Check your municipality. Minnesota does not preempt local rent regulation — city or county ordinances may impose
rent caps, notice rules, and fee limits that are stricter than the state-level rules on this
page and are not covered here. Verify your municipality's ordinances before relying on any
figure below.
What the state record says
No statewide rent control. Minn. Stat. 471.9996 subd. 1 bars any city, county, or town from adopting or renewing rent control on private residential property — EXCEPT that subd. 2 expressly permits it if the ordinance, charter amendment, or law is approved in a GENERAL ELECTION (full text read twice, including the Revisor's official PDF). 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.
Pending legislation — not yet law. The rules on this page reflect current
law only. The following bill would change it if enacted:
SF 4171 (2026) — Laws of Minnesota 2026, chapter 81 — Enacted but NOT yet effective as of the verification date. Section 2 rewrites Minn. Stat. 504B.118 ('Payment of Rent'): landlords must give immediate written receipts for in-person cash rent (three business days otherwise), must offer a no-extra-fee alternative payment method when a digital rent-payment platform is not functioning, and are prohibited from taking any adverse action — expressly including assessing LATE FEES or filing an eviction — when rent goes unpaid because both the digital platform and the landlord's alternative method are down; violation is an affirmative defense requiring dismissal of an eviction plus attorney fees. Other sections bar naming minor children as eviction defendants (new 504B.2136, $300 minimum damages) and allow estimated final submetered/apportioned utility bills at move-out (216B.023, 504B.216). Once effective, the late_fees topic gains a statutory platform-outage exception layered on top of the 8% cap.Status: Passed Senate 67-0 (2026-04-20) and House 134-0 as amended (2026-04-30), Senate concurred 63-3, signed by the governor 2026-05-12 as Laws 2026 ch. 81; effective 2026-08-01 (eviction-related provisions apply to actions filed on or after that date). Incorporate into late_fees notes on the next verification pass after 2026-08-01. (checked 2026-07-09).
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)). 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 owes at most 8% of the unpaid remainder. 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). Beginning August 1, 2026, a landlord also may not assess late fees when rent goes unpaid because both the digital payment platform and the required alternative payment method are down (Laws 2026 ch. 81).
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 any structure — daily, flat, or percentage — cannot push the total past eight percent of the overdue rent payment. The cap applies to EACH overdue rent payment (Minn. Att'y Gen. Op. 430, June 30, 2021), so the base is the payment actually overdue (e.g., 8% of a half-paid month's remainder), not 8% of the full monthly rent.
Reasonableness standard
Not addressed by statute
Notes and caveats
Encoding decisions: statutory_cap quotes the operative statutory base — 'eight percent of the OVERDUE RENT PAYMENT' (double-read verbatim 2026-07-09) — not 'of monthly rent' as many aggregators render it; the difference matters for partial payments, and the 2021 AG opinion (per-payment application) is carried in daily_fees_allowed. grace_period_days is null: no grace period is mandated for standard rentals (manufactured-home parks have separate ch. 327C rules — do not import them). reasonableness_standard is null because the hard cap displaces any reasonableness inquiry below it. must_be_in_lease=true reflects the dual writing requirement: agreed in writing AND specifying when the fee is imposed. Paragraph (c) (housing-assistance-payment tenant-share calculation, 42 U.S.C. 1437f/1485 programs) was added by Laws 2024 ch. 118 § 13 — pre-2024 summaries miss it. Related disclosure regime: 504B.120 (rewritten 2023 ch. 52) requires all nonoptional fees to be disclosed in the lease with a first-page 'Total Monthly Payment' and in all advertising, with treble damages plus attorney fees — a conditional late fee is not a nonoptional fee, but the section is cited because fee-transparency violations are the enforcement hook aggregators most often miss. Pending flag: Laws 2026 ch. 81 (SF 4171) adds the payment-platform-outage late-fee prohibition to 504B.118 effective 2026-08-01 — flagged in pending_legislation, not yet law on the verification date; the summary sentence about it is dated to its effective date.
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 fetched twice in independent calls — 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 (HTML fetch 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, not incorporated, since the Statutes-2025 pages predate it); HF 3245 status read (died in House committee at sine die 2026-05-18, not flagged).