Charge What It Costs You

Every California landlord who has looked this up came away with a number. Sixty-five dollars, or sixty-nine, or sixty-two — it depends which page you landed on. They can't all be right.

They're all arithmetic. Civil Code §1950.6 sets a thirty-dollar base from 1998 and says the landlord may adjust it annually with the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The landlord computes it. No state agency publishes a current ceiling. Every figure you've seen is somebody's calculation that you adopted without checking their math.

Which turns out not to matter, because the ceiling was never your limit.

The binding constraint is the sentence before it: your actual out-of-pocket cost of gathering information about the applicant, plus the reasonable value of your time. The CPI number caps that. It doesn't replace it.

So charge what the screening report costs you. If it costs thirty-eight dollars, charge thirty-eight. Pull the invoice, charge the invoice, attach the invoice to the itemized receipt you're already required to give. There is no argument left to have. You cannot be over a ceiling you aren't near, and you cannot have collected more than your cost when your cost is stapled to the receipt.

That's the whole rule, and it costs you nothing. The screening fee was never the profit center.

If you decide otherwise

I want to be honest about what you're risking, because the obvious answer is wrong.

Nobody is going to bankrupt you over a screening fee. Standing alone, an overcharge is worth the overcharge — a twenty-dollar refund, a small claims filing nobody bothers to bring. If that were the whole exposure, you could reasonably ignore it.

It isn't the whole exposure, for two reasons.

You didn't overcharge an applicant. You overcharged every applicant. The same fee, the same way, for as long as you've owned the property. A trivial individual claim becomes an aggregate one, and that's the standard opening for an unfair business practices claim seeking restitution across everyone who paid. Confirm with counsel how that's actually been applied to small owners — I suspect it's mostly been pointed at large operators — but the structure is sitting there.

And the one that matters more: the screening fee is rarely the case. It's how someone builds the case.

Consider what an overcharge hands an investigator. It's documentary — the receipt exists, and you're the one who produced it. It's uniform, so a single document establishes a pattern across every applicant. And it requires no proof of intent, no conflicting testimony, no credibility contest. It's arithmetic.

So before anyone reaches the contested question — whether you treated an applicant differently because of who they were — they have already established, on paper, that you set your own number, that you did it consistently, and that you followed a rule only until it became inconvenient. That framing is worth more to the other side than the refund ever was. It changes who gets believed on the questions that actually carry damages.

The screening fee is too small to sue over and too easy to prove to leave lying around. You aren't protecting yourself from a screening fee claim. You're declining to hand somebody the cheapest available evidence that your process is improvised.

The processing rules that go with the fee — which applicants you can collect from, what you owe the ones you don't select, and when — are a separate discipline, and I've covered them in The Test Is Whether a Policy Exists.

The Backyard Landlord

If you're renting an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) on your own lot, someone is going to hand you cash in your driveway.

That's the failure mode. No invoice, no receipt, no record of what you charged or what it cost you — a number that got set at "fifty bucks, that sounds about right" and then never changed. It doesn't feel like a transaction. It feels like a neighbor handing you money.

Charge what your screening provider charges you, to the dollar. Print the receipt before they arrive. If you're taking cash, write the amount and the date on the receipt and keep a photo of it.

You're one unit with a handful of applicants a year. There is no version of this where the difference is worth the file it opens.