Landlord Atlas

What are the security deposit rules in Kentucky?

Verified July 9, 2026 All Kentucky topics →

Kentucky has no statewide security-deposit law: the deposit statute, KRS 383.580, applies only in the cities and counties that have adopted Kentucky's optional Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act by local ordinance — including Louisville-Jefferson County, Lexington-Fayette, Covington, and roughly sixteen other documented adopters — and everywhere else the lease alone governs deposits.

Where it does apply, there is no cap on the deposit and no deadline to return it. Instead the landlord must hold the deposit in a dedicated bank account disclosed by location and account number, give the tenant signed itemized damage listings at both move-in and move-out, and mail the departing tenant notice of any refund due — and a tenant who fails to respond within 60 days forfeits the entire refund. A tenant who signs the move-out damage listing without an item-by-item written dissent cannot later sue over those charges. The only penalty for landlord noncompliance is losing the right to withhold; Kentucky awards no double damages and no attorney fees.

Kentucky security deposits at a glance

Maximum deposit No statutory cap
Return deadline No statutory deadline
Deadline conditions Kentucky sets NO deadline for returning a deposit, even where its deposit statute applies (URLTA jurisdictions only). What KRS 383.580 provides instead: if the tenant leaves owing nothing with a refund due, the landlord must send notice of the refund amount to the tenant's last known or reasonably determinable address, and if the TENANT does not respond within 60 days of the sending of that notice, the landlord may remove the deposit from the account and keep it free of any claim (subsection (7)). If the tenant leaves owing the last month's rent without demanding the deposit, the landlord may apply it to the debt after 30 days (subsection (6)). Both clocks run against the tenant. Outside URLTA jurisdictions there is no deposit statute at all — the lease and common law govern.
Itemization required Yes
Itemization rules URLTA jurisdictions only. Two mandatory damage listings bracket the tenancy (KRS 383.580(2)-(3)): BEFORE any deposit is tendered, the prospective tenant must receive a comprehensive listing of existing damage with estimated repair costs and may inspect to check it; at termination the landlord must inspect and compile a comprehensive listing of damage charged against the deposit with estimated repair costs, which the tenant may verify by inspection. Both parties sign each listing, and signatures are conclusive evidence of its accuracy (move-in signatures not conclusive as to latent defects); a tenant who refuses to sign must submit a signed, item-by-item written dissent. The dissent has teeth: a tenant's District Court claim is limited to the items dissented from, and a tenant who neither signs nor dissents recovers nothing under the section (subsection (5)).
Separate account required Yes
Interest owed to tenant No
Account & interest rules No interest is owed — the statute is silent on interest. Deposits must be held in an account 'used only for that purpose' at a bank or lending institution regulated by Kentucky or a federal agency, and prospective tenants must be told the location of the account AND the account number (KRS 383.580(1)) — a stricter disclosure than most states (Tennessee's parallel statute requires location only).
Pet deposits No statute addresses pet deposits anywhere in Kentucky; with no cap of any kind, they are purely a lease matter in URLTA and non-URLTA jurisdictions alike.
Non-refundable fees allowed Not addressed by statute
Penalty for violation Forfeiture only, and only in URLTA jurisdictions: a landlord is not entitled to retain any portion of the deposit if it was not kept in the dedicated account required by (1) AND the initial and final damage listings required by (2)-(3) were not provided (KRS 383.580(4) — the statute's literal 'and' leaves ambiguous whether both failures are needed, the same drafting quirk as Tennessee's parallel provision; encoded as written). Kentucky has NO damages multiplier, no bad-faith penalty, and no attorney-fee award for deposit violations. Outside URLTA jurisdictions there is no statutory penalty because there is no statutory duty.
Tenant forwarding-address duty No affirmative duty — the landlord's refund notice runs to the 'last known or reasonably determinable address' — but the incentive is severe: a tenant who fails to respond within 60 days of the refund notice forfeits the entire refund to the landlord (KRS 383.580(7)).

Notes and caveats

THE APPLICABILITY TRAP LEADS EVERYTHING: KRS 383.500 (1984) makes the whole URLTA (KRS 383.505-383.705, which contains 383.580) adoptable only by ordinance of a city, county, or urban-county government, in its entirety and without amendment, and bars non-adopters from enacting their own ordinances on the same subjects. Most of Kentucky's 120 counties have NOT adopted, so most of the state has no deposit statute — yet consumer/AI sites in 2026 (e.g., leaselenses.com, kentuckylegalservicesauthority.com) flatly claim 383.580 'applies statewide.' Debunked from primary text: 383.580 sits inside the adoptable span, was repealed and reenacted by the same 1984 act (ch. 176, sec. 16) that created the opt-in (sec. 1), and KRS 383.715 titles exactly that span as the URLTA; its 'All landlords of residential property' opening is intra-act phrasing, the same trap as T.C.A. 66-28-301. (Likely seed of the myth: KRS 383.300, the domestic-violence lease-termination law, IS statewide because it is codified outside the URLTA span.) Second myth debunked: 'deposits must be returned within 30/60 days' — those are the unclaimed-deposit forfeiture windows in (6)-(7) and run against the tenant; no return deadline exists. Adopter list (non-exhaustive, no official registry; per Fort Knox Legal Assistance brief and KY practitioner sources, vintage ~2015): Barbourville, Bellevue, Bromley, Covington, Dayton, Florence, Georgetown, Lexington-Fayette, Louisville-Jefferson County, Ludlow, Melbourne, Newport, Oldham County, Pulaski County, Shelbyville, Silver Grove, Southgate, Taylor Mill, Woodlawn — page copy should describe the rule and tell readers to confirm with their local government. max_deposit and nonrefundable_fees_allowed are null because no provision exists for either (documented per data rules). Section unchanged since 1984.

Statute citations

How this record was verified: Every load-bearing section read verbatim from official Kentucky LRC statute PDFs at apps.legislature.ky.gov (KRS 383.500, 383.580, 383.615, 383.695, 383.565, 383.570, 383.660, 383.535, 383.195, 383.198, 383.199, and 65.875), each with an independent second read on the FindLaw mirror (current through 2025-01-01) that matched — Justia, the usual second host, returned 403 throughout, so FindLaw served as the mirror. A third corroborating read of 383.565/.570/.580/.615/.695 came via the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Human Rights Commission's booklet of Ordinance No. 98-84 (the LFUCG URLTA adoption), whose reproduced text matched. The URLTA adopter list is from the Fort Knox Legal Assistance Office brief (US Army, government source) corroborated by a Kentucky landlord-side attorney's published list; no official registry exists. 2026 Regular Session (adjourned sine die 2026-04-15) swept via official bill pages and the LRC chapter listing, which is current through the 2026 RS and shows no amendments to any section used here.