Free Wisconsin Rental Application Fee Receipt

Wisconsin is a state where the popular one-line summary is accurate and still leads landlords into trouble, because what it leaves out is larger than what it says. The summary is that Wisconsin has no cap on rental application fees. That is true of § 704.085, which is not a fee-cap section at all — it is captioned “Credit and background checks” and it does two narrow things. It lets a landlord require a prospective tenant to pay the landlord’s actual cost, up to twenty-five dollars, to obtain a nationwide consumer credit report; and it lets a landlord require a prospective tenant who is not a resident of this state to pay the landlord’s actual cost, up to twenty-five dollars, to obtain a background check. Both are cost recoveries rather than fees, both are additional to each other rather than alternatives, and both carry two procedural duties that almost no published summary mentions: notify the applicant of the charge before you request the report, and give the applicant a copy of the report. Then comes the part that changes how a Wisconsin intake process has to be designed. The residential rental practices rule, ch. ATCP 134, defines an earnest money deposit as the total of any payments or deposits, however denominated or described, given by a prospective tenant to a landlord in return for the option of entering into a rental agreement in the future or for having a rental agreement considered by a landlord — and it excludes only a compliant credit check fee from that definition. Any other money you take from an applicant therefore is an earnest money deposit, and an earnest money deposit is refundable in full on a next-business-day clock. That half of the answer has a gate on it, and it is worth checking before anything else: ATCP 134.01 applies the chapter to the rental of dwelling units located in this state but excludes seven categories of letting, among them a unit owned and operated by government, a unit rented only by tourist or transient occupants, a unit provided to an employee who operates or maintains the premises, and a unit occupied by a tenant engaged in commercial agricultural operations. § 704.085 carries no such exclusions, so the two cost recoveries and the earnest-money rules do not necessarily reach the same lettings. The absence of a cap is real. It is just not the freedom it looks like, because what is uncapped is a deposit you have to give back, not a fee you get to keep.

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: Wisconsin Rental Application Fee Receipt explained

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The generator above produces a dated record of the money taken from an applicant. Wisconsin prescribes no form, so this 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 payment method, what the money was for, the screening company used, the criteria applied, the outcome and the refund position. It is doing real work here rather than being a courtesy. ATCP 134.03(2)(a) requires a written receipt immediately upon accepting an earnest money or security deposit, stating the nature of the deposit and its amount, and “the nature of the deposit” is exactly the thing landlords are vaguest about. Three things it does not do. It does not split your credit-report recovery from your out-of-state background-check recovery into separate lines, so record that split in the detail field, because the two ceilings are separate and a blended figure cannot show either was respected. It does not print the statutory amounts, because a number fixed into a form is a number that goes stale in it. And it is not the pre-order notice of the charge that § 704.085 requires, which has to reach the applicant before you request the report and cannot be cured by a receipt issued afterwards. Nothing is stored and there is no charge. Fields left blank print as a dash.

• That you identified the dwelling unit to the applicant before taking any deposit. ATCP 134.05(1) makes that a precondition of accepting the money.
• That the charge was notified before the report was ordered. Both § 704.085(1)(a) and (2) put the notice ahead of the request.
• Your actual cost for each report, per application. The recovery is the cost, capped at twenty-five dollars; a monthly vendor statement cannot evidence a single applicant’s file.
• That the credit report came from a nationwide consumer credit reporting agency. The subsection describes an agency that compiles and maintains files on consumers on a nationwide basis.
• Whether the applicant supplied a qualifying report before you requested one. Less than thirty days old, nationwide agency, and supplied first — all three, or the bar in (1)(b) does not operate.
• The applicant’s residency, where you charged the background-check amount. § 704.085(2) reaches only a prospective tenant who is not a resident of this state.
• That a copy of each report you charged for was provided. The duty attaches to the report and not to the outcome.
• The written receipt you gave immediately on accepting earnest money. ATCP 134.03(2)(a): the nature of the deposit and its amount.
• Which refund trigger occurred, and on what date. Rejection or refusal, withdrawal before acceptance, or a failure to approve by the end of the third business day.
• Any withholding, and the actual costs and damages behind it. Available only where an approved applicant failed to enter the rental agreement, and not where you significantly altered previously disclosed terms.

• Charging a flat twenty-five dollars. The recovery is your actual cost up to twenty-five dollars. On a twelve dollar report, twelve dollars is the permitted charge.
• Reading “no cap” as a licence to charge a nonrefundable application fee. Money taken for having an application considered is an earnest money deposit under ATCP 134.02(3), however it is denominated, and it is refundable in full — on any letting ch. ATCP 134 reaches. ATCP 134.01 excludes seven categories from the chapter — government-owned and operated units, tourist or transient lettings, employee-occupied units and agricultural tenancies among them — and applying the earnest-money rules to one of those is the mirror-image error.
• Renaming the charge. The definition says “however denominated or described”. An administration fee, a processing fee and a holding charge are the same thing to the rule.
• Treating twenty-five dollars as one combined ceiling. The credit-report recovery and the out-of-state background-check recovery are separate, each with its own actual-cost ceiling.
• Charging the background-check amount to a resident applicant. § 704.085(2) reaches only a prospective tenant who is not a resident of this state.
• Disclosing the charge on the receipt. The notice runs before the report is requested; a disclosure that arrives with the money has arrived after the moment the subsection describes.
• Not giving the applicant a copy of the report. Required by both subsections, for approved and rejected applicants alike.
• Accepting the applicant’s own report after you have ordered yours and then waiving the charge, or refusing it before and charging anyway. The bar in (1)(b) operates only where the report is supplied first, is less than thirty days old and comes from a nationwide agency.
• Missing the next-business-day refund clock. The full earnest money deposit goes back by the end of the next business day after rejection, after a withdrawal before acceptance, or after you fail to approve by the end of the third business day.
• Withholding from an earnest money deposit because an applicant simply changed their mind. The withholding case is an approved applicant failing to enter the rental agreement, limited to actual costs and damages, and unavailable where you significantly altered the terms previously disclosed.

Your actual cost, up to twenty-five dollars, for a nationwide consumer credit report; and, where the applicant is not a resident of this state, your actual cost up to a further twenty-five dollars for a background check. Those are the two charges § 704.085 permits, and they are reimbursements rather than fees.

Subsection (1)(a) is the credit-report limb. It lets a landlord require a prospective tenant to pay “the landlord’s actual cost, up to $25, to obtain a consumer credit report on the prospective tenant from a consumer credit reporting agency that compiles and maintains files on consumers on a nationwide basis”. Subsection (2) is the background-check limb, and it is narrower on one axis and wider on another: it applies only to “a prospective tenant who is not a resident of this state”, and it is an amount in addition to whatever the credit report recovery came to.

The section is captioned “Credit and background checks”, which is the clearest signal of its scope. It is not an application-fee section. It does not say what a Wisconsin landlord may charge to process an application, and reading it as though it did is the source of most of the confusion about this state.

No. It is a ceiling on a reimbursement. The recoverable amount is the landlord’s actual cost of obtaining the report, and the twenty-five dollars is the point past which that cost stops being recoverable from the applicant.

The arithmetic runs in both directions and both directions cost somebody money. A report that cost you eleven dollars supports an eleven dollar charge, so a landlord who charges everyone a flat twenty-five is charging fourteen dollars more than the subsection permits on that file. A report that cost you thirty-one dollars supports a twenty-five dollar charge, and the remaining six dollars is yours to absorb — the ceiling does not rise because your vendor is expensive.

The consequence for record-keeping is the same one that follows from every actual-cost rule anywhere: the invoice is the operative document, and it has to be per application. A monthly statement from a screening vendor covering a dozen vacancies cannot show what this applicant’s report cost, and the charge is made to this applicant.

One further limit sits inside the wording. The report must come from an agency “that compiles and maintains files on consumers on a nationwide basis”. That is a description of a particular kind of consumer credit reporting agency, and a landlord using a local or specialty product is not obviously within the subsection at all. If you are charging for it, be able to say that the product you bought answers that description.

When the applicant hands you a qualifying report first. § 704.085(1)(b) provides that a landlord may not require a prospective tenant to pay for a consumer credit report “if, before the landlord requests a consumer credit report, the prospective tenant provides the landlord with a consumer credit report, from a consumer credit reporting agency that compiles and maintains files on consumers on a nationwide basis, that is less than 30 days old”.

Three conditions have to be met together, and the one landlords miss is the sequencing. The report has to arrive before you request one. A report produced after you have already ordered yours does not engage the bar, because the words of the subsection place the applicant’s delivery ahead of the landlord’s request. It also has to be less than thirty days old at that point, and it has to come from a nationwide consumer credit reporting agency — the same description used in (1)(a).

What the bar does not do is force you to rely on the applicant’s document. The administrative code makes this explicit: the Note under the corresponding provision records that the paragraph “does not prohibit a landlord from obtaining a more current consumer credit check at the landlord’s expense”. So where an applicant supplies a three-week-old report and you would rather have a fresh one, you may order it — you simply pay for it yourself.

The practical design point is that asking early is free and asking late is expensive. If your intake asks at the first contact whether the applicant has a recent nationwide report, you find out before you incur anything. If you ask after you have ordered, you have already spent the money and the bar cannot be triggered retrospectively.

A second one. § 704.085(2) is a distinct permission covering a distinct product for a distinct class of applicant, and it carries its own actual-cost ceiling of twenty-five dollars. It is additional to the credit-report recovery, not a re-run of it.

Both of its qualifiers matter. It covers a background check, which is a different product from a consumer credit report; and it reaches only “a prospective tenant who is not a resident of this state”. An applicant who lives here is outside the subsection entirely, so there is no permission to recover a background-check cost from them under it.

That produces two opposite errors, both common. One is treating fifty dollars as the standard charge for every applicant, which recovers an amount from resident applicants that the section does not authorise as to them. The other is treating twenty-five dollars as a single overall total, which under-recovers on every genuinely out-of-state file where both a credit report and a background check were bought. Recording the applicant’s residency at intake is what keeps you out of both.

The same two duties attach to this charge as to the first: notify the prospective tenant of the charge before requesting the background check, and provide the prospective tenant with a copy of the report. The subsection repeats them in full rather than cross-referring, which is a fair indication of how central they are.

That there is a charge, and you must tell them before the order goes in. Both subsections say the landlord “shall notify the prospective tenant of the charge before requesting” the report. It is a sequencing duty, and sequencing duties are the ones that cannot be repaired afterwards.

A charge that first appears on a receipt, an invoice or a lease was not notified before the request. Neither was a charge mentioned only in a fee schedule the applicant was never shown. The cheapest compliant design is a line on the application form itself, stating that a credit report will be obtained and that the applicant will be charged the landlord’s actual cost up to the statutory ceiling, signed or acknowledged before anything is ordered.

The second duty is the copy. Each subsection requires the landlord to “provide the prospective tenant with a copy of the report”. There is no outcome condition attached, so it is owed on approvals, on rejections and on applications that go nowhere. In practice the rejected applicant is both the one most likely to be forgotten and the one most likely to ask, which is a poor combination. Attaching the copy to the step where you record the decision is the simplest way to make it automatic.

Not on a letting ch. ATCP 134 reaches — and this is the answer the ‘Wisconsin has no cap’ summary obscures. Money taken from an applicant so that their application will be considered is an earnest money deposit, and an earnest money deposit is refundable in full.

Check the chapter’s own scope section first, because it decides whether the rest of this answer applies to you. ATCP 134.01, captioned “Scope and application”, provides that the chapter “applies to the rental of dwelling units located in this state, but does not apply to the rental or occupancy of” seven categories: a dwelling unit operated by a public or private institution if occupancy is incidental to detention or the provision of medical, geriatric, educational, counseling, religious or similar services; a unit occupied by a member of a fraternal or social organization which operates that unit; a unit occupied, under a contract of sale, by the purchaser or the purchaser’s successor in interest; a unit “such as a dwelling unit in a hotel, motel or boarding house, that is being rented only by tourist or transient occupants”; a unit the landlord provides free of charge, or as consideration to a person the landlord currently employs to operate or maintain the premises; a unit occupied by a tenant engaged in commercial agricultural operations on the premises; and “a dwelling unit owned and operated by government, or a subdivision or agency of government”.

The asymmetry between the two instruments is what makes this worth stating rather than assuming. § 704.085 has no scope section of this kind, so its two cost recoveries and their notice and copy duties are unaffected by the list above. The earnest-money definition, the next-business-day refund clock, the receipt duty, the identify-the-unit precondition and the pre-money disclosures all come from the chapter, and on an excluded letting they do not apply. Whether a given property is inside one of the seven is a question of fact about that property, and this page does not answer it for you.

ATCP 134.02(3) defines it: an earnest money deposit is “the total of any payments or deposits, however denominated or described, given by a prospective tenant to a landlord in return for the option of entering into a rental agreement in the future, or for having a rental agreement considered by a landlord”. It then carves out exactly one thing: the definition “does not include a fee which a landlord charges for a credit check in compliance with” the credit check fee provision. One housekeeping point, disclosed because it is visible in the published code and nothing here turns on it: ATCP 134.02(3) points that carve-out at “s. ATCP 134.05 (3)”, while the credit check fee provision itself, and the Note under ATCP 134.05(1), both place it at sub. (4) — this page cites (4), where the operative text sits.

Two features of that definition do the work. “However denominated or described” makes the label irrelevant, so an administration fee, a processing fee, a holding charge and an application fee are the same object. And “for having a rental agreement considered by a landlord” describes the exact thing an application fee is taken for. The carve-out is narrow and specific: a compliant credit check fee, and nothing else.

So the honest statement of Wisconsin law is not that application fees are uncapped. It is that there are two capped cost recoveries for two named reports, and that on a letting the chapter reaches, any other money you take from an applicant is a deposit you are holding rather than a fee you have earned.

The full deposit goes back by the end of the next business day after any of three events, and it may be withheld from in one narrow situation only.

ATCP 134.05(2)(a) requires the landlord to send the full deposit by first-class mail, or deliver it, by the end of the next business day after: the landlord rejects the rental application or refuses to enter into a rental agreement; the applicant withdraws the rental application before the landlord accepts it; or the landlord fails to approve the rental application by the end of the third business day after accepting the deposit, or by a later date the tenant agrees to in writing, which may not be more than twenty-one calendar days after acceptance.

That third trigger is the one that catches out landlords who like to keep options open. Doing nothing is itself a trigger. If you accept an applicant’s money on a Monday and have not approved the application by the end of Thursday, the refund clock has started on its own, without any decision from you, unless the applicant has agreed in writing to a longer period.

Where you do enter into a rental agreement with the applicant, ATCP 134.05(2)(b) gives two options and no third: apply the earnest money deposit as rent or as a security deposit, or return it. And ATCP 134.05(2)(c) closes off a common informal practice — a person who accepts a partial payment or credit does not thereby waive the right to the full refund or credit owed.

Withholding is governed by ATCP 134.05(3). It is available where the prospective tenant fails to enter into a rental agreement after being approved for tenancy, and it is not available if the landlord has significantly altered the rental terms previously disclosed to the tenant. What may be withheld is an amount sufficient to compensate the landlord for actual costs and damages incurred because of the failure to enter the agreement, and lost rents may not be withheld unless the landlord has made a reasonable effort to mitigate those losses.

Getting this wrong is not a one-for-one exposure. The Note to ch. ATCP 134 records that “[a] person who suffers a monetary loss because of a violation of this chapter may sue the violator directly under s. 100.20 (5), Stats., and may recover twice the amount of the loss, together with costs and reasonable attorneys’ fees”. Read at the statute, s. 100.20(5) gives a private action to “[a]ny person suffering pecuniary loss because of a violation… of any order issued under this section”, and provides that they “shall recover twice the amount of such pecuniary loss, together with costs, including a reasonable attorney fee”. The chapter is such an order — ATCP 134.01 says it “is adopted under authority of s. 100.20, Stats.” The doubling and the fee-shifting are both expressed as shall, not as something a court may award if minded to. So a two-hundred-dollar application fee kept when it should have gone back is not a two-hundred-dollar problem: it is four hundred dollars, plus costs, plus the applicant’s legal fees, in a case where the applicant did not have to fund a lawyer to start with. That is the practical reason the next-business-day clock is worth automating rather than remembering.

Two limits on that, both from the same text. It runs on pecuniary loss, so it is a compensation-plus-doubling provision rather than a penalty untethered from what the applicant is out of pocket. And it is the chapter’s remedy: on a letting ATCP 134.01 excludes, the chapter’s duties do not apply, so there is no violation of the chapter to sue on — while § 704.085, which carries no exclusions, still operates on its own terms. No case law was researched here on how the doubling is measured.

Three things, and they are all front-loaded by design. The unit has to be identified, the written terms have to be available, and the required disclosures have to be made.

ATCP 134.05(1) provides that a landlord may not accept an earnest money deposit or security deposit from a rental applicant until the landlord identifies to the applicant the dwelling unit or units for which that applicant is being considered for tenancy. Taking money to be considered for whatever becomes available is outside that.

ATCP 134.03(1) requires written rental agreements and any written rules and regulations established by the landlord to be furnished to prospective tenants for them to examine before a rental agreement is entered into and before any earnest money or security deposit is accepted.

ATCP 134.04 then front-loads the disclosures. Before entering into a rental agreement or accepting any earnest money or security deposit, the landlord is to disclose building or housing code violations of which the landlord has actual knowledge, which affect the dwelling unit or a common area, which present a significant threat to health or safety and which have not been corrected; and a listed set of conditions affecting habitability, including a unit lacking hot or cold running water, heating facilities that are unsafe or cannot maintain the stated temperature in living areas, unsafe or absent electrical service, unsafe structural conditions, and plumbing or sewage disposal facilities that are not in good operating condition. Utility charges not included in the rent are to be disclosed before the same point, along with the basis of allocation where units and common areas are not separately metered.

The pattern is consistent and worth internalising: in this state, the moment money is accepted from an applicant is the deadline for a whole set of things, not the start of the process.

A written one, immediately, stating the nature of the deposit and its amount. ATCP 134.03(2)(a) requires that immediately upon accepting any earnest money or security deposit, the landlord shall provide the tenant or prospective tenant with a written receipt for the deposit, stating the nature of the deposit and its amount.

There is one exception and it is narrower than it looks: a receipt is not required where payment is made by check bearing a notation describing the purpose for which it was given — and even then, it is required if the tenant requests it. A card payment, a bank transfer, a cash payment or a check with no notation all leave the duty intact. Separately, ATCP 134.03(2)(b) requires a written receipt stating the nature and amount of the payment whenever a tenant pays rent in cash.

“The nature of the deposit” is the phrase to take seriously, because it is the thing landlords are vaguest about and the thing that later decides which rules apply to the money. A receipt that says only ‘received, $150’ does not record whether that sum is an earnest money deposit subject to the next-business-day refund clock, a security deposit, a credit check recovery under § 704.085, or a mixture. Write down what each component is at the moment you take it.

They sit alongside it, and neither displaces the other. § 704.085 governs what you may recover and what you must tell the applicant about the charge; the federal consumer-report framework governs when you may obtain a report at all, what the applicant must be given and what you must do if a report contributes to a rejection.

There is a point of overlap worth noticing rather than assuming. The state duty to provide the applicant with a copy of the report is a duty in its own right, arising from the charge, and it attaches whether or not the application succeeds. The federal adverse-action machinery is a separate obligation with its own content, triggered by an outcome rather than by a payment. A landlord who believes that handing over a copy of the report discharges the federal side, or that an adverse-action notice discharges the state copy duty, has conflated two things that arise from different facts.

The permissible-purpose and authorisation steps also run ahead of everything on this page. You obtain an applicant’s written authorisation and have a permissible purpose before ordering the report; you notify the charge before ordering it too. Those duties stack in the same place in the process, which makes the application form the natural home for all of them.

An earnest money deposit can become a security deposit — ATCP 134.05(2)(b) allows the landlord to apply it as one — at which point a different set of rules takes over, with a twenty-one day return period, restrictions on what may be withheld and a written statement of claims. See Wisconsin security deposit laws for the money held during the tenancy and its return at the end.

What you may consider when screening an applicant, and what a denial requires once a consumer report has driven it, are separate questions from what you may charge for the report. Our guide to Wisconsin tenant screening laws covers that ground, including the federal rules that apply whatever the state says about the charge.

For the wider framework of the tenancy — notice periods, entry, repairs and termination — see Wisconsin landlord-tenant laws.

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