Does the deposit have to be in an interest-bearing account in Georgia?

No statute addresses whether the account must bear interest. A landlord or the landlord's agent holding a security deposit must deposit it "in an escrow account established only for that purpose in any bank or lending institution subject to regulation by this state or any agency of the United States government", hold it "in trust for the tenant", and inform the tenant in writing of the location of that account (§ 44-7-31). As an alternative, the landlord may post and maintain an effective surety bond with the clerk of the superior court in the county where the dwelling unit is located, in the amount of the deposits held or $50,000, whichever is less; the bond runs to the benefit of any tenant injured by a violation of the return duty, and the surety may withdraw on 30 days' written notice without being released from liability already existing (§ 44-7-32).

What happens if a landlord does not pay deposit interest in Georgia?

No penalty reaches deposit interest, because no interest is owed. The escrow-or-bond duty is enforced through § 44-7-35(a): a landlord is not entitled to retain any portion of a deposit where the money was neither escrowed under § 44-7-31 nor bonded under § 44-7-32, the initial damage list was not given, and the final damage list was not made available.

Does a landlord have to pay interest on a security deposit in Georgia?

Verified August 28, 2026 All Georgia topics →

Enacted but not yet in force. This page reflects the law in force today. The following measure has been signed and takes effect on the date shown:

SB 406 (2026), Ga. L. 2026, p. 988 — the Georgia Property Owners' Bill of Rights Act — Already SIGNED but not yet effective: on January 1, 2027, new O.C.G.A. 44-7-50(e) lets a court, on motion and after a hearing, make all records of a dispossessory proceeding unavailable to the public when the tenant won the case, when the tenant has paid the judgment in full including interest and costs, or when seven years have passed since a dismissal or a paid-in-full judgment. The landlord may still pursue any amounts owed in a separate action or through collections. The rest of the act concerns homeowners' and property owners' associations, not landlord-tenant law. Status: Signed 2026; section 9 makes the dispossessory-records provision effective January 1, 2027 (only the association attorney-fee section took effect July 1, 2026). The answers shown do not yet reflect it. (checked August 16, 2026).

Georgia does not require landlords to pay tenants interest on a security deposit, and the word "interest" does not appear anywhere in the state's security-deposit article.

Cited to O.C.G.A. § 44-7-31 (placement of security deposit in trust in escrow account; notice of account location) and 4 more cited sources · Verified August 28, 2026

Georgia does require custody, with a choice of routes: the deposit goes into an escrow account opened only for that purpose at a bank or lending institution regulated by the state or a federal agency, held in trust for the tenant, with written notice to the tenant of where the account is (§ 44-7-31); or the landlord posts a surety bond with the superior court clerk instead (§ 44-7-32). Both duties fall away for one defined class of landlord, and that exemption is widely mis-described as an "owner-occupied" exemption. It is not. Section 44-7-36 lifts the escrow, bond, damage-list and penalty sections for units owned by a natural person where that person, his or her spouse and his or her minor children collectively own ten or fewer rental units — and the exemption disappears for any unit whose management, including rent collection, is done by a third party for a fee.

Georgia deposit interest at a glance

Interest owed to the tenant	No — no statute addresses it
How the rate is set	No rate exists — there is no interest duty
Current figure	No published figure exists
Rate rules	No rate rules — no duty exists
Accrual and payment	No payment duty exists
Who and what is covered	No statutory conditions stated — see the summary and notes
Statute controls where or how the deposit is held	Yes
Interest-bearing account required	No statute addresses whether the account must bear interest
Custody rules	A landlord or the landlord's agent holding a security deposit must deposit it "in an escrow account established only for that purpose in any bank or lending institution subject to regulation by this state or any agency of the United States government", hold it "in trust for the tenant", and inform the tenant in writing of the location of that account (§ 44-7-31). As an alternative, the landlord may post and maintain an effective surety bond with the clerk of the superior court in the county where the dwelling unit is located, in the amount of the deposits held or $50,000, whichever is less; the bond runs to the benefit of any tenant injured by a violation of the return duty, and the surety may withdraw on 30 days' written notice without being released from liability already existing (§ 44-7-32). Neither route says anything about what the account earns — the word "interest" does not appear anywhere in the article. A defined class of small landlords is exempt from both routes under § 44-7-36.
Penalty for violation	No penalty reaches deposit interest, because no interest is owed. The escrow-or-bond duty is enforced through § 44-7-35(a): a landlord is not entitled to retain any portion of a deposit where the money was neither escrowed under § 44-7-31 nor bonded under § 44-7-32, the initial damage list was not given, and the final damage list was not made available. Late lists or statements work "a forfeiture of all the landlord's rights to withhold any portion of the security deposit" (§ 44-7-35(b)). A landlord who fails to return a deposit that is due is liable for "three times the sum improperly withheld plus reasonable attorney's fees", reduced to the sum alone if the landlord shows by a preponderance of the evidence that the withholding was not intentional and resulted from a bona fide error occurring in spite of procedures reasonably designed to avoid such errors (§ 44-7-35(c)). Landlords exempt under § 44-7-36 are outside § 44-7-35 altogether.
Local rules	None noted for this state

Cite this page: "Landlord Atlas, Georgia Security Deposit Interest Laws (verified August 28, 2026), landlordatlas.com/laws/deposit-interest/georgia/" — free to cite and quote with a link (how these records are verified). Everything above is cited in the citations section below.

Check the verified Georgia answer — and every state and city that differs — in the deposit interest calculator — free, no signup, built on the same verified Georgia law as this page.

Notes and caveats

What § 44-7-36 actually says — The section reads in full: "Code Sections 44-7-31, 44-7-32, 44-7-33, and 44-7-35 shall not apply to rental units which are owned by a natural person if such natural person, his or her spouse, and his or her minor children collectively own ten or fewer rental units; provided, however, that this exemption does not apply to units for which management, including rent collection, is performed by third persons, natural or otherwise, for a fee." Three elements, none of them owner-occupancy: the owner must be a natural person, so an entity-owned unit never qualifies; the count is ten or fewer and aggregates the owner's spouse and minor children; and a paid third-party manager destroys the exemption whatever the unit count. The words "owner-occupied" appear nowhere in § 44-7-36 or anywhere else in the article.
What the exemption does and does not lift — Section 44-7-36 lifts only §§ 44-7-31, 44-7-32, 44-7-33 and 44-7-35 — the escrow duty, the bond alternative, the damage-list duties and the treble-damages penalty. The definitions in § 44-7-30, the two-months cap in § 44-7-30.1, the 30-day return duty in § 44-7-34 and § 44-7-37 still apply to an exempt landlord.
Judgment interest is not deposit interest — The Department of Community Affairs handbook tells a tenant suing over a wrongfully withheld deposit that the suit may also seek interest on the amount while it was wrongfully withheld, along with attorney fees and filing costs. That is interest on a sum a court finds was wrongly kept — it arises from the litigation, not from the deposit. Georgia has no statutory entitlement to interest on a deposit that is being held properly, and the two are easy to confuse.
The escrow account has no yield condition — Section 44-7-31 names the institution (a bank or lending institution subject to state or federal regulation), the account's dedicated purpose, the trust character of the holding, and the written notice of location. It says nothing about the account bearing interest and nothing about who would own any earnings. The same is true of the bond route, where there is no account at all.
Currency — Section 44-7-36 has not been amended since it was enacted by Ga. L. 1976, p. 1372, § 6. Section 44-7-31 was last amended in 2006 (HB 1273) and § 44-7-32 in 2000; §§ 44-7-34 and 44-7-35 were last amended in 2018 (HB 834). The two-months cap in § 44-7-30.1 was added by the Safe at Home Act, Ga. L. 2024, p. 91 (HB 404), effective July 1, 2024, and applies to residential lease agreements entered into or renewed on or after that date. No 2025 or 2026 change touches deposit interest.

Common questions: Georgia deposit interest

Each answer is the verified value from the table above, restated as a direct answer. Free to quote with a link to this page.

What is the Georgia security deposit interest rate right now?: No published figure exists.
When must a landlord pay or credit deposit interest in Georgia?: No payment duty exists.
Does the deposit have to be in an interest-bearing account in Georgia?: No statute addresses whether the account must bear interest. A landlord or the landlord's agent holding a security deposit must deposit it "in an escrow account established only for that purpose in any bank or lending institution subject to regulation by this state or any agency of the United States government", hold it "in trust for the tenant", and inform the tenant in writing of the location of that account (§ 44-7-31). As an alternative, the landlord may post and maintain an effective surety bond with the clerk of the superior court in the county where the dwelling unit is located, in the amount of the deposits held or $50,000, whichever is less; the bond runs to the benefit of any tenant injured by a violation of the return duty, and the surety may withdraw on 30 days' written notice without being released from liability already existing (§ 44-7-32).
What happens if a landlord does not pay deposit interest in Georgia?: No penalty reaches deposit interest, because no interest is owed. The escrow-or-bond duty is enforced through § 44-7-35(a): a landlord is not entitled to retain any portion of a deposit where the money was neither escrowed under § 44-7-31 nor bonded under § 44-7-32, the initial damage list was not given, and the final damage list was not made available.
Do any cities or counties in Georgia have their own deposit-interest rules?: None noted for this state.

Citations

O.C.G.A. § 44-7-31 (placement of security deposit in trust in escrow account; notice of account location) (verified 2026) Official source
O.C.G.A. § 44-7-32 (surety bond as an alternative to escrow) · (a) (verified 2026) Official source
O.C.G.A. § 44-7-35 (penalties) · (a), (b), (c) (verified 2026) Official source
O.C.G.A. § 44-7-36 (exemption for small natural-person landlords) (verified 2026) Official source
Georgia Landlord-Tenant Handbook (Georgia Department of Community Affairs) (verified 2026) Official source

How this record was verified: Direct read of the complete security-deposit article of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, title 44, chapter 7, article 2 — §§ 44-7-30, 44-7-30.1, 44-7-31, 44-7-32, 44-7-33, 44-7-34, 44-7-35, 44-7-36 and 44-7-37, all nine sections read in full with their credit lines and editor's notes — searched for "interest", "interest-bearing", "accrue" and "per annum", which return no occurrences of any kind in the article; and the Georgia Department of Community Affairs Landlord-Tenant Handbook read as an independent official statement of the same escrow-or-bond duty and of the § 44-7-36 trigger. Georgia's official code portal serves no readable statutory text without a live session, so the article's text was taken from a current-code reproduction and confirmed section by section against the Department of Community Affairs handbook and against the credit lines the reproduction prints.