What late fees can a landlord charge in Tennessee?

Verified July 9, 2026 All Tennessee topics →

Pending legislation — not yet law. The rules on this page reflect current law only. The following bill would change it if enacted:

SB 961 / HB 955 (114th General Assembly) — 'Affordable Housing and Tenant Protection Act' — Would repeal the residential half of the rent-control preemption in T.C.A. § 66-35-102, allowing local rent control adopted by a two-thirds vote with a local rent agency, plus a THDA gap-financing program. Would flip local_control_preempted for residential property if ever enacted.Status: Not enacted. HB 955 was deferred in the House Cities & Counties Subcommittee to the 'January 2027 calendar' on 2026-03-18 — with the 114th GA adjourned sine die, this is effectively a soft kill; watch for a 115th GA refile. (checked 2026-07-09).

In Tennessee's 19 large URLTA counties, late fees are capped at 10% of the rent actually past due, and no fee may be charged during a five-day grace period — with a counting rule that trips people up: the DUE DATE itself counts as day one, so for rent due on the 1st a fee may be charged on the 6th, not the 7th.

If the fifth day falls on a Sunday or legal holiday, no fee may be imposed as long as the tenant pays on the next business day. The cap covers any charge 'however described,' so relabeled administrative or daily fees can't evade it. None of this applies in the other 76 counties, where no statute caps late fees or mandates a grace period — a distinction most Tennessee summaries miss, with many landlord blogs wrongly presenting the 10%/5-day rule as statewide. The 10% base is the past-due amount, not the full month's rent, so partial payment shrinks the maximum fee.

Tennessee late fees at a glance

Statutory cap	10% of the amount of rent past due (T.C.A. § 66-28-201(d)) — URLTA counties (over 75,000 population, 2010 census) only
Mandatory grace period	5 days
Must be in the lease	Not addressed by statute
Daily fees	The cap reaches 'any charge or fee, however described' for late payment — anti-relabeling language that folds daily or 'administrative' fees into the 10% ceiling in URLTA counties. Non-URLTA counties: lease terms and common-law penalty doctrine only.
Reasonableness standard	In URLTA counties the hard 10% cap governs. In the 76 non-URLTA counties there is no statutory cap or grace period at all — only general contract/liquidated-damages principles.

Notes and caveats

grace_period_days is 5 with the inclusive-count nuance (fee chargeable on day 6) carried in the summary because 'five-day grace' is universally misread as fee-on-day-7. The statewide-application myth is TN's FL §83.57-class trap: the 2013 amendment (Pub. Ch. 206) that some sources credit with extending the rule statewide actually just deleted an old public-housing carve-out and expressly applies only where chapter 66-28 applies — verified from the official act PDF. must_be_in_lease is null: § 66-28-201(d) does not condition the fee on a lease provision (unlike AZ/VA), though the contract-law baseline still requires some agreed basis to charge; encoded null to avoid asserting a statutory element that is not in the text. No amendments 2014-2026; no pending bills found.

Statute citations

T.C.A. § 66-28-201 (current-code mirror; read twice, fetches matched) (d) Unofficial mirror
2011 Pub. Ch. 272, § 4 (official session law enacting the grace-period text) Official source
2013 Pub. Ch. 206 (official session law — confirms the rule was NOT extended statewide) Official source

How this record was verified: Tennessee's official code is published via LexisNexis without stable deep links (GA-class sourcing situation), so verification pairs current code mirrors with official session-law PDFs from the Tennessee Secretary of State: T.C.A. §§ 66-28-102, 66-28-201, 66-28-301, 66-28-403, 66-28-512, and 66-35-102 read verbatim on the Justia 2024-edition and FindLaw (current through 2024-01-02) mirrors — §§ 66-28-102, 66-28-201, and 66-28-403 each read twice via independent fetches that matched — with every recent amendment traced to the official act text: 2011 Pub. Ch. 272 (inspection scheme, late-fee rule, entry rewrite), 2012 Pub. Chs. 847 and 887, 2013 Pub. Ch. 206, and 2021 Pub. Ch. 182 (census freeze + county preemption), all read from publications.tnsosfiles.com PDFs. Bill statuses (SB 961/HB 955 et al.) checked on official capitol.tn.gov pages 2026-07-09.