What late fees can a landlord charge in Arkansas?

Verified July 10, 2026 All Arkansas topics →

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

SB 501 (2025 RS) — 'Tenant Possessions Recovery Act' — Would have required a landlord to give a tenant at least 14 days' written notice before the scheduled repossession date after a court issues a writ of possession, and created a process for tenants to recover personal possessions left behind. Adjacent to, not within, the four v1 topics, but it was the session's principal tenant-side bill.Status: Dead. Filed 2025-03-18, amended and re-referred to Senate Judiciary 2025-03-20, died in committee at the 2025-05-05 sine die adjournment. The 2026 fiscal session was appropriations-only; watch for a refile in the 2027 regular session (Arkansas holds regular sessions in odd years). (checked 2026-07-10).

Arkansas sets no cap on residential late fees and mandates no grace period — the fee is whatever the lease provides, policed only by the general contract-law rule against penalty clauses.

The state's landlord-tenant statutes treat late charges simply as rent: the 2007 act defines rent to include 'late charges whether payable in lump sum or periodic payments,' and rent is payable without demand or notice at the time and place the parties agreed. Two five-day rules are routinely misread as a grace period, and both are eviction rules instead: if rent goes unpaid for five days past the due date the landlord may terminate the rental agreement, and unpaid rent five days past due automatically constitutes legal notice that eviction proceedings may begin. Neither says anything about when a late fee may accrue. Arkansas also has a criminal footnote no other state shares: a tenant who fails to pay rent and then refuses to vacate after ten days' written notice commits a misdemeanor under the failure-to-vacate statute — an eviction oddity, not a fee rule.

Arkansas 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 daily late fees. The 2007 act's definition of 'rent' expressly includes 'late charges whether payable in lump sum or periodic payments' (A.C.A. 18-17-301(10)), so agreed late charges — including recurring ones — are collectible as rent; the only check is the common-law rule against penalty clauses.
Reasonableness standard	No statutory cap, grace period, or reasonableness standard anywhere in Arkansas law. General contract/liquidated-damages doctrine (a charge grossly disproportionate to actual damage risks unenforceability as a penalty) is the only backstop, and no Arkansas statute codifies it for residential leases.

Notes and caveats

statutory_cap and grace_period_days are null because no provision exists anywhere in chapters 18-16 or 18-17 — chapter 18-17 was read in FULL (all sections, 18-17-101 through 18-17-913) to make this a verified negative, and the deposit subchapter contains nothing on fees. must_be_in_lease is null to avoid asserting a statutory element that does not exist: no statute conditions late fees on a lease clause, though as contract law a fee needs an agreed basis (18-17-401(b)(1) makes rent due 'without demand or notice' only 'at the time and place agreed upon by the parties,' and the 18-17-301(10) definition folds late charges into rent). Traps documented: (1) the 18-17-701(b) five-day termination right and 18-17-901(b) five-day automatic eviction notice are eviction-side rules, not fee-accrual rules; (2) unpaid 'late charges' are rent by definition, so nonpayment of an agreed late fee can itself ground termination — sharper than most states; (3) the 18-16-101 failure-to-vacate misdemeanor (10 days' notice, $1-$25/day fine) is criminal-eviction context only. Correction to the research lead preserved for the reviewer: the rent-due-without-demand rule is 18-17-401(b), not 18-17-701(b).

Statute citations

A.C.A. § 18-17-401 (rent payable without demand or notice at the time and place agreed; read twice, fetches matched) (b)(1) Unofficial mirror
A.C.A. § 18-17-301 (definitions — 'rent' includes late charges, confirming fees are lease terms; read twice, fetches matched) (10) Unofficial mirror
A.C.A. § 18-17-701 (5-day nonpayment TERMINATION right — an eviction rule commonly misread as a late-fee grace period; read twice, fetches matched) (b) Unofficial mirror

How this record was verified: Arkansas's official code is published via a LexisNexis portal without stable deep links (GA/TN-class sourcing), so verification pairs two independent current-code mirrors with official arkleg.state.ar.us session-law PDFs: every load-bearing section (A.C.A. 18-16-303, 18-16-304, 18-16-305, 18-16-306, 18-17-201, 18-17-202, 18-17-401, 18-17-602, 18-17-704, 18-17-705, 14-16-601) was read verbatim on FindLaw (current through 2024-03-28) and independently re-read on the Justia 2024 Arkansas Code edition (via browser; Justia returned 403 to direct fetches), with all reads matching; chapter 18-17 was additionally read in FULL from a mirrored chapter PDF for negative checks (no late-fee, rent-increase, or entry-notice provision exists). Every amendment was traced to the official act text read from arkleg PDFs: Act 559 of 2009 (deposit return 30->60 days; 18-17-501 rewritten to defer to 18-16-301 et seq.), Act 1052 of 2021 (18-17-502 habitability, context), and Act 459 of 2025 (preemption expanded to application fees and deposits). Corroborated against the Arkansas Attorney General's landlord-tenant page (official state source) and Legal Aid of Arkansas. 2025 regular session swept for landlord-tenant acts (only Act 459 touches an encoded field; SB 501 died in committee 2025-05-05 per the official arkleg bill page); the 2026 fiscal session was appropriations-only.