Federal attention to rental fee practices has receded over the past year, and the vacuum has not gone unfilled. State legislatures and city councils have taken up the issue on their own, producing a growing set of rules that govern what landlords can charge, how those charges have to be disclosed, and what happens when they get it wrong.

Seattle passed the most recent example in August. The city council voted 8-0 to approve the Rental Fee Restriction Ordinance, which takes effect July 1, 2027. The law bans recurring pet rent along with charges for package and mail handling, common area access, valet garbage, in-unit appliances, lease administration, and adding or removing a tenant from a lease. Landlords can still collect application screening fees, utilities, key replacement charges, security deposits, and pet deposits capped at 25 percent of rent. Move-in fees are limited to one month’s rent in total.

The disclosure requirements may matter more than the prohibitions. Seattle will require advertisements, listings, applications, and leases to present base rent, all mandatory and optional fees, and utility estimates on a standardized summary sheet. The Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections gets enforcement authority and subpoena power, and the City Attorney’s Office can recover three times the amount of any illegal fees collected.

Colorado moved earlier and went further in some respects. House Bill 25-1090 took effect January 1, 2026, and requires landlords to advertise a single total price that incorporates every mandatory charge. The law bans common area maintenance fees outright and caps third-party markups at either 2 percent of the landlord’s actual cost or $10 a month, whichever is lower. For leases of a year or less, non-utility fees cannot increase more than 2 percent during the term. Tenants who paid a prohibited fee can send a written demand for reimbursement.

Connecticut took a disclosure-focused approach with Public Act 25-44, signed in June 2025 with rental provisions effective that October. Landlords must include all periodic or recurring fees in any advertised rent, whether or not a tenant can opt out of them. Payment processing fees, pet fees and deposits, utilities, and damage charges are excepted. A violation entitles the tenant to one month’s rent plus attorney’s fees.

Tracking this as it develops is becoming part of the job for anyone running a portfolio across multiple jurisdictions, and Krisann Gaiko, SVP of Learning and Enablement at Grace Hill, argues that waiting for passage is too late. Knowing what is under consideration gives operators time to adjust before a deadline and a chance to participate in the process. “Managers and VPs need to know what laws are being proposed so they can be prepared operationally and advocate politically,” she said.

The practical difficulty is that the people closest to these properties have no capacity to do that monitoring themselves. “Property operators are drowning in the day to day, it is a lot to ask them to read every new law or legislation,” Gaiko said. A regional manager handling leasing, maintenance escalations, and staffing across a dozen communities is not going to read a city council agenda, which puts the burden on corporate compliance functions that are often thin.

Writing a compliant policy is also only the first half of the work. Gaiko describes the second half as translating that policy into procedures the people executing them can actually follow, which requires asking those people what would have to change. “You have to sit down and put policies together that are compliant,” she said. “From there, you have to bring your teams in and ask them how the procedures need to change to match that policy.” A fee disclosure requirement touches leasing scripts, listing templates, application flows, lease documents, and onboarding materials, and none of that updates itself.

Compliance that was verified at rollout and never checked again tends to drift as staff turns over and shortcuts accumulate, which is how an operator ends up out of compliance without anyone having decided to be. Creating protocols around compliance only works if the procedures being run by staff continue to adhere to the protocols, requiring ongoing audits.

Gaiko also thinks the industry has a self-inflicted problem underneath the regulatory one. Fees that serve a real purpose get resented when nobody explains what they cover, and fees that cannot be explained probably should not be charged. “People perceive these as junk fees because landlords are not explaining them well,” she said. “If you can’t defend the fees then it probably should not exist.”

Where this ends up, in her view, is somewhere operators may find they prefer. All-in pricing removes the gap between the advertised number and the actual monthly cost, which removes the moment where a prospect feels misled. “All-in rent pricing can turn out to be a good experience,” Gaiko said. “It creates trust and can make for a better relationship.”

Several of these laws have compliance dates that have not yet arrived, and more jurisdictions are drafting their own versions. Operators working across state lines will be managing different disclosure formats, different prohibited fee lists, and different penalty structures in each market, with the Seattle rules landing in mid-2027 and Colorado’s already in force.

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