Free West Virginia Rental Application Fee Receipt

West Virginia is the odd row in any table of state application-fee rules, and the reason it gets reported badly is that it does not belong in the table at all. There is no cap. There is no ban. There is no actual-cost limit, no receipt duty, no refund duty, no criteria-disclosure duty and no deadline of any kind. A summary that records West Virginia as ‘no rule’ is closer to right than one that records a figure — but it still misses the thing that actually matters to a landlord, because West Virginia does say something about application fees, and what it says has teeth of a peculiar kind. Before the definitions, one sentence settles what they are definitions for. § 37-6A-6 is the article’s own application provision, and subsection (a) says the article’s provisions apply to all residential rental premises or units used for dwelling purposes. There is no exclusions section in article 6A and no list of arrangements carved out of it; the reach is stated inclusively. But it is stated, and it is where the rest of this page begins: the definitional condition below is a condition that operates on a residential dwelling letting. A commercial letting is not premises used for dwelling purposes, and nothing in article 6A speaks to it. The only other limit in the section is about time rather than category — subsection (b) says the article does not apply to agreements for the payment of security deposits entered into before it took effect. § 37-6A-1 is then the definitions section of that same residential rental security deposit article. Definition (2) tells you what an application fee is, in words wide enough to catch almost any money taken at the front of a tenancy: any deposit of money, however denominated, paid to a landlord or their agent for the purpose of being considered as a tenant for a dwelling unit. Definition (14) then tells you what a security deposit is, and lists three things it does not include — rent, a pet fee, and an application fee — with a proviso attached to the last two: provided that the parties expressly agree, in writing, that the pet fee or application fee is nonrefundable. That proviso is the whole of West Virginia’s application-fee law, and it is a drafting condition rather than a fee regulation. It does not tell you what to charge, when to charge it, what to do with it or what to give the applicant. It tells you that whether the money you have just taken sits inside or outside an entire statutory regime depends on a sentence in your own paperwork. That makes it more useful to a landlord than a cap would be, and easier to get wrong, because most application forms do not contain the sentence at all. This page is built around that consequence. It sets out both definitions from the retrieved text, explains what ‘expressly agree, in writing’ asks of your documents, walks through what article 6A would require of the money if the exclusion did not apply, and then — this part matters — sets out honestly why that last question is genuinely contested rather than settled. Two readings of the same definitions both sit on the face of the text, no West Virginia provision resolves them, and no case law was located. A page that resolved it for you would be inventing certainty, so this one does not.

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: West Virginia Rental Application Fee Receipt explained

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The generator above produces a dated record of a West Virginia application fee: the parties and the unit, the amount received with its date and method, the screening company used, the criteria applied, the outcome, and a note of the nonrefundability agreement the fee was taken under. West Virginia prescribes no form for any of this — there is no receipt duty in the code at all — so what it produces is your own record and is not captioned as a statutory form. What it is not. It is not the writing the proviso in § 37-6A-1(14) describes. That has to be an express agreement between the parties, in writing, that the application fee is nonrefundable, and it belongs in the document the applicant signs when they apply. A receipt records that a fee was paid; it is not the agreement, and it cannot become one by being handed over afterwards. Deliberately, it prints no permitted-fee figure and no cap, because West Virginia sets neither, and it prints no refund promise and no penalty language, because the code imposes no refund duty on an application fee and this page does not assert a consequence the statute leaves contested. Nothing is stored and there is no charge. Fields left blank print as a dash.

• A written agreement that the application fee is nonrefundable. This is the fact § 37-6A-1(14) turns on, and it is the only one the code makes decisive.
• That the agreement was express, and was an agreement. Signed or affirmatively accepted by the applicant, not merely stated by you.
• That it used the word nonrefundable, about the application fee. Not about a bundle of charges, and not merely that the fee was due.
• The version of the wording this applicant accepted. If you revise the form, keep the superseded versions; the question later is what this applicant agreed to.
• The amount, date and method of the payment. Ordinary record-keeping, but it is what ties the agreement to the money.
• That the application fee was taken separately from any deposit or prepaid rent. Separate items, separately documented, are far easier to classify.
• What the fee was used for, if you want the option of explaining it. Not required by the code — there is no actual-cost limit — but useful if the classification of the money is ever argued.
• Your screening file for the applicant. Who was used, what was ordered, what came back and what was decided.
• Your federal adverse-action record where a consumer report drove a denial. That duty is independent of article 6A and was not researched from primary sources for this page.
• Any municipal requirement you are also meeting. Local ordinances were not researched for this page.

• Concluding West Virginia has no application-fee law at all. It has no cap and no ban, which is not the same thing. § 37-6A-1 defines the fee and conditions its exclusion from the deposit regime on a writing.
• Relying on the fee simply being called an application fee. The definition catches any deposit of money “however denominated” paid to be considered as a tenant, so the label neither saves you nor exempts you.
• Treating a policy statement as an agreement. The proviso needs the parties to expressly agree. A notice on your website, in a listing or on a wall is a statement, not an agreement between two parties.
• Relying on a verbal assurance at the showing. Express agreement in writing is the requirement, and an oral understanding satisfies none of the three words.
• Putting the nonrefundability clause only in the lease. The lease is signed after the fee was taken, and only by the applicant who succeeded. The clause belongs on the application.
• Writing round the word. “The fee covers our screening costs” and “the fee is due with your application” are not the agreement the proviso describes. It has to be that the fee is nonrefundable.
• Bundling the application fee with a deposit or first month’s rent in one payment. Article 6A draws lines between categories of money; a single undivided payment invites the argument that the lines were never drawn.
• Assuming the deposit rules could never apply because no tenancy started. That is one of the two readings, and it is a real one — but it is contested, and it is not a position to build a process on when a signed sentence removes the question.
• Assuming the deposit rules certainly do apply and refunding on that basis. The opposite error. Nothing in the code says an application fee must be returned, and this page asserts no refund duty.
• Trusting a zero-result search on the state code site. That site’s full-text search returns false nulls, and a nil return there is not evidence that a provision does not exist.
• Waiving article 6A rights in the rental agreement as a precaution. § 37-6A-4 makes such a provision unenforceable and exposes a landlord who sues to enforce it to the tenant’s actual damages and reasonable attorney’s fees.

No. West Virginia sets no maximum application fee, no ban, no actual-cost limit, no receipt duty and no refund duty. Nothing in chapter 37 articles 6 and 6A regulates what a landlord may charge to consider an application.

That is a genuine negative finding rather than an absence of research, and it is worth saying how it was reached, because West Virginia is a state where a careless search produces a false answer in either direction. The finding rests on fetching and reading all thirty-seven sections of chapter  37 articles 6 and 6A and looking through them for the fee vocabulary — application fee, screening, credit check, credit report, background check, nonrefundable, prospective tenant. The only occurrences anywhere in those thirty-seven sections are inside § 37-6A-1. Article  6 has no fee section at all.

It also rests on not trusting the obvious tool. The Legislature’s code site has a full-text search, and that search returns false nulls: a query for a phrase that demonstrably appears in article 6A can come back reporting zero results. A nil return from that box is not evidence that a provision does not exist, and nothing on this page was concluded from one.

Other states regulate application fees in ways West Virginia does not, and none of those rules applies to a West Virginia tenancy — no Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky or Maryland provision is imported into § 37-6A-1, and this page describes none of them.

It defines the fee, and then makes one condition decide whether the money sits inside or outside the security-deposit regime. Both halves live in the definitions section of article 6A.

Before either half, read the article’s own application provision, because it is the ground the rest of this stands on. § 37-6A-6 is captioned “Application and effective date of this article”, and subsection (a) reads in full: “The provisions of this article shall apply to all residential rental premises or units used for dwelling purposes.” That is drafted inclusively. Article 6A has no exclusions section, and no arrangement anywhere in it is named as carved out — so unlike some states there is no list to work through, and on an ordinary residential letting the article simply applies. The only other limb is subsection (b), and it limits by time rather than by category: the article does not apply to agreements for the payment of security deposits entered into before its effective date.

It still matters that the sentence is there, because West Virginia’s rule is a definitional condition and a condition has to have somewhere to operate. The proviso in § 37-6A-1(14) does its work inside article 6A, and article 6A reaches residential rental premises and units used for dwelling purposes. Premises let for something other than dwelling purposes are not within it, and nothing on this page describes what governs those — a commercial letting is simply outside the article that this entire question lives in. That is a scope statement, not a qualification of the rule: on a residential dwelling letting, everything below applies as written.

§ 37-6A-1(2) provides that “application fee” means “any deposit of money, however denominated, which is paid by a tenant to a landlord, lessor or agent of a landlord for the purpose of being considered as a tenant for a dwelling unit”. The phrase to notice is however denominated. The definition is drawn around the purpose of the payment, not around what the payment is called, so a processing charge, an administration fee, a screening charge or a reservation sum paid so that someone may be considered for a unit is an application fee for the purposes of this article.

§ 37-6A-1(14) defines the security deposit and then excludes three things from it: “(A) Rent; (B) a pet fee; or (C) application fee: Provided, That the parties expressly agree, in writing, that a pet fee or application fee is nonrefundable.”

Read that carefully, because the structure is the point. Rent is excluded without condition. The pet fee and the application fee are excluded subject to a proviso, and the proviso asks for something quite specific: an express written agreement, between the parties, that the fee is nonrefundable. That is the entire operative content of West Virginia’s application-fee law. It is a drafting condition, not a fee regulation — and unlike a cap, it is something you can satisfy completely, in advance, with one sentence.

Three separate things, and most application packs fail at least one of them.

Agreement. The proviso speaks of what “the parties” agree. A statement by you alone is not an agreement between two parties, however prominently it is displayed. A policy on your website, a line in a listing, a sign in the office and a paragraph in an information sheet the applicant never signs are all announcements. Turning an announcement into an agreement takes an affirmative acceptance — a signature, an initialled line, or an equivalent recorded acceptance in an online flow.

Express. This is the opposite of implied. It cannot be inferred from the fact that you have never refunded a fee, from industry practice, from the applicant having paid without objecting, or from the general tenor of the paperwork. The agreement has to say the thing.

In writing. An oral assurance at a showing, however clearly given and however honestly remembered, is not a writing. Nor is a phone call you noted afterwards. The document the applicant signs is the natural home for this, which is why the application form — not the lease — is where the sentence belongs.

And there is a fourth point that is really about content rather than form: the thing agreed must be that the fee is nonrefundable. A form that states the fee amount, or that the fee is payable on submission, or that the fee covers the cost of screening, has recorded something else. Use the statute’s word.

The honest answer is that the exclusion in § 37-6A-1(14) does not operate on its own terms, and what follows from that is genuinely contested. This page sets out both readings and does not pick between them, because nothing in the article resolves the question and no case law was located.

The reading that puts the fee inside the deposit regime. The drafter listed the application fee as something a security deposit “does not include”, and then attached a condition to that exclusion. On the ordinary reading of a proviso, an application fee that does not meet the condition is not excluded — and if it is not excluded, it is a security deposit within the article’s meaning. That would carry the money into § 37-6A-2, which requires a deposit minus deductions to be delivered to the tenant on termination and within the notice period, “together with a written itemization” of the deductions; into § 37-6A-3, which requires itemized deduction records for one year after the tenancy ends and examination or a copy within seventy-two hours of a written request; and into § 37-6A-5(a), which where the noncompliance “is willful or not in good faith” entitles the tenant to judgment for any unreturned security deposit plus damages “for annoyance or inconvenience resulting from the landlord’s nonconformance equal to one and a half times the amount wrongfully withheld, unless the tenant owes rent to the landlord, in which case, the court shall order an amount equal to any amount awarded to the tenant pursuant to this subsection to be credited against any rent due to the landlord”. Read the whole of that paragraph before sizing the risk: the damages are characterised as compensation for annoyance or inconvenience, and where the tenant owes rent the award is credited against the rent rather than paid over.

The reading that keeps it outside. The same definition says a security deposit is “any refundable deposit of money that is furnished by a tenant to a landlord to secure the performance of the terms and conditions of a rental agreement, or as security for damages to the leased premises”. An application fee is not obviously either of those things: it is not furnished to secure performance of a rental agreement that may never exist, and it is not security for damage to premises the applicant may never occupy. On that reading the exclusion in (C) is belt-and-braces drafting rather than the only thing keeping the fee out, and a fee without the writing simply falls outside the definition anyway. Two further textual points push the same way. Definition (2) describes the fee as paid “by a tenant”, while definition (16) defines a tenant as “a person entitled under a rental agreement to occupy a dwelling unit to the exclusion of others and shall include a roomer” — which an unsuccessful applicant never becomes. And § 37-6A-2’s duty runs from “termination of the tenancy”, with a notice period measured from that termination or from occupation by a subsequent tenant, neither of which ever happens where no tenancy began.

What a landlord should take from an unresolved question. Not a prediction, but a decision about exposure. One reading exposes an application fee to a return duty, an itemization duty, a records duty and a remedy of one and a half times the amount wrongfully withheld — subject to § 37-6A-5(a)(2)’s own proviso, which credits any award against rent the tenant owes, so the exposure is smaller where rent is outstanding and undiminished where it is not. The other reading does not. Nothing in the code tells you which applies, and the cost of removing the question altogether is a single sentence on your application form. That is the whole practical case for getting the writing right, and it does not depend on which reading is correct.

On the application form, above the applicant’s signature, as its own line. There are three reasons that placement is better than any of the alternatives landlords reach for.

The lease comes too late and reaches too few people. The lease is signed after the fee was taken, and only by the applicant who was approved. Every applicant who paid a fee and was declined — the entire population for whom the question of refundability actually arises — never signs it.

A website or listing is not signed at all. It can carry the wording, but it cannot carry the agreement, and the proviso asks for an agreement.

A receipt is issued after the money. A receipt is a useful record and this page provides one, but a document handed over once the fee has been paid is evidence of the payment rather than of a prior agreement about its character.

If you take applications online, the same three requirements apply and the mechanics need a little more care: the wording has to be presented, the acceptance has to be affirmative and recorded, and you have to be able to reproduce later both the fact of acceptance and the exact wording that was accepted on that date. Version your form and keep the superseded versions.

An applicant is declined and asks for the fee back. If your application form carried an express written agreement that the fee is nonrefundable and the applicant signed it, the exclusion in § 37-6A-1(14) is on its terms satisfied and there is no code provision requiring a refund. If it did not, you are in the contested territory described above, and the sensible response is to decide the matter commercially rather than to assert a legal position the code does not clearly give you.

The applicant paid one sum covering the fee and a holding amount. This is the avoidable version of the same problem. A single undivided payment makes it harder to say which category each part of the money belongs to, and the definitions in article 6A are drawn around categories. Take the application fee on its own, receipt it on its own, and take anything else as a separate transaction with its own paperwork.

Your form says the fee “covers the cost of screening”. That is a description of what the money is for, not an agreement that it is nonrefundable, and West Virginia imposes no actual-cost limit that would make the description necessary. It is a common piece of wording that does none of the work the proviso asks for. Add the word, or replace the sentence.

A page that only lists duties invites a landlord to guess at the rest, so here is the negative side of the ledger, each item established by having read all six sections of article 6A and the thirty-one sections of article 6.

No cap and no actual-cost limit. Nothing ties the fee to what screening cost you, and no figure appears anywhere.

No receipt duty. The code does not require you to give the applicant a receipt or any other document at the point of payment, and prescribes no form for one.

No refund duty. No provision requires an application fee to be returned in whole or in part, whether the applicant is approved, declined or withdraws.

No criteria-disclosure duty. Nothing requires you to publish your screening standards or to tell an applicant which categories of information you consider.

No frequency limit. Nothing restricts charging the same applicant more than once, or charging separately for separate units.

No deadline of any kind attaches to the fee itself. The time limits in the article — the sixty-day and forty-five-day notice period in § 37-6A-1(7), the seventy-two hours for records in § 37-6A-3 — belong to the deposit machinery, and whether they ever reach an application fee is the contested question this page has already declined to resolve.

And two limits of the research itself. No case law and no Attorney General opinion were researched, so nothing here reflects how a West Virginia court has read these definitions. No municipal ordinance was examined, and nothing outside chapter 37 articles  6 and 6A was read.

Everything above is state law about how money is classified. Federal law governs the screening the fee pays for, it was not researched from primary sources for this page, and what follows is general orientation to be checked before it is relied on rather than a statement of verified law.

In broad terms, when a landlord obtains a consumer report on an applicant and then denies the application, charges more, or imposes different terms because of what the report said, federal fair-credit-reporting law requires an adverse-action notice identifying the agency that supplied the report, stating that the agency did not make the decision, and telling the applicant they may obtain a copy of the report and dispute its contents. That obligation exists whatever the state code says about classifying the fee, and it is the duty most often missed by landlords in states whose own law is as light as this one — precisely because the absence of state rules can be mistaken for an absence of rules.

Federal fair-housing law applies to the screening decision itself, prohibiting discrimination on protected grounds in the terms, conditions and availability of housing; it was not researched from primary sources here either. The practical point for a fee page is that a consistent, written screening standard applied the same way to every applicant is what makes a process defensible, and that is worth having even in a state that does not require you to publish one.

Because the fee is defined inside the security-deposit article, the two subjects are closer here than in most states, and the deposit rules are worth understanding on their own terms rather than only as a consequence to be avoided. See West Virginia security deposit laws for the money taken at signing, its return, and the itemization that goes with it.

What you may lawfully consider in the screening the fee pays for, and what a denial requires once a consumer report has driven it, are separate questions from how the money is classified. Our guide to West Virginia tenant screening laws covers that ground, including the federal rules that apply whatever the state code says.

For the wider framework of the tenancy — the rental agreement, notice, entry and the obligations that follow occupancy — see West Virginia landlord-tenant laws.

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