Pick your state below. See what its deposit statute actually says — the return deadline and the conditions attached to it, what your landlord can and cannot deduct, and a link to read the text yourself. No account, no email, no card.
Deposit law is a deadline business, and the public information about it is worse than you would expect. Reading the primary statutes for this page caught nine widely republished “rules” that are fabricated, garbled or repealed — Idaho’s treble damages and Oklahoma’s 2x multiplier do not exist, and Tennessee’s famous 30-day deadline appears nowhere in the statute. So we treat this data the way a paralegal would.
Each deadline on this page was read off the state code itself, not a blog post. The citation is printed next to it and links to the source — check our work.
If we have not confirmed a state against its primary source, we say so and show you no number. A wrong deadline costs you your claim, so silence beats a guess.
The day count is the least important part. Whether you made a written demand, whether you gave a forwarding address, how many units your landlord owns — these decide real cases, so we print the statute’s own wording rather than a tidy headline figure.
Everything above is free either way. This is what happens next.
Free tenant tools
$0
Generic templates and a forum answer that may not match your state. You do the research and the follow-up yourself.
TenantNex
$39, one time
Your state’s demand letter prepared, mailed certified with return receipt, and tracked until it lands. No subscription, no account.
A tenant attorney
$300+/hr
The right answer when a claim is genuinely contested — and far more than most deposit disputes are worth.
Correct. Pick your state and the rules appear on this page — the return deadline and the conditions on it, what your landlord may and may not deduct, the citation, and a link to the statute. No email address, no card, no account. Starting a case is how you get the demand letter prepared, mailed certified, and tracked — one-time fee, still no account.
From each state’s own statute. We only publish a state once its operative text has been read from an official government source, and every entry carries the citation, the link, and the date it was read. Where we have not cleared that bar, we say so and show you nothing rather than a number we cannot stand behind.
Because we have not been able to read its statute in the official text yet. That is a deliberate gap, not an oversight. The public information on this topic is unreliable — reading primary sources caught nine widely republished rules that turned out to be fabricated, garbled or repealed. We would rather be missing than wrong. Check back — we add states as each one clears that check.
Because in a lot of states it genuinely is not. In several, your own written demand is what starts the clock — so a landlord is not late until you have asked. In others, not giving a written forwarding address either suspends the landlord’s duty or bars the claim outright. A few exempt small landlords by unit count, and one state sets no return deadline at all. The statute’s own wording is on this page for exactly that reason.
Yes. Start a deposit case and we prepare a demand letter built on your state’s deadline and penalty rules, mail it to your landlord by USPS Certified Mail with return receipt, and track delivery on your case page. Every letter is reviewed by a person before it is mailed, and the conditions above (forwarding address, whether a demand starts the clock in your state) are checked against your answers — so the letter never claims your landlord is late when they are not. One-time fee, no account.
No. TenantNex is a technology platform that provides informational assistance. We are not a law firm, nothing on this page is legal advice, no attorney has reviewed this information, and we cannot guarantee any outcome. For legal representation, consult a licensed attorney in your state.