Is there a legal limit on late fees in Minnesota?

8% of the overdue rent payment.

Does a late fee have to be written into the lease in Minnesota?

Yes — in Minnesota a late fee must be stated in the lease.

Can a landlord charge a daily late fee in Minnesota?

The statute does not address fee structure, but no structure — daily, flat, or percentage — may push the total past eight percent of the overdue rent payment.

What late fees can a landlord charge in Minnesota?

Verified October 1, 2026 All Minnesota topics →

Check your municipality. Minnesota does not preempt local rent regulation — city or county ordinances may impose rent caps, notice periods, and fee limits that are stricter than the state law on this page. Verify your municipality's ordinances before relying on any figure below. Verified local pages: St. Paul.

What the state record says

Local rent control is not flatly barred. Minn. Stat. 471.9996 subd. 1 stops any city, county, or town from adopting or renewing rent control on private residential property, but subd. 2 expressly permits it where the ordinance, charter amendment, or law is approved in a GENERAL ELECTION. The exception is live, not theoretical: St. Paul voters approved a 3% annual rent-stabilization cap in November 2021 (effective May 2022), which the city council has since narrowed — most recently on 2025-05-07 (4-3 vote, changes effective 2025-06-13) to permanently exempt units first receiving a certificate of occupancy after 2004-12-31. Minneapolis voters in 2021 authorized their council to draft a rent-stabilization ordinance, but none has been enacted.

Minnesota caps residential late fees at eight percent of the overdue rent payment — one of the few hard statutory late-fee caps in the country — and a landlord may not charge any late fee at all unless the tenant has agreed in writing to a provision specifying when the fee will be imposed (Minn. Stat. 504B.177(a)).

Cited to Minn. Stat. 504B.177 (a)-(c) and 2 more cited sources · Verified October 1, 2026

No statutory grace period exists for standard rentals, so a lease-authorized fee may attach the day after rent is due. Because the cap keys to the overdue PAYMENT rather than the monthly rent, a tenant who has paid part of the month by the time the fee is imposed owes at most 8% of the unpaid remainder, though a later partial payment does not reduce a fee already imposed (Minn. Att'y Gen. Op. 430, June 30, 2021). Federally subsidized tenancies follow the federal fee schedule where it conflicts (paragraph (b)), and for tenants with housing-assistance contracts such as Section 8 the fee is computed only on the tenant's share of the rent, never the government's portion (paragraph (c), added in 2024). Since August 1, 2026, a landlord also may not assess a late fee when rent goes unpaid because both the digital rent-payment platform and the required no-extra-fee alternative payment method were not functioning — and adverse action over rent unpaid in such an outage, expressly including late fees or filing an eviction, gives the tenant an affirmative defense requiring dismissal of the eviction plus attorney fees (Minn. Stat. 504B.118, as rewritten by Laws 2026, ch. 81, sec. 2).

Minnesota late fees at a glance

Statutory cap	8% of the overdue rent payment
Mandatory grace period	None mandated statewide
Must be in the lease	Yes
Daily fees	The statute does not address fee structure, but no structure — daily, flat, or percentage — may push the total past eight percent of the overdue rent payment. The cap applies to each overdue rent payment once, on the date the lease sets for the fee, and cannot be applied again to a running total of past-due rent that already carried a late fee (Minn. Att'y Gen. Op. 430, June 30, 2021). The base is the amount actually overdue when the fee is imposed (e.g., 8% of the unpaid half of a half-paid month), not 8% of the full monthly rent; a partial payment made after the fee is imposed does not require the fee to be recalculated (same opinion).
Reasonableness standard	Not addressed by statute

Cite this page: "Landlord Atlas, Minnesota Late Fee Laws (verified October 1, 2026), landlordatlas.com/laws/late-fees/minnesota/" — free to cite and quote with a link (how these records are verified). Everything above is cited in the citations section below.

Check a late fee against the Minnesota rules — free, no signup, built on the same verified Minnesota law as this page.

Notes and caveats

8% of the overdue payment — not the monthly rent — a tenant who has paid part of the month by the time the fee is imposed owes at most 8% of the unpaid remainder, and a 2021 Attorney General opinion applies the cap to each overdue payment once and does not require a fee already imposed to be recalculated after a later partial payment.
No statutory grace period — for standard rentals a lease-authorized fee may attach the day after rent is due. Manufactured-home parks run on a separate scheme (ch. 327C) that sets no late-fee grace period either: a park may charge a reasonable fee for delinquent rent if the rental agreement provides for it (327C.03, subd. 3), and the chapter's ten-day period is the written notice to cure a park must give before it can end a tenancy for overdue rent (327C.09, subd. 2), not a grace period before a late fee.
The writing requirement is double — the tenant must have agreed in writing AND the provision must specify when the fee is imposed.
Subsidized tenancies — with a housing-assistance contract (Section 8 and similar), the fee is computed only on the tenant's share of the rent, never the government's portion (paragraph (c), added 2024).
New since August 1, 2026 (Laws 2026, ch. 81) — no late fee may be assessed — and no eviction filed — over rent that went unpaid because both the digital payment platform and the required free alternative were down. A violation gives the tenant an affirmative defense requiring dismissal plus attorney fees.
Official page lags the law — as of August 2, 2026 the Revisor's consolidated 504B.118 page still showed the pre-amendment text (flagged 'amended by Chapter 81, Section 2'). The session law, linked in the citations, controls.
The enforcement hook most summaries miss — 504B.120 requires every nonoptional fee to be disclosed in the lease with a first-page 'Total Monthly Payment' and in all advertising, enforceable by treble damages plus attorney fees. A conditional late fee is not a nonoptional fee, but fee-transparency violations are the sharper enforcement angle.
The sections behind these figures — the late-fee cap and its writing requirement are Minn. Stat. 504B.177; the fee-disclosure duty is 504B.120; and the payment-platform rule is 504B.118 as rewritten by Laws 2026, ch. 81, sec. 2.

Common questions: Minnesota late fees

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

Is there a legal limit on late fees in Minnesota?: 8% of the overdue rent payment.
Is there a grace period before rent is late in Minnesota?: None mandated statewide.
Does a late fee have to be written into the lease in Minnesota?: Yes — in Minnesota a late fee must be stated in the lease.
Can a landlord charge a daily late fee in Minnesota?: The statute does not address fee structure, but no structure — daily, flat, or percentage — may push the total past eight percent of the overdue rent payment.

Citations

Minn. Stat. 504B.177 · (a)-(c) (verified 2026) Official source
Minn. Stat. 504B.120 (verified 2026) Official source
Laws 2026, ch. 81, sec. 2 (SF 4171) — rewrites Minn. Stat. 504B.118, effective 2026-08-01 · sec. 2 (verified 2026) Official source

How this record was verified: Direct read of statute text on the official Minnesota Revisor of Statutes site (revisor.mn.gov, Minnesota Statutes 2025 edition): Minn. Stat. 504B.178, 504B.177, and 504B.211 each read twice independently — the 1% interest rate, three-week/five-day return deadlines, $500 bad-faith punitive cap, 8%-of-overdue-rent late-fee cap, 24-hour entry notice, 8:00 a.m.-8:00 p.m. window, and $500-per-violation entry penalty all matched verbatim across reads. 504B.135 and 471.9996 read twice each (the HTML section page plus the Revisor's official PDF read in full). 504B.147 and 504B.120 read once each. MN Attorney General landlord-tenant handbook (ag.state.mn.us) read for the 'one rental period plus one day' rent-increase derivation. 2026 enactment sweep on revisor.mn.gov: SF 4171 bill status and enrolled text read directly (Laws 2026 ch. 81, signed 2026-05-12, effective 2026-08-01 — flagged as pending while not yet in force; folded into late_fees 2026-08-02 once effective); HF 3245 status read (died in House committee at sine die 2026-05-18, not flagged). October 1, 2026: sections 504B.178, 504B.177, 504B.211, 504B.135, 504B.147, 504B.120, 504B.118, 504B.182, 504B.113, 504B.261 and 471.9996 and chapter 327C were read again on revisor.mn.gov, which still serves the 2025 edition and marks each section the 2026 session changed; the 2026 changes are read from Laws 2026, ch. 81. The Revisor's tables of sections affected for 2025 and 2026 show no other act touching these sections. Attorney General Opinion 430 (June 30, 2021) was read on ag.state.mn.us, and the Saint Paul and Minneapolis deposit sections in each city's published code.