What late fees can a landlord charge in Vermont?

Verified July 12, 2026 All Vermont topics →

Check your municipality. Vermont 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 rent control exists anywhere in Vermont — no statewide program and no municipal ordinance. Two notice-only overlays exist: (1) age-restricted housing (privately owned, not licensed as a long-term care or similar facility) requires written notice of any rent increase on a state form to the Department of Housing and Community Development AND all affected residents at least 60 days before the effective date, and an unnoticed increase is 'ineffective and unenforceable' (9 V.S.A. 4468a, effective 2024-06-17); (2) mobile home park LOT rents are a separate regime with their own 60-day state-form notice to the Commissioner and leaseholders, capital-improvement surcharge rules, and the same ineffective-if-unnoticed sanction (10 V.S.A. 6251 — lot rentals are excluded from chapter 137 by 4452(6)).

Vermont has no statute capping residential late fees and no statutory grace period — but it is not a free-for-all, because the Vermont Supreme Court polices late charges as liquidated damages.

Under Highgate Associates v. Merryfield (1991), a late-fee clause is enforceable only if it reflects a reasonable estimate of the landlord's actual damages from late payment and is meant to compensate rather than punish or coerce; the clause in that very case — five dollars after a five-day window plus a dollar a day — was held void as a penalty. In practice, a fee must be agreed in the rental agreement (there is otherwise nothing to enforce) and should track real costs, and Vermont's statewide tenant-landlord guidance tells tenants they can demand documentation and refuse a fee that is not reasonably related to the landlord's expenses. Rent itself is due without demand at whatever time and place the parties agreed, so any grace period is likewise a lease term, not a legal right. Do not confuse the 14-day termination notice for nonpayment with a grace period: it is an eviction step, and the tenancy survives if the tenant pays or tenders the rent due through the end of the rental period in which payment is made.

Vermont 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	Not addressed by statute, and the leading Vermont case struck one down: in Highgate Associates v. Merryfield the lease charged $5.00 after a five-day grace window plus $1.00 for each additional day late, and the Vermont Supreme Court held the provision void as an unenforceable penalty. A compounding or per-diem fee that outruns the landlord's actual late-payment costs fails the same test.
Reasonableness standard	No statutory cap, formula, or grace period — 9 V.S.A. chapter 137 never mentions late charges (verified negative: complete chapter read twice), and rent is payable 'without demand or notice at the time and place agreed upon by the parties' (4455(a)). The governing standard is the liquidated-damages doctrine of Highgate Associates, Ltd. v. Merryfield, 157 Vt. 313 (1991): a late-charge clause is enforceable only if damages from late payment are hard to calculate, the fixed sum is a reasonable estimate of likely damages, and the provision is intended solely to compensate the landlord — not to penalize the tenant or coerce timely payment. Statewide tenant-landlord guidance renders this as: a late fee not reasonably related to the landlord's actual expenses is invalid and need not be paid.

Notes and caveats

statutory_cap and grace_period_days null: verified negative — zero late-fee, late-charge, penalty, or grace-period language anywhere in ch. 137 (full chapter read twice via two official endpoints; local text grep for late/penalt/interest/grace as a third check), and no late-fee or junk-fee bill passed in the 2025-2026 biennium (full acts list + vetoed list swept; S.91/H.399 tenant-rights omnibuses that brushed fees died in committee, biennium adjourned sine die). must_be_in_lease null rather than true (MT/AK precedent): no STATUTE conditions late fees on a lease term; the agreed-in-advance requirement is contract law — Highgate polices clauses that exist, and without one there is no basis to charge. Highgate is the load-bearing authority: 157 Vt. 313 (1991), Docket 90-032 — three-factor liquidated-damages test (damages hard to calculate; sum a reasonable estimate; solely compensatory intent), $5-plus-$1/day clause in a subsidized Barre project VOID as penalty; parallel cite 597 A.2d 1280 taken from secondary corroboration (Justia blocks automated fetches — verify the A.2d pinpoint via browser before quoting it on-page). CVOEO's statewide guidance (the Renting in Vermont handbook publisher) operationalizes Highgate: fee invalid unless reasonably related to actual expenses; tenants told to demand documentation. Secondary-source chatter that Vermont courts 'accept 5-8% late fees' has no statutory or reported-decision basis found — do not encode or quote a percentage. Adjacent trap: the 14-day nonpayment termination notice (4467(a)) is sometimes rendered as a '14-day grace period' — it is eviction procedure with a full right to reinstate by paying rent due through the end of the current rental period, not a fee rule. Mobile home parks: no late-fee cap in 10 V.S.A. ch. 153 either (chapter swept).

Statute citations

9 V.S.A. § 4455 (a) Official source
9 V.S.A. ch. 137 (Residential Rental Agreements — full chapter swept for late-fee provisions; none exist) Official source
Highgate Associates, Ltd. v. Merryfield, 157 Vt. 313, 597 A.2d 1280 (1991) Unofficial mirror
9 V.S.A. § 4467 (a) Official source

How this record was verified: Direct read of statute text on the official Vermont General Assembly site (legislature.vermont.gov): the complete text of every section of 9 V.S.A. chapter 137 (4451 through 4475, all four subchapters) read twice via two independent official endpoints — the per-section pages and the full-chapter view — with every load-bearing figure (60 days' actual notice for rent increases in 4455(b); the 14-day deposit return clock, its discovery/noticed-vacate-date triggers, the 60-day seasonal clock, and the forfeiture-plus-willful-double penalty in 4461(c)-(e); the 48-hour / 9 AM-9 PM entry rule in 4460(b); the three-day mail-receipt presumption in 4451(1)) matching verbatim across both reads. 10 V.S.A. 6251 and a full sweep of 10 V.S.A. chapter 153 (mobile home parks) read for the note-only lot-rent regime. Session sweep run against the official 2025-2026 biennium data: all 178 regular acts, all 12 municipal (charter) acts, and all 13 vetoed bills enumerated, plus the official Acts-Affecting-VSA-Sections table (2,693 rows) filtered to Title 9 chapter 137 — exactly three hits, each verified in the enacted act text (Act 69 of 2025 sec. 10 amending 4456a; Act 103 of 2026 amending 4452(b) and cancelling its scheduled repeal, effective 2026-07-01; Act 176 of 2026 sec. 30 adding new 9 V.S.A. 4468b, effective 2026-07-01). Act 103 and Act 176 read from their official As Enacted PDFs; both postdate the statutes site's current text (the site still shows 4452(b) as repealed effective 2026-07-01 and lacks 4468b — flagged in notes). Verified negatives (no deposit cap, no state deposit-interest or separate-account rule, no late-fee or grace-period statute, no rent-control or preemption provision, no increase-frequency limit) established by the full-chapter double read plus a targeted Title 24 municipal-powers check (24 V.S.A. 2291; chapter 123). Late-fee case law (Highgate Associates, Ltd. v. Merryfield, 157 Vt. 313 (1991)) corroborated via the statewide CVOEO tenant-landlord guidance and multiple independent secondary descriptions; advance.lexis.com not used. Dead 2025-2026 bills (S.91, H.399, H.440) verified dead on their official bill-status pages; the biennium has adjourned sine die.