Nevada Application Fee Refund Law 2025: Rules Explained

This refund and minor-fee rule arrived as one section of a broader bill aimed at rental fee transparency, alongside separate provisions requiring rent to be disclosed as a single all-in figure and requiring a fee-free payment method.

[Cite: Assembly Bill 121, Section 4.5]

Those other provisions get their own coverage elsewhere; this article focuses specifically on what changed for application, credit-report, and background-check fees.

A landlord who collects from a prospective tenant any fee to apply to rent a dwelling unit, including an application fee, a fee to obtain a credit report, or a fee to obtain a background check, has to refund the fee to the prospective tenant if the landlord rents the dwelling unit to a different prospective tenant and does not conduct the activity for which the fee was collected.

[Cite: Nevada Revised Statute section 118A.306, added by 2025 Nevada Statutes, page 1413]

Both conditions in that sentence have to be true. That's a narrower rule than it first sounds like.

An applicant who paid a fee, had their background check actually run, and then didn't get the unit because it went to someone else isn't automatically owed a refund under this specific rule.

[Cite: Nevada Revised Statute section 118A.306]

The statute's refund trigger isn't tied to whether the applicant got the unit; it's tied to whether the landlord performed the activity the fee paid for. A landlord who ran the check and made a normal selection decision among qualified applicants has satisfied what the fee was collected for, even if that particular applicant wasn't chosen.

The refund obligation attaches specifically to a landlord who didn't conduct the activity, meaning the credit check, background check, or application processing itself, for which the applicant paid.

[Cite: Nevada Revised Statute section 118A.306]

A landlord who collected a fee, then rented the unit to a faster-moving applicant before ever running the paying applicant's check, is squarely in the situation this statute targets. That's a materially different scenario from running every application through screening and picking among qualified results.

A landlord processing several applications in parallel and filling a unit before working through every applicant's paperwork needs to track, for each applicant who paid a fee, whether their specific check was actually run before the unit went to someone else.

[Cite: Nevada Revised Statute section 118A.306]

That's a real operational distinction, not just a legal technicality. A property manager who runs checks in batches, or who stops processing once a strong applicant is found, is more likely to have unprocessed, fee-paid applications sitting around when a unit fills, which is exactly the scenario this refund rule reaches.

A landlord can't collect an application fee, a fee to obtain a credit report, or a fee to obtain a background check for a minor who's a member of the household of the prospective tenant.

[Cite: Nevada Revised Statute section 118A.306]

Unlike the refund rule, this isn't conditional on whether the unit gets rented to someone else or whether a check gets run. It's a flat prohibition on collecting these fees for a minor household member at all, regardless of what happens with the application afterward.

A landlord charging a flat per-occupant application fee that includes every household member listed on the application, including minor children, is charging for something this statute doesn't permit for those minors specifically.

[Cite: Nevada Revised Statute section 118A.306]

That's a common enough fee structure that it's worth flagging directly: a landlord using a per-person fee schedule needs a mechanism to exclude minors from that count, not just a general awareness that fees for children aren't allowed.

The minor exclusion applies to a minor who's a member of the household of the prospective tenant, tying the exclusion to household membership rather than to whoever happens to be listed as a co-applicant.

[Cite: Nevada Revised Statute section 118A.306]

A landlord evaluating whether a specific fee is permissible needs to confirm the minor is actually part of that prospective tenant's household, as opposed to, for instance, a minor being screened independently for some other reason.

Nevada sets no statewide dollar or actual-cost ceiling on what a landlord can charge an adult applicant for an application fee, a credit-report fee, or a background-check fee.

[Cite: Ezel.ai, Nevada rental application and screening fee requirements survey]

That's true both before and after this bill. This law changed the refund trigger and added the minor exclusion; it didn't touch how much a landlord can charge an adult applicant in the first place, which is worth stating plainly since the two issues get conflated in casual summaries of "Nevada's new screening fee law."

The statute doesn't specify a number of days within which an owed refund has to be issued once the refund conditions are met.

[Cite: Ezel.ai, Nevada rental application and screening fee requirements survey]

That's a genuine gap, not an oversight in this research. A landlord who owes a refund under this section is working without a specific statutory clock, and should treat "promptly once the situation is confirmed" as the reasonable standard rather than assuming any particular number of days is automatically safe.

Unlike the rent-disclosure provisions elsewhere in this same bill, which specify a civil action and $250 in statutory damages per deceptive violation, this refund and minor-fee section doesn't state its own specific remedy or penalty.

[Cite: Assembly Bill 121, Section 4.5]

That doesn't mean a violation carries no consequence; it means the sources reviewed for this article don't clearly extend that particular statutory-damages remedy to a violation of this section specifically, so this article isn't going to claim it does.

Since the refund trigger depends on whether a specific activity was actually conducted for a specific applicant, a landlord's practical protection is a clear record of when each applicant's credit or background check was run, not just whether the applicant ultimately got the unit.

[Cite: Las Vegas 1 Real Estate, "Nevada Law Now Requires Landlords to Refund Rental Application Fees"]

A landlord who can show a check was completed before the unit was rented to someone else has a straightforward answer to a refund request under this section; a landlord without that record is in a weaker position to establish the check was actually done.

A property manager using third-party screening software that auto-charges every listed occupant on an application needs to confirm that system doesn't charge minors as part of a household application.

[Cite: Nevada Revised Statute section 118A.306]

That's a system-configuration issue as much as a policy one; a landlord who's aware of the minor exclusion but hasn't checked whether their screening platform's default settings actually exclude minors from the charge is still exposed to the same compliance gap.

The practical starting point is auditing current fee schedules for any per-occupant or per-household-member charge to confirm minors are excluded, and reviewing screening workflows to ensure checks are run promptly enough that a stalled or batched application doesn't turn into an unprocessed, fee-paid application sitting around when a unit fills.

For any refund request under this section, confirming and documenting whether the specific applicant's check was actually completed, rather than relying on whether that applicant ultimately got the unit, is what determines whether a refund is actually owed.