Free District of Columbia Rental Application Fee Receipt

The District of Columbia is the jurisdiction most often summarized in a single sentence — there is a fifty-dollar cap on rental application fees — and that sentence, while true, describes perhaps a tenth of what D.C. Code § 42-3505.10 actually requires of a housing provider. The section is called Tenant screening, not Application fees, and the fee cap is one paragraph inside a much larger scheme. The scheme begins with a disclosure duty that is unusual in its breadth and unusual in its timing. Before you request any information or any fee from a prospective tenant as part of tenant screening, you must first notify them — in writing, or by posting in a manner accessible to a prospective tenant — of ten specified matters. Several of those matters are ones a housing provider would not ordinarily volunteer: the specific criteria that will result in automatic denial of the application; the additional criteria that may result in denial; the approximate quantity of units expected to become available over a specified period, by bedroom size and monthly rent, or failing that the number that became available each month in the previous fiscal year; and the number of days after receiving an application within which you will respond with an approval or denial. That is not a receipt and it is not a privacy notice. It is a prospectus about how you let property, and it is owed before the transaction starts. Around it sit the rules everybody does quote — the cap, its annual index adjustment, the bar on any other fee before the lease is signed, the single-fee rule across your own units within thirty days, and the fourteen-day refund where no screening is conducted — plus a set of prohibited screening criteria, an adverse-action notice with its own contents and its own deadline, and a dispute process with a ten-day response duty. One question comes before all of that and is asked almost nowhere: whether the chapter reaches your unit. § 42-3505.10 is a section of chapter 35 of Title 42, and § 42-3502.05(e) provides that the chapter shall not apply to a rental unit operated by a foreign government as a residence for diplomatic personnel, a rental unit in an establishment whose primary purpose is providing diagnostic care and treatment of diseases — hospitals, convalescent homes, nursing homes and personal care homes are the examples given — any dormitory, and, following a determination by the Rent Administrator, qualifying nonprofit long-term temporary family housing. Alongside it, the definition of housing accommodation at § 42-3501.03(14) excludes a hotel or inn with a valid certificate of occupancy and a structure used primarily for transient occupancy, and because “rental unit” is defined by reference to that definition, those sit outside the section too. This page is organised the way the section is, with that gate in front: scope first, then the disclosure, because it is where compliance is won or lost, and the money afterwards.

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: Washington DC Rental Application Fee Receipt explained

▶ Watch overview

The generator above produces a dated record of an application fee taken in the District of Columbia, built around the facts § 42-3505.10 turns on: what was taken, when, whether a screening was conducted, and what was refunded. The District prescribes no form for this, so it 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, the screening company used, the criteria applied, the outcome, and the refund position. What it is not. It is not the subsection (a) disclosure. That document carries ten specified items, has to reach the applicant before you request any information or any fee, and cannot be discharged by a receipt issued afterwards — a receipt is by definition too late. Nor is it the adverse-action notice required by subsection (f), which has its own four contents and its own deadline. What it deliberately omits. It prints no dollar ceiling. The statutory figure is $50, but (b)(2) allows the housing provider to adjust it annually in line with an increase in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, and no adjusted number is published for you — so a figure hard-coded into a form would be a figure a housing provider relied on. Enter the amount you actually charged and keep your index working alongside it. And one thing it assumes. It is written for a unit chapter 35 governs; § 42-3502.05(e) excludes four kinds of unit from that chapter and § 42-3501.03(14) puts hotels, inns and primarily-transient structures outside “rental unit” altogether, and the record does not ask which yours is because that is a question of fact about the building rather than a field. Nothing is stored and there is no charge. Fields left blank print as a dash.

• That the unit is one chapter 35 governs. § 42-3505.10 is a section of that chapter; § 42-3502.05(e) takes diplomatic residences, units in establishments whose primary purpose is diagnostic care and treatment of diseases, any dormitory, and Rent Administrator-determined nonprofit long-term temporary family housing outside it, and § 42-3501.03(14) puts hotels, inns and primarily-transient structures outside ‘housing accommodation’ and so outside ‘rental unit’.
• That the ten-item disclosure existed and was delivered or posted first. Keep the dated version of the document or page, because the duty is about what the applicant could see before they engaged with you.
• Your published automatic-denial criteria, and the additional ones. Items (3) and (4), and the fact that neither includes a ground prohibited by subsection (d).
• The consumer reporting agency you named. Item (5) requires its name and contact information, plus the statement about a free copy on denial or other adverse action.
• Your availability figures. Item (6), either the forward view by bedroom size and monthly rent or the prior fiscal year’s monthly counts.
• The response time you published. Item (7), which is also the deadline subsection (f) imposes on your adverse-action notice.
• The fee charged, and the index arithmetic if it exceeds fifty dollars. (b)(1) and (b)(2): the adjustment is yours to make and yours to justify.
• That no other fee was taken before the lease was signed. (b)(3), and (b)(5) for holding deposits where a government-funded voucher is in use.
• Whether this applicant applied to any of your other District units in the previous thirty days. (b-1), and, if a second fee was charged, why a second screening was required.
• Whether a screening was in fact conducted. The trigger for the refund duty in subsection (c) is a failure to conduct one, for any reason.
• The refund, its amount, date and method, inside fourteen days. The subsection sets a reasonable time not to exceed 14 days.
• Your adverse-action notice and its four contents. Subsection (f), issued by the response date you published.
• Your written response to any dispute, within ten days. Subsection (g)(2).
• Any requirement of the Municipal Regulations you are also meeting. Titles 12 and 14 are referenced by (b-2) and were not read for this page.

• Assuming the chapter reaches every unit you let. § 42-3505.10 sits inside chapter 35, and § 42-3502.05(e) provides that the chapter shall not apply to a diplomatic residence, a unit in an establishment whose primary purpose is diagnostic care and treatment of diseases, any dormitory, or Rent Administrator-determined nonprofit long-term temporary family housing — while § 42-3501.03(14) excludes a hotel or inn with a valid certificate of occupancy and a primarily-transient structure from ‘housing accommodation’, and therefore from ‘rental unit’. That does not weaken the duties on a unit the chapter covers; it means the classification question comes first, and item (4) of the list turns on a determination by the Rent Administrator rather than on your own assessment.
• Treating the disclosure as a fee notice. It is engaged by requesting information, so handing out an application form without having disclosed first is already too late, whatever happens to the money afterwards.
• Disclosing some of the ten items. The subsection lists ten and the ones providers skip are predictable: the automatic-denial criteria, the availability figures and the stated response time. Partial compliance on a ten-item list is non-compliance.
• Publishing automatic-denial criteria that subsection (d) forbids. An eviction filing more than three years old, or one that produced no judgment for possession, cannot be a ground — and writing it into your disclosure documents the breach.
• Publishing an optimistic response time. Item (7) sets the deadline for your own adverse-action notice under subsection (f). A short published period is a short notice window for every rejection you make.
• Charging above fifty dollars without the arithmetic. (b)(2) permits an annual adjustment by the housing provider in line with an increase in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, but nobody publishes the resulting figure for you. Without the index working, the number you are charging is unexplained.
• Adding an administration or processing charge at application stage. (b)(3) bars any fee other than the application fee prior to signing a lease. Renaming it does not move it outside the paragraph.
• Requiring a holding deposit from a voucher holder. (b)(5) prohibits it outright where the prospective tenant is using a government-funded housing voucher.
• Charging a second fee for a second building. (b-1) allows one fee where the applicant applies to further units you own or operate within 30 calendar days, unless a further screening is required. Choosing to run one is not the same as being required to.
• Reading subsection (c) as a general unused-portion refund. The express duty is triggered by a failure to conduct a screening, and runs to the fee, within a reasonable time not exceeding 14 days. The unused-portion language sits at item (a)(9), as something you must tell the applicant about.
• Charging tenants for services you are required to provide. (b-2) bars fees before move-in, during the tenancy or after move-out for services required to maintain the accommodation consistent with the implied warranty of habitability and the Municipal Regulations, including third-party billing administration charges.
• Sending an adverse-action notice with the grounds but nothing else. Subsection (f) requires four things, including a free copy or summary of the third-party information relied on and a statement of dispute and complaint rights.
• Ignoring a disputing applicant. Subsection (g)(2) requires a written response — by mail, electronic mail or in person — within 10 days of receiving the information.

Ten specified items, in writing or by posting in a manner accessible to a prospective tenant, and the duty arises before requesting any information or fees from that prospective tenant as part of tenant screening. That is the opening line of § 42-3505.10(a), and it is the most important sentence on this page.

One boundary belongs on that answer, and it comes before everything else here. § 42-3505.10 is a section of chapter 35 of Title 42, so it reaches what the chapter reaches and no further. § 42-3502.05, captioned “Registration and coverage”, provides at subsection (e) that “[t]his chapter shall not apply to the following units”: any rental unit operated by a foreign government as a residence for diplomatic personnel; any rental unit in an establishment which has as its primary purpose providing diagnostic care and treatment of diseases, including but not limited to hospitals, convalescent homes, nursing homes and personal care homes; any dormitory; and, following a determination by the Rent Administrator, any rental unit or housing accommodation intended for use as long-term temporary housing by families with one or more members, where the families had incomes at or below 50% of the District median income for families of that size at initial occupancy, the housing provider is a nonprofit charitable organization operating it on a strictly not-for-profit basis, and the provider offers a comprehensive social services program to resident families.

A second exclusion runs through the definitions rather than through that list, and it catches the lodging cases. § 42-3501.03(14) defines a housing accommodation as any structure or building in the District containing one or more rental units and the land appurtenant thereto, and then provides that the term “does not include any hotel or inn with a valid certificate of occupancy or any structure, including any room in the structure, used primarily for transient occupancy and in which at least 60% of the rooms devoted to living quarters for tenants or guests were used for transient occupancy as of May 20, 1980”. It adds that for the purposes of the chapter a rental unit is deemed used for transient occupancy only where the landlord of the unit is subject to and pays the sales tax imposed by § 47-2001(n)(1)(C). Because § 42-3501.03(33) defines a rental unit as any part of a housing accommodation as defined in paragraph (14) of this section, a hotel, an inn or a primarily-transient structure is not a rental unit for this chapter at all, and the tenant-screening section does not operate on it.

Read both of those as a gate, not as a doubt. Where the unit is one the chapter covers — the ordinary residential letting this page is written for — every duty set out below binds exactly as stated. Where it is one of the excluded categories, the chapter does not reach the unit and whatever law does is not described here. Two of the exclusions repay a second look before you rely on them: the diagnostic-care limb turns on the establishment’s primary purpose rather than on a licence category, and the long-term-temporary-housing limb operates only following a determination by the Rent Administrator, so it is not a status a housing provider assigns to itself. Which side of the line a particular building falls on is a question of fact about the property, and it is not one this page can settle for you.

The list is: (1) the amount and purpose of each fee or deposit, mandatory or voluntary, that may be charged to a tenant or prospective tenant, and whether it is refundable; (2) the types of information that will be accessed to conduct a tenant screening; (3) the specific criteria that will result in automatic denial of the application; (4) any additional criteria that may result in denial; (5) if a credit or consumer report is used, the name and contact information of the credit or consumer reporting agency, and a statement of the applicant’s rights to obtain a free copy of the report in the event of a denial or other adverse action; (6) the approximate quantity of rental units that will be available for rent over a specified period, by bedroom size and monthly rent, or if that information is not available, the number that became available each calendar month in the provider’s prior fiscal year; (7) the number of days after receipt of an application within which the provider will respond with an approval or denial decision; (8) the applicant’s right to dispute any information relied upon that is inaccurately or incorrectly attributed to them or is based on prohibited criteria, and the right to receive a response about anything disputed; (9) the applicant’s right to a refund for any unused application fee; and (10) the applicant’s right to file a complaint with the Office of Human Rights or to pursue civil action in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.

Read that list as an operational document rather than a legal one and its character becomes clear. Four of the ten — the fee schedule, the information types, the reporting agency and the dispute rights — are drafting. Three — the automatic-denial criteria, the additional criteria and the availability figures — require you to know something about your own business that most providers have never written down. One, the response time, quietly sets a deadline you will be held to later.

Before you request any information from the prospective tenant, or any fee. Not before you screen; not before you charge. The earliest of those events is almost always the application form, because asking for an employer, a previous address or a reference is requesting information as part of tenant screening.

That timing is what makes the alternative delivery method matter. The subsection permits notification in writing, or by posting in a manner accessible to a prospective tenant. A housing provider who advertises publicly cannot realistically serve a personalised written notice on everyone who might apply, and does not have to. The workable pattern is a single page carrying all ten items, kept current, reachable from every advertisement and from the application form itself, so that the disclosure is available at or before the first moment any information is asked for.

Two practical consequences follow. First, a receipt cannot cure this: a document issued when the fee is paid is issued after the information was requested, and the duty was owed earlier. Second, because the disclosure is posted rather than served, the record you want to keep is a dated version of the page or document as it stood, so you can show what a prospective tenant would have seen at the time.

By drafting them and then testing each one against subsection (d), which lists grounds a housing provider may not inquire about, require the applicant to disclose, or base an adverse action on.

Subsection (d) covers two families. The first is prior possession actions: whether a previous action to recover possession from the applicant occurred, where the action either did not result in a judgment for possession in favor of the housing provider, or was filed three or more years ago. The second is allegations of a breach of lease, where the alleged breach stemmed from an incident that the applicant demonstrates may constitute a defence to a possession action under § 42-3505.01(c-1) or a federal law relating to domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault or stalking — including records of civil or criminal protection orders the applicant sought or obtained, or of criminal matters in which the applicant is a witness; or from an incident in which the applicant was the victim of a crime in the unit; or is related to the applicant’s or a household member’s disability; or took place three or more years ago.

Put those next to a typical published screening standard and the friction is obvious. “No prior eviction filings” is not a criterion this section permits, because it sweeps in filings that produced no judgment and filings more than three years old. A criterion phrased around judgments for possession within the last three years is a different proposition. The point of writing item (3) is precisely that it forces this distinction into the open.

Subsection (e) adds a related constraint on how a report is used: a housing provider shall not base an adverse action solely on a credit score or the lack of one, although information within the credit or consumer report that is directly relevant to fitness as a tenant may be relied on. And it supplies a safe harbour: it is not a violation to receive a report containing information that may not be used under subsection (d), provided the provider did not specifically request or inquire about that information and can demonstrate that no adverse action was based on it. That proviso is evidential, so the practice it rewards is documenting the grounds you did rely on.

§ 42-3505.10(b)(1) provides that a housing provider may require a prospective tenant to pay an application fee, and that such a fee will be no more than $50.

§ 42-3505.10(b)(2) then adds that, beginning on 1 January 2024, that fee may be adjusted annually by the housing provider, or his or her agent, commensurate with an increase in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers published by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Notice who does the adjusting. The paragraph does not direct an agency to publish a current maximum; it permits the housing provider to make the adjustment. There is therefore no official figure to look up, and a provider charging above the statutory fifty dollars is asserting an arithmetic that it, and not the District, has performed. That has an obv