Landlord Atlas

What late fees can a landlord charge in Mississippi?

Verified July 11, 2026 All Mississippi topics →

Mississippi sets no cap on residential late fees and mandates no grace period — no statute regulates the amount, timing, or structure of late fees at all.

The one statutory hook is the definition of rent: Miss. Code Ann. 89-8-7(1)(k) counts late fees as rent only when they are 'required to be paid under the rental agreement,' so a fee written into the lease can be demanded and pursued as rent — including in the 3-day nonpayment termination notice under 89-8-13(5)(a) and the eviction that follows — while a fee that appears nowhere in the lease has no basis at all. That 3-day nonpayment window is a termination-notice precondition, not a grace period: nothing in Mississippi law delays a lease-based late fee from accruing the day after rent is due. With no statutory ceiling, the only limit on the amount is ordinary contract law on liquidated damages.

Mississippi late fees at a glance

Statutory cap No statutory cap (see reasonableness standard and notes)
Mandatory grace period None mandated statewide
Must be in the lease Not addressed by statute
Daily fees No statute addresses late-fee structure or timing; daily fees are a lease-drafting matter bounded only by common-law liquidated-damages principles. The chapter's only late-fee language is definitional: 'rent' includes 'any late fees that are required to be paid under the rental agreement by a defaulting tenant' (Miss. Code Ann. 89-8-7(1)(k)).
Reasonableness standard No statutory reasonableness standard or percentage cap exists — the chapter regulates neither the amount nor the timing of late fees (negative check run against the full current chapter). Enforceability is governed by ordinary contract and liquidated-damages principles; percentage figures circulating on landlord sites have no Mississippi statutory basis.

Notes and caveats

statutory_cap and grace_period_days both null — the chapter is silent on late-fee amount and timing (negative sweep of the full current chapter; 'late fee' appears only in the 89-8-7(1)(k) rent definition, plus eviction-affidavit mechanics in ch. 7 for non-dwelling tenancies). must_be_in_lease null rather than true: no statute conditions charging a fee on a written lease; the in-the-lease requirement is the contract-law consequence of 89-8-7(1)(k)'s 'required to be paid under the rental agreement' phrasing — page copy should explain the distinction rather than assert a statutory writing requirement. Trap to expect (SC/AZ-style): the 3-day nonpayment notice of 89-8-13(5)(a) — or the pre-2022 5-day figure from repealed ch. 7 procedure — recast as a 'statutory grace period'; both framings are wrong. 89-8-7(1)(k) double-read on HB 1200 (2025) enrolled text and the AG PDF (clause added by SB 2473, Laws 2018 ch. 446); the 2025 re-enactment kept it verbatim.

Statute citations

How this record was verified: Mississippi's official code compilation is LexisNexis-published and JS-rendered (lexisnexis.com/hottopics/mscode redirects to advance.lexis.com), so verification ran on official fetchable state sources reconciled with mirrors: enrolled session-law texts on the Legislature's billstatus.ls.state.ms.us (SB 2461/Laws 2022 ch. 501 eff. 2022-04-21; SB 2328/Laws 2025 ch. 460 eff. 2025-04-10; HB 1200/Laws 2025 ch. 474 eff. 2025-07-01; SB 2473/Laws 2018 ch. 446 eff. 2018-07-01) plus the MS Attorney General's consumer-guide PDF reproducing the full pre-2022 act text, each load-bearing figure reconciled verbatim against Justia (2025 code edition) and FindLaw (current through 2025-01-01): 45-day deposit return with its three-element trigger and $200 bad-faith penalty (89-8-21, unamended since Laws 1991 ch. 478 — three matching reads), 30-day month-to-month and 7-day week-to-week termination notice (89-8-19, three reads), 3-day nonpayment termination notice and 14-day cure notice (89-8-13, official + mirror), rent-definition late-fee clause (89-8-7(1)(k), official + AG PDF), and the municipal/county rent-regulation preemption clauses (21-17-5(2)(h) and 19-3-40(3)(g), FindLaw + Justia matching verbatim). Negative checks (no deposit cap, no interest/escrow, no entry statute, no late-fee statute, no rent-increase-notice statute) were run against the complete current chapter assembled from the AG PDF (pre-2022 sections) and all amending enrolled acts. Legislature per-section bill indexes swept for every 89-8 section, 2018-2026, and the full 2026 all-measures index searched: no live bills; HB 442, HB 499 and SB 2012 (2026) all died in committee 2026-02-03. A same-day (2026-07-11) in-app browser session reached the official Lexis compilation's search results, sight-confirming the chapter's current compiled span (§§ 89-8-1 — 89-8-45), the verbatim opening text of 89-8-21(1)-(2), and 89-8-13's post-2022 structure including the (5)(a) nonpayment clause; the full-text section pages are CAPTCHA-gated, so complete Lexis sight-reads of 89-8-21/-13/-19 and the 21-17-5(2)(h) lettering remain open carry-forwards, with the encoding resting on the reconciled official sources above.