charge from applicants for your residential unit, that charge is being made by your agent in order to apply for your unit. Owners who have outsourced letting are the group most likely to be exposed here, because the money never appears in their own accounts and the practice is easy not to notice. Ask what your agent charges applicants, in writing, and keep the answer.