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By Tracie McMillan
Ms. McMillan is a journalist covering business and affordability.
I first met Pauline Lee, a renter in San Francisco and a half-century-long resident of the city, over the phone. She charmed me with her scratchy voice and matter-of-fact pronouncements about the charges showing up on her apartment’s rent ledger.
“I never had no problem with bills until I moved here,” she said.
Ms. Lee was referring to a problem many renters face: a sharp rise in add-on fees, charged on top of rents that Zillow reports have increased by 36 percent since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. These can include long-accepted fees for utilities. But as they’ve expanded to once-included services and broadened to new areas, their critics have begun calling them junk fees.
In Seattle a $42 municipality fee is due monthly at the Viktoria Apartments. An Annapolis, Md., complex charges a mandatory monthly fee of $30 for “trash services — doorstep,” with tenants required to place trash outside their doors nightly for pickup instead of taking it to bins themselves. Martin’s Point, outside Chicago, bills tenants up to $20 a month for common area maintenance, something that has traditionally been covered by rent in multifamily buildings.
While pet fees have long been common in rental units, some landlords are now pushing them to extremes. In Austin, Texas, the Janis complex levies four pet charges totaling about $930 per pet in the first year: a nonrefundable $350 pet fee, a $250 refundable pet deposit, $25 monthly for “pet rent” and up to $30 per pet annually for something referred to as “pet management — third party.” A Florida property, the Reserve at Venice, says pet charges cover “PooPrints,” a DNA testing service for animal excrement that markets itself to landlords as a way to “unlock revenue potential.”
“There’s a whole new pricing scheme in place that is based on decoupling base rent from all of these fees,” said Renee Tapp, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill urban planner who studies housing market concentration.
For many tenants, fees are part of a bait and switch: Tenants apply for an apartment listed at one price, only to find, at lease signing or when they receive an invoice, that they owe their landlord considerably more. The problem has spurred numerous lawsuits across the country and a patchwork of local protections, including a ban on junk fees in rental housing that was passed in Seattle this summer. There have even been junk-fee strikes, like one started by Philadelphia tenants in early October.
Rental fees can be a source of unfair competition, allowing fee-heavy landlords to advertise rental prices that are lower than what they actually charge. That’s one reason the Federal Trade Commission is considering new regulations on the fees that may be charged, when they must be disclosed and whether they should be rolled into the rent.
Federal law doesn’t explicitly require landlords to list their fees. We know about the fees listed above as a result of a $24 million settlement between Greystar, the country’s largest property manager, the Federal Trade Commission and Colorado’s attorney general. Both plaintiffs said the company had used “deceptive” advertising and “bilked” customers through hidden fees. The settlement forced Greystar to list all fees it may charge and to include the cost of fixed, mandatory monthly fees in its advertised price. It does not have to include the price of fees that it says are usage-based.
Across Greystar rental listings nationwide, there are at least 125 named fees, according to an investigation I published with The Guardian U.S. in June. Some apartments carried more than a dozen mandatory add-on fees. I analyzed 60 listings across 10 states and Washington, D.C., and none of the monthly advertised leasing prices included the cost of all mandatory fees. (Greystar told me via email that the company is “proud to lead the industry in enhanced price transparency” and highlighted that it discloses all fees.)
Data from Zillow shows that 60 percent of renters in the United States paid at least one recurring fee, other than a pet fee, in 2025; among Gen Z renters, the figure was 78 percent. A July study of some 1,100 Colorado rental ledgers found tenants faced a monthly average of $143 in fees and fines on top of rent, according to the Urban Institute and the Community Economic Defense Project.
Few of these fees are reflected in advertised rents or in rent statistics. With no public data on rent that includes the myriad fees that are increasingly charged on top of it, said Dr. Tapp, “America’s affordability crisis is even worse than we think.”
Some landlords have turned utilities into add-on fees with what are known as ratio utility billing systems or RUBS. The model enables landlords to evict tenants for failing to pay utility fees. Under RUBS, landlords divide buildingwide costs among apartments with a formula based on apartment size, number of units or number of residents. Tenants can’t lower their bills by using less water, gas or electricity, and they never see how much usage they are billed for. These fees have been the subject of multiple lawsuits in California and tenant campaigns to ban RUBS in Los Angeles and Seattle.
To ensure fair competition, say tenants and consumer advocates, advertised rents must include every mandatory fee. “If an expense is unavoidable, it should be included in the advertised rent,” said Lee Hepner of the American Economic Liberties Project. That’s unlikely to happen unless the Federal Trade Commission requires it.
Just ask Ms. Lee, who is looking to move. I visited her at home in May. Plants lined the windowsills of her junior one-bedroom apartment, and a microsuede sectional crowded up against the kitchen table. I suggested we look at Greystar listings.
When she got to a mandatory ratio utility billing fee, which was listed as a fee but had no dollar amount attached, she squinted at the screen and set her phone down. “I need to know this number before I agree to it,” she said. “What if I can’t afford it?”
This story was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Tracie McMillan is an independent journalist and the author of “The White Bonus.”
