About DepositLens
DepositLens is an independent, ad-supported reference for American renters. We track security-deposit rules across all 50 states and the District of Columbia — deposit caps, return deadlines, interest requirements, and the penalties landlords face for withholding in bad faith — and turn them into plain-English state guides and a free calculator.
The site exists because the same question gets asked at the worst possible moment: moving day, or the day the deposit was supposed to arrive. The answers live in state statutes that are written for lawyers, scattered across housing-agency pages, and reprinted inaccurately all over the internet. We collect the primary numbers, keep them dated, and show our sources so you can check our work.
How we build the state pages
Each state guide starts from the state's landlord-tenant statutes and official guidance from state and city housing authorities. Where a rule is set annually — interest rates announced by a state banking department, for example — we say so on the page and mark the number for re-verification. Every page carries a last-reviewed date. When a legislature changes a rule, we update the page and note the change; when we make a mistake, a correction note goes in its place. Nothing on this site is legally drafted for your situation, and no page here is a substitute for advice from a lawyer or your state housing agency.
How we pay for the site
DepositLens is free to use, runs no accounts, and does not sell data — the calculator works entirely in your browser. The site is supported by advertising and, in some guides, clearly labeled referrals to services we have judged useful. Advertising and referral relationships never determine what we say about a state's law; the statutes do that. Our editorial policy page explains the full rules, and our disclosures page lists current partners.
Why trust these numbers over a search result? Because every page names its statute and its review date, and the raw law is always one click away from the summary. We would rather show you the source than ask for your faith — which is also why state pages flag the figures that change annually instead of presenting them as settled.
Contact
Found a number that does not match your housing authority's current guidance, or a rule that changed before we caught it? Corrections get the fastest treatment of anything we read — write to [email protected] and tell us the state, the number, and where you found the better figure.
What we are building next
The state guides and calculator are the foundation. On the roadmap: city-level pages for the rent-controlled cities that add their own interest and cap rules, a landlord-side mirror of every guide (the same laws read from the other side of the lease), and periodic re-verification sweeps of every annually announced rate in the country. If a number on this site ever disagrees with your housing authority's current guidance, their figure wins and our correction note follows within days — that policy is written into our editorial standards, not just practiced.