What are the security deposit rules in Missouri?

Verified July 9, 2026 All Missouri topics →

Missouri caps security deposits at two months' rent and gives landlords thirty days after the tenancy ends to return the deposit or send a written itemized list of damages with any balance.

The deposit must be held for the tenant in a federally insured bank, credit union, or depository institution, but any interest it earns belongs to the landlord — Missouri never pays deposit interest to tenants. Before withholding anything, the landlord must give the tenant reasonable written notice of the date and time of the move-out inspection, and the tenant has the right to be present at it. Deductions are limited to unpaid rent, damage beyond ordinary wear and tear, and losses from the tenant leaving without proper notice, and a landlord who wrongfully withholds any portion owes the tenant twice the amount wrongfully withheld. One Missouri quirk: money labeled a pet deposit is excluded from the statute's definition of a security deposit, so it sits outside the cap and the return rules entirely.

Missouri security deposits at a glance

Maximum deposit	2 months' rent — RSMo 535.300.1: 'A landlord may not demand or receive a security deposit in excess of two months' rent.' Subsection 8 defines 'security deposit' as any deposit of money or property, HOWEVER DENOMINATED, furnished by a tenant to secure performance of any part of the rental agreement — so relabeling a security amount ('move-in deposit', 'damage deposit', a refundable 'last month' held as security) does not escape the cap. The one express carve-out: money or property denominated as a deposit FOR A PET is excluded from the definition entirely (535.300.8), so a pet deposit sits outside both the two-month cap and the 30-day/2x return scheme — the opposite of states like Arizona that sweep pet deposits in. No unit-count threshold; applies to residential rental agreements generally.
Return deadline	30 days
Deadline conditions	Within thirty days 'after the date of termination of the tenancy' (RSMo 535.300.3) the landlord must either return the full deposit or furnish a written itemized list of damages plus any remaining balance. The clock runs from termination of the tenancy — NOT from 'the end of the month in which the tenant moves out,' a wrong formulation circulating on landlord-help sites. The landlord complies by mailing the refund and/or itemized list to the tenant's LAST KNOWN address, so a tenant who never supplies a forwarding address can satisfy the landlord's duty at a stale one.
Itemization required	Yes
Itemization rules	If anything is withheld, the landlord must furnish a written itemized list of the damages for which the deposit or any portion is withheld, along with the balance (535.300.3(2)). Withholding grounds are limited to three (535.300.4): unpaid rent; restoring the unit to move-in condition, ordinary wear and tear excepted (with a lease-based carpet-cleaning carve-out that requires the landlord to provide a receipt for actual carpet-cleaning costs within thirty days of the end of the tenancy); and actual damages from the tenant's failure to give adequate termination notice, subject to a statutory duty to make reasonable efforts to mitigate.
Separate account required	No
Interest owed to tenant	No
Account & interest rules	RSMo 535.300.2 (added by S.B. 581, 2018) requires all security deposits to be 'held by the landlord for the tenant' in a bank, credit union, or depository institution insured by an agency of the federal government, and states flatly: 'Any interest earned on a security deposit shall be the property of the landlord.' No interest is ever owed to the tenant. The statute requires a federally insured institution but contains NO express separate-account, escrow, or commingling prohibition — sites claiming Missouri requires an 'escrow account' or forbids the landlord's own account overstate the text. Housing authorities created under section 99.040 and other government entities acting as landlords are exempt from this subsection (the holding requirement only — not the cap, return, or penalty rules).
Pet deposits	Expressly excluded: 535.300.8 says the term security deposit 'does not include any money or property denominated as a deposit for a pet on the premises.' A genuine pet deposit therefore does not count toward the two-month cap and is not governed by the 30-day return, itemization, or 2x-penalty provisions — it is a matter of contract. Caution for encoding and page copy: the exclusion turns on denomination as a PET deposit; a general deposit that merely covers pet damage among other things remains a security deposit.
Non-refundable fees allowed	Not addressed by statute
Penalty for violation	If the landlord wrongfully withholds all or any portion of the security deposit in violation of the section, the tenant recovers as damages 'twice the amount wrongfully withheld' (535.300.6) — double the amount wrongfully withheld, NOT double the whole deposit as many summaries state. Subsection 7 preserves the landlord's right to recover actual damages exceeding the deposit and forbids the tenant from applying the deposit in lieu of rent.
Tenant forwarding-address duty	No affirmative statutory duty to furnish a forwarding address, but the landlord's return and itemization duties are satisfied by mailing to the tenant's LAST KNOWN address (535.300.3), and the move-out inspection notice likewise goes to the last known address or is delivered in person (535.300.5) — so a tenant who fails to update their address can lose both the inspection opportunity and the refund in practice while the landlord remains compliant.

Notes and caveats

Encoding decisions and traps: (1) return_deadline_days runs from the DATE OF TERMINATION OF THE TENANCY — Hemlane and similar sites state 'within 30 days from the end of the month in which the tenant moves out,' which is not the statutory text and can misstate the deadline by weeks. (2) The 2x penalty attaches to the amount WRONGFULLY WITHHELD (535.300.6); several summaries say 'twice the security deposit amount' — wrong, same precision class as the AZ/OH notes. (3) separate_account_required is encoded false: the 2018 federally-insured-institution requirement (535.300.2) is real, but there is no express escrow/segregation/commingling ban in the text — sites claiming 'deposits cannot be held in the landlord's personal account' or 'escrow required' go beyond the statute; page copy should describe the actual requirement (held for the tenant in a federally insured institution, interest to landlord). (4) The subsection 8 definition is label-agnostic ('however denominated') with a single express PET-deposit exclusion; it never mentions prepaid rent, so genuinely prepaid rent (money applied to rent, not held as security) is outside the section, while anything held to secure performance is inside it whatever the lease calls it — encode conservatively as a definitional note, not a prepaid-rent cap. (5) nonrefundable_fees_allowed is null: no Missouri statute authorizes or prohibits nonrefundable fees; a 'nonrefundable deposit' securing performance risks being recharacterized as a security deposit under the however-denominated definition, while true fees (application, amenity) are unregulated contract terms. (6) The move-out inspection right (535.300.5) requires REASONABLE NOTICE IN WRITING of the inspection's date and time, at the tenant's last known address or in person, and the inspection must be at a reasonable time — the writing requirement is frequently dropped by secondary sources.

Statute citations

RSMo 535.300 subsections 1-8 Official source

How this record was verified: Direct read of statute text on the official Missouri Revisor of Statutes site (revisor.mo.gov): RSMo 535.300 read in full THREE times via independent fetches (all load-bearing figures — two months' cap, thirty-day return, written-notice inspection right, twice-the-amount-wrongfully-withheld penalty, subsection 8 definition — matched verbatim across reads), RSMo 441.060 and RSMo 441.043 each read twice (matched verbatim), plus single trap-check reads of RSMo 535.060 (demand of rent — confirmed it says nothing about late fees), RSMo 415.400 and 415.417 (confirmed the $20/20% late-fee figure belongs to the Self-Service Storage Facilities Act, not residential rentals), RSMo 441.233 (unlawful ouster), RSMo 441.065 (abandonment entry procedure), and the full chapter 441 section index (confirmed no entry-notice, late-fee, or rent-increase-notice section exists). 2026 regular session Truly Agreed To and Finally Passed list (102 bills) checked on senate.mo.gov 2026-07-09 — no landlord-tenant bills passed; the 2025 amendments to 441.043 (H.B. 595 & 343, effective 2025-08-28) are already law and are incorporated, not flagged.