Minnesota Tenant Screening Laws: The Landlord and Applicant Guide

Minnesota tenant screening sits at the crossroads of two bodies of law: the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, which governs how a consumer report may be pulled and used everywhere in the country, and Minnesota’s own rules under Minnesota Statutes Section 504B.173 and Section 504B.241, which add a specific screening-fee disclosure, a refund duty, a fourteen-day rejection notice, and report-correction rights. On top of the statewide floor sit two of the strictest local renter-screening ordinances in the nation, in Minneapolis and St. Paul. The Minnesota landlords who screen properly almost never face a lawsuit. The ones who skip the pre-fee disclosure, the consistent written criteria, or the adverse action notice pay for that shortcut, and the mandatory attorney-fee provisions are what make the bill so large.

This guide walks the whole framework in plain English: what the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act actually requires of a landlord — and the widely repeated “pre-adverse action notice” that it does not — Minnesota’s screening-fee rule and pre-fee disclosure under Section 504B.173, the applicant’s report-correction rights under Section 504B.241, fair-housing protection under the federal Fair Housing Act and the Minnesota Human Rights Act, the accurate source-of-income and Section 8 analysis, the Minneapolis Section 244.2030 and St. Paul chapter 193 renter-screening ordinances, the Fair Housing Act discriminatory-effects rule at 24 CFR Section 100.500 that outlived HUD’s withdrawn 2016 criminal-records guidance, the rights every applicant holds, a day-by-day screening workflow, a compliance playbook, real scenarios, and a Minnesota-specific set of frequently asked questions.

Because Minnesota’s biggest cities add protections on top of the statewide baseline, the safest posture for a landlord is the written pre-fee disclosure, written consent, consistent written criteria, and proper adverse action notices every single time, and the strongest position for an applicant is to know exactly which rights the law confers. Treat every figure here as a starting point and verify the current statute and local ordinance before you screen, charge a fee, or dispute a decision.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act, codified at fifteen U.S.C. section 1681, is the federal statute that governs tenant screening nationwide, and a Minnesota landlord must comply with it regardless of any state-law differences, then add Minnesota’s own rules under Section 504B.173 and Section 504B.241. Getting both layers right prevents almost all screening-related liability. Two federal duties sit at the core, permissible purpose and the adverse action notice, alongside two load-bearing practices — and a further point, the one nearly every screening guide gets wrong, is what the FCRA does not require of a landlord.

Permissible Purpose

A landlord may obtain a consumer report on a rental applicant because the landlord has a legitimate business need for the information in connection with a business transaction that is initiated by the consumer — Fair Credit Reporting Act section 604(a)(3)(F)(i), 15 U.S.C. Section 1681b(a)(3)(F)(i). The parallel clause at section 604(a)(3)(F)(ii) covers reviewing an existing account, which is how a landlord may re-screen at lease renewal. The screening company will require the landlord to certify that purpose in writing before it releases anything. Permissible purpose is the threshold right to obtain the report at all; it does not eliminate any of the other duties — it only opens the door to a report the landlord must then handle correctly.

Written Consent and Authorization

Take written authorization from every applicant before pulling a consumer report — but be precise about where the duty comes from, because this is the second thing screening guides routinely misstate. The FCRA’s stand-alone written disclosure and written authorization rule is section 604(b)(2), 15 U.S.C. Section 1681b(b)(2), and by its own terms it governs a report procured “for employment purposes.” A landlord’s authority to obtain the report comes from permissible purpose, not from that subsection. Written consent is nevertheless close to mandatory in practice: every FCRA-compliant consumer reporting agency requires it by contract as a condition of releasing the report, and a signed standalone form is far better evidence of permissible purpose than a clause buried in the rental application if the pull is ever challenged.

One genuine federal pre-report duty can reach a landlord directly. If the landlord orders an investigative consumer report — one built on personal interviews about character, general reputation, personal characteristics or mode of living rather than on database records — section 606(a), 15 U.S.C. Section 1681d(a), requires a clear and accurate written disclosure of that fact, mailed or otherwise delivered to the applicant not later than three days after the report was first requested, together with a statement of the applicant’s right to the additional disclosures and the written summary of rights. That is the only place a “summary of rights” legitimately belongs in a landlord’s workflow. In Minnesota, the landlord must also give the applicant the separate written pre-fee disclosure required by Section 504B.173 — the screening service’s name, address, and telephone number, and the decision criteria — before charging a screening fee, and that one is a statutory command with a remedy attached.

Consistent Criteria

Written screening criteria must be applied consistently to every applicant. Inconsistency creates Fair Housing Act and Minnesota Human Rights Act exposure, because bending the rule for one applicant and not another is powerful evidence of discrimination even where none was intended. Minnesota adds a practical reason to write the criteria down: the Section 504B.173 rejection notice must identify the criteria the applicant failed to meet, and the pre-fee disclosure must state those criteria before any money changes hands. In Minneapolis and St. Paul it goes further still — both ordinances require the landlord to make its screening criteria readily available to applicants before applications are accepted, and St. Paul extends that to before any security deposit, application fee or other fee is taken.

Adverse Action Notice Under Section 1681m(a)

If information in a consumer report causes any unfavorable outcome — denying the application, requiring a co-signer or guarantor, requiring a larger deposit than another applicant would pay, or charging a higher rent than another applicant would pay — the landlord has taken an adverse action and owes an adverse action notice under Fair Credit Reporting Act section 615(a), 15 U.S.C. Section 1681m(a). The definition that reaches a tenancy is 15 U.S.C. Section 1681a(k)(1)(B)(iv): an action taken in connection with an application initiated by the consumer that is adverse to the consumer’s interests. The notice is given after the decision, and it must provide:

• the name, address, and telephone number of the consumer reporting agency that furnished the report, including its toll-free number if it is a nationwide agency;
• a statement that the agency did not make the decision and is unable to give the specific reasons for it;
• notice of the applicant’s right to a free copy of the report from that agency, with an indication of the sixty-day window for asking; and
• notice of the right to dispute the accuracy or completeness of anything in it with the agency.

If a numerical credit score was used in the decision, Section 1681m(a)(2) adds a written or electronic disclosure of the score, its source, the date it was created, the range of scores under that model, and the key factors that adversely affected it, listed in order of importance. The notice may be oral, written or electronic; the Federal Trade Commission’s guidance for landlords calls written notice the best practice, not a legal requirement. And it is owed even when the report was not the primary reason for the decision, because Section 1681m(a) reaches any adverse action “based in whole or in part” on a consumer report. In Minnesota, pair it with the fourteen-day rejection notice that Section 504B.173 separately requires.

What the FCRA Does Not Require: There Is No Pre-Adverse Action Step in Housing

Most tenant-screening guides — and a great many landlord forms — tell a Minnesota landlord to send a “pre-adverse action notice” enclosing a copy of the report and the FCRA summary of rights, then wait some period before finalizing the denial. That is not the law for housing. The pre-adverse procedure is Fair Credit Reporting Act section 604(b)(3), 15 U.S.C. Section 1681b(b)(3), and it opens with the words “in using a consumer report for employment purposes.” “Employment purposes” is defined at 15 U.S.C. Section 1681a(h) as a report used to evaluate a consumer “for employment, promotion, reassignment or retention as an employee.” Renting a home is none of those four things.

Three consequences follow, and they are the practical difference between the myth and the statute:

• No waiting period. Federal law sets no interval between the decision and the notice in housing. Section 1681b(b)(3) states no number of days even in employment, and the “five business days” figure that circulates on screening pages has no federal source at all.
• No duty to enclose the report. Section 1681m(a)(4)(A) routes the applicant to the consumer reporting agency for a free copy within sixty days. The FTC’s landlord guidance does not tell a landlord to send the report.
• No duty to enclose the summary of rights. The written summary prescribed by the Bureau under Section 1681g(c)(3) belongs to the employment procedure and to the investigative-report disclosure at Section 1681d(a) — not to a housing adverse action notice.

The Federal Trade Commission’s own landlord publication, Using Consumer Reports: What Landlords Need to Know (July 2023), is organized under exactly two headings — “Before You Get a Consumer Report” and “After You Take an Adverse Action.” There is no third step, the phrase “pre-adverse action” appears nowhere on it, and it points landlords to section 615(a), 15 U.S.C. Section 1681m(a). Two federal agencies do recommend going further: HUD’s letter to public housing agencies of 27 July 2023 “strongly encourages” providing a copy of the screening report as part of the denial letter, and HUD’s April 2024 fair-housing screening guidance says applicants should get an opportunity to challenge negative information. Both are expressly labeled best practice, both put the report with the denial rather than before it, and neither creates a waiting period. Nothing about sending a courtesy pre-denial letter is unlawful — it is often good practice — but it does not discharge the Section 1681m(a) notice, and a landlord who sends only the courtesy letter has still missed the notice the statute actually requires.

Where a genuine pre-denial duty exists it comes from state or local fair-chance housing law, not from the FCRA. Minnesota has none statewide. Minneapolis and St. Paul each impose one — and its shape is different from the myth: an individualized assessment and a duty to consider the applicant’s supplemental evidence before the denial, with no notice-and-wait window at all. Both are set out in full below.

How much can a landlord charge to screen a tenant in Minnesota?

Minnesota does not put a fixed dollar cap on the applicant screening fee — any guide that claims a hard ceiling such as forty dollars is wrong. Under Minnesota Statutes Section 504B.173, the fee is instead regulated through availability, receipt, disclosure, refund, and notice duties rather than a number. In practice most Minnesota landlords charge close to what the screening company charges them, commonly in the range of thirty to fifty dollars, but the statute itself sets no figure. The statute is published at Minnesota Statutes Section 504B.173.

The pre-fee disclosure

Before it accepts any screening fee, the landlord must give the applicant a written notice stating the name, address, and telephone number of the tenant screening service the landlord will use and the criteria on which the decision to rent will be based. This up-front disclosure is the hinge of the whole statute: because the criteria are on the table before money changes hands, the applicant can measure any later denial against them, and the landlord who denies for an undisclosed reason must refund the fee.

When the fee must be refunded

Section 504B.173 requires the landlord to return the fee, or the unused portion of it, in three situations:

• The applicant is rejected for any reason not listed in the disclosed criteria.
• A prior applicant is offered the unit and agrees to enter into a rental agreement, so this applicant is never actually screened.
• The landlord does not perform the reference check or does not obtain the credit or tenant screening report — the amount not actually used for those purposes must be returned.

The fourteen-day rejection notice and the penalties

When the landlord rejects an application, Section 504B.173 requires a notice to the applicant within fourteen days that identifies the criteria the applicant failed to meet. A landlord who violates the section is liable to the applicant for the screening fee plus a civil penalty of up to one hundred dollars, civil filing costs, and reasonable attorney fees. The statute cuts both ways: an applicant who provides materially false information faces a civil penalty of up to five hundred dollars plus costs and fees.

Can a Minnesota applicant see and correct their screening report?

Yes. Minnesota Statutes Section 504B.241 governs residential tenant reports and gives an applicant the right to obtain the nature and substance of the information a tenant screening service holds on them, together with the sources of that information, on proper identification. The disclosure is free if the report was used within the past thirty days to deny the rental or to increase the security deposit or rent; otherwise the service may charge a reasonable fee. If the applicant disputes the accuracy of anything, the service must reinvestigate, and information found to be inaccurate or that can no longer be verified must be deleted, with prior recipients notified. This state right runs alongside the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act dispute process, so a Minnesota applicant has two overlapping avenues to fix a bad report. The statute is published at Minnesota Statutes Section 504B.241.

Four statewide changes taking effect on 1 January 2024 and 1 January 2025 reshaped Minnesota screening, and they are the provisions competitor guides most often omit — partly because three of the four sit outside Section 504B.173, the screening-fee section a guide on this topic normally reads.

1. A landlord may no longer deny based on a pending or non-public eviction case (§ 504B.173, subd. 3a)

2024 Minn. Laws ch. 118, § 12 added subdivision 3a to Section 504B.173, effective 1 January 2025. It is a flat prohibition, not a balancing test. No landlord may deny a rental application based on any of the following:

• a pending eviction action — a filing that has not been decided;
• any court file that is not public, has been expunged, or has been destroyed; or
• any eviction action that has not resulted in a writ of recovery of premises and order to vacate, as that term is defined in Section 504B.001, subdivision 15.

That last clause is the widest of the three. An eviction that was dismissed, settled, withdrawn, or decided for the tenant never produces a writ — so it cannot lawfully be a reason to deny anywhere in Minnesota, not only in Minneapolis and St. Paul. The remedy is the same as for the rest of Section 504B.173: the applicant recovers the screening fee plus a civil penalty of up to one hundred dollars, civil filing costs and reasonable attorney fees.

2. A screening service must re-check the court record within 24 hours (§ 504B.241, subd. 4)

2024 Minn. Laws ch. 118, § 22 amended Section 504B.241, subdivision 4, effective 1 January 2025, to give every residential tenant screening service an affirmative duty to update and verify the current status of court files by accessing Minnesota Court Records Online no more than 24 hours before issuing a screening report. The same subdivision requires the report to carry the individual’s full name and date of birth where the court file has them, and to record the outcome of the proceeding accurately, including the specific basis of the court’s decision when available. A service that reports complete and accurate information as supplied by the court, and that complies with the 24-hour re-check, is shielded from liability under Section 504B.245.

For a landlord, the practical consequence is that a stale report is now a defective one. A report pulled from a cached database rather than a current court check is exactly the mechanism by which an expunged or dismissed case reaches a decision — which is what subdivision 3a forbids you to act on.

3. Eviction expungement became automatic and much broader (§ 484.014)

2023 Minn. Laws ch. 52, art. 19, §§ 117–118, effective 1 January 2024, rewrote Section 484.014. Discretionary expungement no longer requires a motion by the defendant or a finding that the landlord’s case was without basis; the court may expunge whenever expungement is clearly in the interests of justice and those interests are not outweighed by the public’s interest in knowing about the record. Mandatory expungement was expanded and, for most grounds, is now ordered without motion by any party: where the defendant prevailed on the merits, where the complaint is dismissed for any reason, where the parties agreed to expungement, and — the one with the widest reach — three years after an eviction was ordered. Two further grounds run on the tenant’s motion: where the case was filed in violation of Section 504B.285, subdivision 1, paragraph (b), and where the case settled and the tenant fulfilled the settlement terms. That second motion ground is not from the 2023 act. Clause (7) — “upon motion of a defendant, if the case is settled and the defendant fulfills the terms of the settlement” — and the widening of the no-motion carve-out from “Except for clause (6)” to “except for clauses (6) and (7)” were added by 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 118, § 1, which by its own terms is “effective 30 days following the date of final enactment.” The governor signed that act on 24 May 2024, so clause (7) has been in force since 23 June 2024 — unlike the tenant-screening sections of the same act (§§ 12 and 22), which carry no section-specific date and take the act default of 1 January 2025.

Section 504B.321, subdivision 6 adds a front-end companion: since 1 January 2024 an eviction action is not accessible to the public until the court enters final judgment — with one carve-out the subdivision states expressly: the parties to the case, and licensed attorneys assisting a party whether or not they are the attorney of record, keep access to the file. A landlord who is already a party can therefore see its own case; a screening company, which is neither, cannot. Combined with subdivision 1(d), which requires dismissal and expungement where a landlord filed a nonpayment case without the required 14-day notice, the effect is that a substantial share of Minnesota eviction filings never becomes a public record a screening report can lawfully carry.

4. A rental application must offer an SSN-or-ITIN option (§ 504B.117)

2024 Minn. Laws ch. 118, § 7 created Section 504B.117, captioned “Individual Taxpayer Identification Number.” Section 7 carries no section-specific effective date, so it takes the act default in § 32 — “Except as otherwise specified, this act is effective January 1, 2025” — the same date as the screening-fee and tenant-report sections of the same act discussed above. It does two things, and the first is a drafting duty most Minnesota screening guides omit entirely: a landlord must provide on the rental application itself the option for a prospective tenant to submit an individual taxpayer identification number or a Social Security number, printed as an “SSN or ITIN:” line for the applicant to complete. That is an affirmative requirement about the form you hand out, not merely a limit on how you read it back. Second, a landlord must not deny a rental application solely because the prospective tenant provided an ITIN. The statute preserves the underwriting judgment behind that rule: nothing in it prevents a denial where the consumer credit report attached to the ITIN is insufficient — a thin or absent file remains a lawful ground, provided what you act on is the report and not the ITIN itself.

Read this together with the Minneapolis ordinance discussed later on this page. Minneapolis Code Section 244.2030(e)(1)c., as amended by Ordinance No. 2026-007, separately forbids denying an application solely because the applicant supplied an ITIN, so inside Minneapolis the city and state rules overlap. Section 504B.117 is statewide, and it reaches the one duty the ordinance does not: printing the SSN-or-ITIN option on the application form. A landlord in Duluth, Rochester or Bloomington who has read only the Minneapolis and St. Paul ordinances is still bound by it.

Can a Minnesota landlord reject an applicant for a criminal record?

Minnesota has no statewide Fair Chance or ban-the-box housing law and no statewide statute requiring an individualized assessment, so outside Minneapolis and St. Paul a landlord may consider criminal history. What constrains that consideration statewide is the Fair Housing Act’s discriminatory-effects rule at 24 CFR Section 100.500, reinstated effective 1 May 2023 (88 FR 19450, 31 March 2023). Under that rule a facially neutral policy can be unlawful if it causes a discriminatory effect the landlord cannot prove is necessary to achieve one or more substantial, legitimate, nondiscriminatory interests — and even then the claimant may still prevail by showing a practice that serves those interests with a less discriminatory effect. Because criminal records fall disproportionately on Black, Hispanic and American Indian applicants, a blanket ban is the classic exposure.

Check the date on any source that tells you otherwise. HUD’s April 2016 criminal-records guidance — the document nearly every screening guide still cites for the individualized-assessment idea — was withdrawn effective 25 September 2025 (Federal Register, Notice of the Withdrawal of OGC Guidance Documents, Docket No. FR-6617-N-01, published 17 July 2026), and its 2022 implementation memo was withdrawn effective 17 September 2025 (Docket No. FR-6571-N-01, published 6 April 2026). Withdrawing a guidance document repeals neither the Fair Housing Act nor Section 100.500: the statute and the regulation both stand. Section 100.500 is itself the subject of a pending HUD proposal to remove it (supplemental proposed rule, Docket No. FR-6540-P-02, published 10 August 2026, comments due 9 October 2026) — proposed only; nothing has changed the regulation. What Section 100.500 does not contain is any individualized-assessment step or pre-denial notice; it is a burden-shifting litigation standard. So statewide, an individualized assessment is a strong defense and sound practice, not a legal command. Two Minnesota cities make it a legal command: the Minneapolis and St. Paul renter-screening ordinances, covered in the next section, which also bar reliance on an arrest in an inactive case that never produced a conviction. The property’s city can control the answer.

The Individualized-Assessment Factors

Where an individualized assessment is legally required — in Minneapolis and St. Paul, whenever the landlord’s criteria are more prohibitive than the ordinance’s own inclusive or uniform criteria — and everywhere else in Minnesota as the best available defense to a discriminatory-effects claim, work these factors and document the analysis. The first three plus the applicant’s age are the four the Minneapolis and St. Paul ordinances actually enumerate.

• Nature and severity of the offense. A decades-old shoplifting conviction differs materially from a recent violent crime or manufacturing charge.
• Number and type of the incidents. One old incident and a repeated pattern are different facts; both ordinances list this factor by name.
• Time since the conviction. More recent offenses carry more predictive weight; very old convictions may have little probative value. Both ordinances also list the applicant’s age at the time the incidents occurred as a required factor.
• Evidence of rehabilitation. Consistent employment, completed parole or probation, continuing education, or recovery documentation can rebut the presumption of risk.
• Relevance to tenancy. The offense should bear on the specific risk — violent or property crimes bear more directly than a traffic or minor drug-possession offense might.
• Consistent application. Apply the same analysis to every applicant with any criminal history; selectivity creates disparate-treatment exposure.

This is the layer that actually produces a pre-denial duty in Minnesota — and it is city law, not the FCRA. Minneapolis and St. Paul have each enacted a renter-screening ordinance with the same two-path architecture: a landlord may either screen inside a fixed set of criteria the ordinance defines, or screen more strictly and run a documented individualized assessment before issuing any denial. Neither ordinance creates a notice-and-wait period. What each creates is a duty to consider the applicant’s own evidence before the denial, and a written notice within fourteen days after it.

What are the Minneapolis renter-screening ordinance rules?

The Minneapolis rule is Minneapolis Code of Ordinances Section 244.2030, “Applicant screening criteria for prospective tenants,” added by Ordinance No. 2019-038 and effective 1 June 2020, and amended by Ordinance No. 2026-007, adopted 23 April 2026. Before accepting applications, a landlord must make its rental screening criteria “readily available to all applicants … in as much detail as is feasible.” From there the ordinance gives the landlord two paths, and it must pick one for each applicant: apply the inclusive screening criteria in subdivision (c), or conduct the individualized assessment required by subdivision (d).