Calculating legally compliant rent late fees across U.S. states

https://www.RentLateFee.com

52•hrgdevBuilds•3h ago

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hrgdevBuilds•3h ago

I built a small tool to clarify how much late fee a landlord can legally charge (and when) in each U.S. state.

Rent laws vary widely: some states set a fixed dollar cap, others a percentage, and a few use only “reasonable” language that’s open to interpretation. Many renters and landlords have no easy way to check what’s actually allowed without reading the statutes themselves.

This project compiles those laws into an instant calculator. Enter rent amount, due date, payment date, and state — it shows the lawful late fee limit, grace period rules, and citation.

It started as a curiosity after seeing conflicting answers online. The goal is transparency, not advocacy; all data is drawn from current state statutes.

The app is lightweight, built in Replit, and runs entirely client-side. I’d be interested in feedback on legal interpretation consistency, data sourcing, or UI clarity.

candiddevmike•1h ago

I thought this would be for tenants, but this seems more geared towards landlords. Most landlords have some kind of SaaS platform that will automate all of this for them as part of rent collection, I don't think you'll get many bites on this TBH.

I'd love to see some kind of 50 state tenant resource center, geared towards providing tenants with advice and legal resources.

axus•1h ago

I love the ambiguity in who the tool is for. For renters, learning about their rights and fighting illegal fees. For landlords, charging the maximum amount permitted under the law.

limagnolia•1h ago

Or landlords who want to follow the law, but aren't sure what it is, trying to make sure they are doing things right.

ChrisMarshallNY•1h ago

Here on Long Island (NY), most apartments are illegal (addition/remodeled single-family homes). Many of them make you sign a lease, anyway, but they can get dismissed by any law student.

Every now and then, some municipality claims that it will be "fighting illegal apartments," but they die quick deaths. If they got serious about it, the homeless population would explode, and a lot of folks would leave the state.

Also, I believe that most of the rules that apply to apartments, come from municipalities, not states.

gruez•47m ago

>Here on Long Island (NY), most apartments are illegal (addition/remodeled single-family homes). Many of them make you sign a lease, anyway, but they can get dismissed by any law student.

What does this mean in practice? Courts won't enforce late fees or unpaid rents? Landlords can't evict bad tenants? Renters can terminate leases without any penalty?

ChrisMarshallNY•41m ago

Pretty much.

Landlords get in a lot of trouble, for renting illegal apartments.

I have friends that rented apartments, and had Pacific Heights-type[0] problem tenants.

The COVID era was a horror. Many tenants just stopped paying rent entirely.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Heights_(film)

hrimfaxi•40m ago

Yes, at least in some towns on the US east coast, if you didn't register your rental with the town. And not only that, but you also would have to pay treble damages and all moving costs associated with them vacating your illegal rental.

ChrisMarshallNY•39m ago

Yup. That treble-damages thing is a kicker. Can't get it, though, if they don't have it.

Most folks don't want to saw off the branch they are sitting on, though, so they play nice.

Spooky23•35m ago

It’s not the homeless population, it’s more to do to with the folks who own the apartments. Local politics and local real estate are birds of a feather.

terminalshort•7m ago

This is the failure mode of bureaucratic government. The personality type of bureaucrats means that the rules will proliferate endlessly. Karens never sleep. Eventually the rules get so onerous that it becomes impossible to comply and everybody operates in violation of the rules. Everybody know that actual enforcement of the rules would be catastrophic, so they noncompliance is ignored. The economy reverts to the same unregulated and "unfair" state that the ruling Karens feared in the first place, but arbitrary enforcement continues anyway as the bureaucrats need to justify their existence by continually enforcing the rules. The number one rule of business becomes "keep your head down" because anything that attracts the attention of the bureaucrats will be immediately enforced, while the other 99% of violators are allowed to peacefully continue violating. Stagnation and slow decay takes hold as any sort of disruptive innovation is instantly shut down.

ryandrake•59m ago

This is just a nicer way of saying what OP posted. "I want to charge as much as I can, but I want to follow the law and do things right."

eadmund•23m ago

Everybody wants to charge as much as he can. Workers do the same: we all want to charge as much for our labour as possible. Unions do the same thing too.

Everyone also wants to pay as little as he can, too.

Fortunately, as long as there are many buyers and many sellers, the market tends to find efficient prices. When there is a monopoly or a monopsony, though, prices get out of wack.

Bjartr•15m ago

> Everybody

Not everybody everybody. Some people want to charge/pay/receive the maximum reasonable amount. Where "reasonable" is informed by social norms. The existence of so many amoral corporations, and sociopathic individuals running them, has absolutely skewed social expectations though.

Such people are certainly less common, but they do exist (anecdata of one, me)

Homo economicus does not actually exist.

walkabout•5m ago

My experience is that kids have to be taught “‘fair’ is what the market will bear” because they start out feeling quite strongly that it’s not true.

Tons of kids aren’t taught that, some of them start businesses, and they may struggle to make ends meet (or at least to thrive like they could be) because raising prices to market rates feels so unfair to them that they won’t do it unless prodded to and told it’s ok by someone else (and they still might not)

I definitely am not convinced market-rate-is-ethical-and-fair is natural thinking for most people, or the kind of thing they want to do.

(I’ve been the one telling people they should raise prices and I still can’t shake the feeling that it’s kinda wrong…)

Fraterkes•56m ago

If you look at the other tools on the page, there's stuff for property-management and sending rent-reminders. I guess they know what part of their userbase is the most moneyed.

terminalshort•18m ago

It's a tool, and like any tool it should be as neutral as possible.

limagnolia•1h ago

Utah appears to be calculating incorrectly, the text says "10% of rent or $75, whichever is GREATER." But it is doing the opposite, showing the lessor of 10% or $75.

limagnolia•1h ago

New Hampshire has the same bug.

corndoge•1h ago

Other states do as well.

gruez•55m ago

Given that OP said it was "built in Replit"[1], I'm tempted to believe AI misgenerated the underlying calculation code.

[1] Replit bills itself as "an AI-powered platform for building professional web apps and websites."

zahlman•41m ago

I always thought Replit was supposed to be a pastebin site with built-in sandboxed code execution, so people could demo Python snippets and what-not. What happened?

Scoundreller•13m ago

Vibe-coding webapps raise more money

gruez•11m ago

see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45486035

tl;dr: they pivoted from offering services adjacent to "learn to code" (among other things) to vibecoding

pton_xd•45m ago

"We compile state-level rent late-fee rules from official statutes and housing authority publications with AI-powered consistency checks."

Needs a higher-powered AI, I'd say.

redmattred•2h ago

Curious what your process for gathering and verifying the legal information was

bpt3•16m ago

Based on how inaccurate the information is and the fact that there is no support for local (city, county, town, etc.) regulations, I would say it was a very simple prompt to an LLM with no additional verification.

josefritzishere•1h ago

Sounds like a great tool. But it's sad that it needs to exist.

grafmax•1h ago

Our society prioritizes the narrow interests of rentier capitalists over the working class. Unfortunately this means the US is losing international competitiveness across more and more industries. For one thing rent extraction ultimately gets financed by employers through higher wages, thus productive business loses out to business from a region like China where costs of employment are lower. Rather than making economies more efficient like productive business is supposed to do, rentier capitalism means cash flows from the debtor to the creditor class, which forms a feedback loop as the creditor class is able to use this cash to buy more assets and extract more rent simply by expanding its circle of ownership.

bpt3•12m ago

Real estate prices are controlled by supply and demand. If you want a lower cost of living than desirable places in the US, alternatives (like China, or the Rust Belt) exist.

And if you think housing prices are bad in the US, you should look at the rest of the developed world.

SilverElfin•53m ago

Yep. A lot of these regulations end up hurting small landlords because only corporate landlords with a large number of units can comply easily and absorb costs of bad tenants.

bpt3•14m ago

Sad in what way?

Renters will always exist, and some will be unable or unwilling to adhere to the contract they signed. Like all contracts, there are penalities for non-compliance (on both sides).

ecshafer•1h ago

There are laws at the county and city levels as well as state levels. So this is insufficient.

goldenCeasar•1h ago

This looks something that could work nicely with my calculation DSL (https://github.com/amuta/kumi) This is one of the scenarios that was in my head: auditable/exportable/reusable tax-related calculations schemas.

pseudocomposer•1h ago

At least for North Carolina, it's wrong/self-inconsistent. The quoted text (and linked NC legislation) says the max is:

> $15 or 5% of rent, whichever is GREATER. 5-day grace period. One-time fee per late payment.

But this site seems to say the legal maximum is whichever is lower (i.e., it won't go above $15).

shimmers•47m ago

Being a landlord is one of the most directly parasitical things a person can do to another person.

I see all the bugs here about how it minimizes fees by reversing a particular comparison, and for a second I got excited -- maybe it's a subversive site? But no, just AI blunders.

nashashmi•18m ago

for nj the legal source brings up a 404. https://www.nj.gov/dca/divisions/codes/publications/pdf_lti/...

dotnet00•10m ago

I don't know how I feel about the concept of late rent fees...

On one hand, you did agree to the payment schedule when you signed the lease, but on the other hand, tacking on fees to someone who is already struggling to pay, to support mainly parasites responsible for creating a lot of the issues facing young people, is also not great.

bpodgursky•6m ago

People are lazy. Without penalties, nobody will ever pay a bill. Doesn't matter if they are rich or poor. They could have $1mm cash sitting on their desk and unless you motivate them, they're just not going to open the bill.

That's just the reality of sending bills or invoices. Half the time it's not about malice, just no reason to bother being timely.

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Calculating legally compliant rent late fees across U.S. states

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