Rental fines and fees are the charges added to a tenant’s base rent for a range of additional costs. Recent lawsuits allege that fines and fees inflate base rent in harmful and predatory ways. Yet their scope and impact are difficult to assess, as rental ledgers (financial records of a tenant’s charges and payments) are not publicly available.

This groundbreaking pilot study leverages optical character recognition, text extraction, and natural language processing on a sample of rental ledgers from Colorado to examine the scope and costs of fines and fees. Our findings show that fines and fees add substantial, volatile costs to monthly base rents.

Why This Matters

Across the US, renter households are spending increasingly large parts of their income on housing. This can lead to housing instability, eviction, and even homelessness. While much research focuses on the cost of rent, as fines and fees increase, it is critical to understand the role they may play in adding costs to renters and creating housing instability. This analysis provides a detailed look at fines and fees, giving changemakers concrete information they can use to support renters and reduce housing instability.

What We Found

• Thousands of fine and fees were charged to renters in any given month.
• Fees made up a considerable share of monthly costs compared with base rent.
• The total costs of fines and fees varied substantially each month, with a median swing of about $300.
• Many of the fines and fees were not reflected in lease terms.

How We Did It

We used 1,109 rental ledgers and a subset of associated leases submitted by renters and landlords as part of Colorado’s emergency rental assistance application process. We collected data from the ledgers by extracting their text using optical character recognition. We cleaned, combined, and aggregated individual rows in R to create charge and payment categories over time and across renters. We identified a total of 126,674 charges and payments. To understand the differences in fines, fees, and rents, we categorized the broad charge categories into the following: base rent, security deposit, utilities, administrative fees, and penalty fees.