About

What this is

About a quarter of US jurisdictions require landlords to pay tenants interest on a held security deposit — 14 of the 51 covered here. Most tenants have never heard of the rule, and plenty of small landlords discover it only when they are on the wrong end of it.

The information exists, but it is scattered across statutes, and the tools that summarise it usually do one of three things: state a rule without citing it, cite a statute without computing anything, or compute a number without saying which rule produced it. This site does all three on one page, for every state.

Who runs it

I'm Ravi. I live in Kolkata, India, I build small tools and write about them, and I built this one.

Start with what is missing. I am not a lawyer. I have no legal training of any kind. No institution stands behind this site — no firm, no university, no tenants' organisation, and no editor checking my work before it goes up. It is one person and a spreadsheet, and you should read it that way. Nothing here is an expert opinion and none of it should be treated as one.

I built it because the rule is real and almost nobody it applies to has heard of it. A tenant who moved out three years ago in a state that requires interest is owed money and does not know the question exists. Every explanation I could find was one of two things: a law firm's page, written to produce a phone call rather than an answer, or a calculator that returned a figure without saying which rule produced it — and in more than one case a figure the statute could not have produced at all.

So I read the statutes. All fifty-one, from each state's own official source, one at a time, and recorded what each one actually says in the single spreadsheet everything on this site is generated from.

What stands in for credentials

I have none to offer, so I will offer the two things I do have.

The first is the sourcing. Every figure here traces to a statute I read myself, cited on the page, linked to the official text, with the date I last checked it. You do not have to take my word for any of it. The citation is right there, and if I have misread it, you can see that I have — which is the whole reason it is shown rather than summarised.

The second is what this site refuses to do. It will not hand you a number it cannot stand behind. Where a state ties interest to whatever the landlord's account happened to earn, there is no figure to publish and it says so. Where a statute genuinely supports two readings that produce different amounts, it says that too, and stops. Those refusals are listed below, and they cost the site a great many pages that would have looked more useful and been worth less.

For completeness: this site is not a law firm, sells nothing, and has no relationship with any landlord, letting agent, property manager or tenants' organisation.

How the rules are sourced

Every legal value on this site — every rate, threshold, deadline and citation — was read from the state's own statute or its official publication, not from another calculator, a law-firm blog or an encyclopedia. Each state page shows the section it came from, a link to the official text, and the date it was last checked.

Those values live in a single spreadsheet, and the site's data file is generated from it. That is not a detail of convenience: it means there is exactly one place a legal figure can be changed, and no way for a value to appear on the site without having been put in the sourced record first. Two automated checks run on every change — one that regenerates the data file and fails if it differs, and a second that re-reads the spreadsheet with its own parser and compares every value in it, field by field, against what the site ships.

The methodology page sets out the whole process, including what happens when a statute is ambiguous.

What it will not do

• Guess a rate. Most states that require interest tie it to whatever the landlord's account actually earned. There is no published number for those, so the calculator says so and tells you what to ask your landlord for, rather than inventing a figure you might put in an email.
• Resolve an ambiguous statute. Where a state's text genuinely supports two readings that produce different amounts, the answer is that it is unresolved. Picking one and presenting it as settled would be the most damaging thing this site could do.
• Collect anything about you. The calculator runs entirely in your browser. Your deposit, your dates and your rent are never sent anywhere, because there is nowhere to send them — no account, no database, no server. See the privacy policy.
• Give legal advice. It reports what a statute says and does arithmetic. It cannot tell you how a court in your county will read your facts.

How it is paid for

The site is free and carries no advertising at the time of writing. It may carry advertising later, and this section will be updated to say so plainly when it does. Nothing on the site is a paid placement, and no state page has been written to favour any product or service.

Corrections

If a rule here is wrong or out of date, that matters more than anything else on this page. Tell me and I will check it against the statute and fix the source record, which updates every page that depends on it.Contact details are here.