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Calculating legally compliant rent late fees across U.S. states
- hrgdevBuilds 11mo agoI 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 11mo agoI 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.
- hrgdevBuilds 11mo ago[dead]
- axus 11mo agoI 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.
- terminalshort 11mo agoIt's a tool, and like any tool it should be as neutral as possible.
- limagnolia 11mo agoOr landlords who want to follow the law, but aren't sure what it is, trying to make sure they are doing things right.
- ryandrake 11mo agoThis 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 11mo agoEverybody 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 11mo 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 11mo agoMy 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…)
- limagnolia 11mo agoUtah 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 11mo agoNew Hampshire has the same bug.
- corndoge 11mo agoOther states do as well.
- gruez 11mo agoGiven 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 11mo agoI 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 11mo agoVibe-coding webapps raise more money
- gruez 11mo agosee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45486035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45486035 tl;dr: they pivoted from offering services adjacent to "learn to code" (among other things) to vibecoding
- deleted 11mo ago
- vjekm 11mo ago[flagged]
- gruez 11mo agoMost people aren't lawyers and therefore won't know what statues to read, so they'll need to search/ask AI, which is pretty much what this site does.
- redmattred 11mo agoCurious what your process for gathering and verifying the legal information was
- bpt3 11mo agoBased 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.
- hrgdevBuilds 11mo ago[dead]
- josefritzishere 11mo agoSounds like a great tool. But it's sad that it needs to exist.
- grafmax 11mo agoOur 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 11mo agoReal 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 11mo agoYep. 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 11mo agoSad 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).
- grafmax 11mo agoThese leases generally are not a contract between equals. One party owns extra housing. The other owns none and gets charged for this fact. It’s institutionalized exploitation. Legal, sure. People being unable to pay for a basic necessity while others have so much that they can profit off it - its not unreasonable to call this “sad”.
- ecshafer 11mo agoThere are laws at the county and city levels as well as state levels. So this is insufficient.
- hrgdevBuilds 11mo ago[dead]
- goldenCeasar 11mo agoThis looks something that could work nicely with my calculation DSL (https://github.com/amuta/kumi https://github.com/amuta/kumi) This is one of the scenarios that was in my head: auditable/exportable/reusable tax-related calculations schemas.
- hrgdevBuilds 11mo ago[dead]
- pseudocomposer 11mo agoAt 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).
- hrgdevBuilds 11mo ago[dead]
- shimmers 11mo agoBeing 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 11mo agofor nj the legal source brings up a 404. https://www.nj.gov/dca/divisions/codes/publications/pdf_lti/t_l_biblio.pdf https://www.nj.gov/dca/divisions/codes/publications/pdf_lti/...
- hrgdevBuilds 11mo ago[dead]
- dotnet00 11mo agoI 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 11mo agoPeople 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.
- dotnet00 11mo agoThis is simply not true, the vast majority of people continued to pay their bills and rent on time through Covid despite financial pressures and suspension of most penalties. The cases of abuse are so egregious precisely because most people were just normal well meaning people doing their best to meet their obligations.
- grafmax 11mo agoThere’s really nothing lazier than making money simply by owning more than others. Such a person doesn’t have to produce anything of value. They can simply just use their outsized wealth to buy something others need, then charge money for access to it. This drains cash from those who have no other option than working for a living while their own coffers grow. Not just lazy, this actively makes the economy less efficient by increasing the cost of living and necessitating higher wages from employers simply to finance parasitism, which means value-producing businesses become less competitive also.
- terminalshort 11mo agoI can think of one thing lazier. Complaining on HN about what other people do to make money while having no understanding whatsoever of the business they engage in.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- hrgdevBuilds 11mo ago[dead]