Your Apartment's "Total Monthly Payment"

If your lease was signed on or after January 1, 2024, page one of it was supposed to carry a single number labeled Total Monthly Payment — your rent plus every nonoptional fee, added together. If page one shows rent and the fees show up later, or on a different page, or on the property’s FAQ, the statute was not followed. The remedy is treble damages and, at the court’s discretion, attorney fees.

If your lease was signed before January 1, 2024, this statute does not reach it. That is a real cutoff and it is the first thing to check.

The statute is two short subdivisions

Minn. Stat. § 504B.120 is called PROHIBITED FEES, and subdivision 1 is one paragraph long:

A landlord must disclose all nonoptional fees in the lease agreement. The sum total of rent and all nonoptional fees must be described as the Total Monthly Payment and be listed on the first page of the lease. A unit advertised for a residential tenancy must disclose the nonoptional fees included with the total amount for rent in any advertisement or posting. In a lease agreement disclosure or unit advertisement, the landlord must disclose whether utilities are included or not included in the rent.

Four separate duties in four sentences:

Disclose all nonoptional fees in the lease agreement.
Add them to rent, call the sum the Total Monthly Payment, and put it on the first page of the lease. Not the fifth page. Not an addendum. The first page, under that name.
Advertisements and postings for the unit must disclose the nonoptional fees included with the total amount for rent. This one reaches the listing, before there is any lease at all.
Say whether utilities are in or out — in the lease disclosure and in the advertisement.

Subdivision 2 is one sentence:

A landlord who violates this section is liable to the residential tenant for treble damages and the court may award the tenant reasonable attorney fees.

Read the two verbs separately. Treble damages are mandatory — the landlord “is liable … for treble damages.” Attorney fees are discretionary — the court “may award.” Those are different words doing different work, and a page that collapses them into “treble damages and attorney fees” has told you something the statute does not say.

One number you will see that is not in this statute: “$1,000 per violation.” It circulates in summaries of Minnesota’s 2024 rental-fee legislation and it is attached to section 504B.120 all over the internet. Section 504B.120 contains no dollar figure at all. Its penalty is treble damages plus discretionary fees, and that is the entire text of subdivision 2, quoted above. I did not find the provision that the $1,000 figure actually comes from, so I am not repeating it here in either direction.

“Nonoptional” is the word that decides most of these

The statute reaches nonoptional fees. Not all fees.

A fee you can genuinely decline and still rent the apartment on the same terms is optional. A reserved garage stall you chose is optional. A pet fee, if you do not have to have a pet, is optional as to you.

A fee everybody pays is not optional because the lease calls it an amenity. Monthly charges for trash, utility administration, a technology or internet package you cannot refuse, a “community fee,” a rent-payment portal fee you cannot avoid because there is no other way to pay — those are the ones to look at. The test is whether you could have rented that unit without it.

The statute does not define “nonoptional.” Searching the Minnesota Supreme Court, the Minnesota Court of Appeals, the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota and the Eighth Circuit on CourtListener on September 18, 2026 — for the section number and for the phrase “nonoptional fees” — I found no decision construing section 504B.120. That database does not carry every unpublished Minnesota opinion, so none had surfaced as of that date; that is not the same as none existing.

The date gate, and exactly how far the text goes

Section 504B.120 was created by Laws 2023, chapter 52, article 19, section 84. The effective date is in a separate section of the same article — section 90 — which reads, in full:

Sections 83 to 89 are effective January 1, 2024, and apply to leases signed on or after that date.

Section 84 sits inside that range. So: leases signed on or after January 1, 2024.

That clause turns entirely on signing. And here is where I will stop short of what a lot of pages tell you. The statute and the session law both speak of a lease “signed”; neither of them defines signing, and neither says a word about renewals. If you signed a new lease document in 2024 or 2025, you signed a lease on or after the date. If your 2022 tenancy simply rolled over month to month with nothing new signed, the text does not tell you the answer, and I am not going to invent one.

The same search turned up no decision construing “leases signed on or after that date,” on renewals or otherwise — again, as of September 18, 2026, in a database that is thin on unpublished Minnesota opinions.

What that means practically: if you have a signed document with a 2024 or later date on it, dig it out. It is the single fact this statute turns on.

The listing is covered too — by two different laws

The third sentence of subdivision 1 is about advertisements: a unit advertised for residential tenancy “must disclose the nonoptional fees included with the total amount for rent in any advertisement or posting.” A listing that says $1,695 and does not mention the fees that bring the real monthly number higher does not satisfy that sentence.

Separately, Minnesota’s general price-transparency rule — Minn. Stat. § 325D.44, subd. 1a — reaches any business that “advertises, displays, or offers a price for goods or services that does not include all mandatory fees or surcharges,” for conduct on or after January 1, 2025. A rental listing is a displayed price. I walk that statute gate by gate, including all eight of its safe harbors, in Is This Fee Legal in Minnesota?.

Two different statutes, two different dates, two different remedies. The section 504B.120 route reaches back a full year further and carries the better remedy.

Two neighboring sections worth checking on the same lease

Application screening fees — Minn. Stat. § 504B.173. If a landlord takes a screening fee, the landlord must disclose in writing before accepting it the name, address, and telephone number of the tenant screening service it will use (unless it uses none) and “the criteria on which the decision to rent to the prospective tenant will be based,” and must notify a rejected applicant within 14 days, “identifying the criteria the applicant failed to meet.” Subd. 3. The landlord must return the fee if the applicant is rejected for a reason not in that disclosure, or if a prior applicant took the unit; and must return any portion not used where no reference check, consumer credit report, or tenant screening report was obtained. Subd. 2.

The remedy at subdivision 4(a) is unusually clean for a consumer statute:

In addition to any other remedies, a landlord who violates this section is liable to the applicant for the applicant screening fee plus a civil penalty of up to $100, civil court filing costs, and reasonable attorney fees incurred to enforce this remedy.

Note that subdivision 4(b) runs the other way, against an applicant who puts materially false information on the application: damages, a civil penalty of no more than $500, filing costs, and fees.

Late fees — Minn. Stat. § 504B.177. A landlord “may not charge a late fee if the rent is paid after the due date, unless the tenant and landlord have agreed in writing that a late fee may be imposed,” the written agreement “must specify when the late fee will be imposed,” and “[i]n no case may the late fee exceed eight percent of the overdue rent payment.” Paragraph (c), added in 2024, requires that a late fee charged by a landlord holding a housing assistance payments contract “be calculated and assessed only on the portion of rent payable by the tenant.”

Section 504B.177 contains no penalty provision of its own. There is no treble-damages clause and no fee-shift in it. An overcharged late fee is a breach-of-the-lease and overcharge question, or a predicate for another statute — not a self-executing claim.

Where the landlord is in the clear

A landlord who lists the unit with the nonoptional fees disclosed alongside the rent, discloses the same fees in the lease, prints rent plus fees as a Total Monthly Payment on page one, and says whether utilities are included has complied with section 504B.120. There is nothing wrong with charging the fee. The statute is about disclosure and arithmetic, not about the price.

Genuinely optional charges stay out of the Total Monthly Payment, and that is correct, not a loophole.

And a lease signed before January 1, 2024 is outside this statute regardless of how the fees were presented. That is the legislature’s line, plainly drawn.

What to do with this

Get out the lease and look at page one. Find the words “Total Monthly Payment.” Then compare that number to what you actually pay in a normal month, and to the number in the listing you answered.

If the three do not match, the documents that answer the question are the ones you already have: the signed lease, a screenshot or printout of the listing, and a month of your ledger or bank statements showing what came out.

Madgett Law, LLC is evaluating whether Minnesota rental-fee practices can be challenged on behalf of the tenants who paid. Nothing on this page is advice about your lease, and sending documents to a law firm does not make you a client.

Published by Madgett Law, LLC. Statutes and session laws verified September 18, 2026 against the Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes.