The Number Minnesota Requires on Page One of Your Lease — and Treble Damages for Leaving It Out

Turn to page one of your lease. If you signed it on or after January 1, 2024, one number is supposed to be sitting there — rent plus every fee you cannot decline, added together and labeled Total Monthly Payment. Not the fees listed one at a time somewhere in the addenda, and not a figure you are left to assemble yourself. The sum, on the first page, under that name.

That line comes from a statute, and it is not the one that got the press. Minnesota’s junk fee law took effect on January 1, 2025, and it earned the coverage it got. For a person renting an apartment, it is the second-best statute on the shelf.

The best one is Minn. Stat. § 504B.120, captioned Prohibited Fees. It took effect on January 1, 2024 — a year to the day earlier. The entire section, both subdivisions, runs 109 words. And its remedy subdivision says this:

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.

Treble damages, owed directly to the tenant by name. No injunction-only problem, no trip through the attorney general’s statute, no public-benefit showing, no proof that the landlord meant anything by it. The junk fee provision at § 325D.44, subd. 1a, by contrast, was dropped into the Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act, whose remedy section grants an injunction and no damages — § 325D.45, subd. 1. I worked through that placement problem, and where the money claim actually comes from, in Minnesota’s junk fee law has no damages remedy.

And here is the part almost everyone misses. Section 504B.120 is read as a lease-drafting rule — put the total on page one and you are done. Subdivision 2 does not say that. It trebles damages for a landlord who “violates this section,” and the section imposes four duties, two of which reach the advertisement, one of them attaching to the advertisement alone. The treble-damages exposure is created before anybody signs anything.

Four duties in eighty-four words

Subdivision 1 reads in full:

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 obligations, in order:

1. Disclose all nonoptional fees in the lease agreement.
2. Describe the sum of rent and all nonoptional fees as the Total Monthly Payment, and put it on the first page of the lease.
3. In any advertisement or posting of a unit advertised for a residential tenancy, disclose the nonoptional fees with the total amount for rent.
4. In a lease agreement disclosure or a unit advertisement, disclose whether utilities are included or not included in the rent.

Duty 2 is the one with teeth in a document. It is not enough to list the fees somewhere in the lease; the sum has to exist as a single number, it has to carry that specific label — Total Monthly Payment, capitalized in the statute — and it has to be on page one. A hypothetical lease that discloses a $45 trash charge on page eleven and a $25 parking charge on page fourteen and never adds them to rent has satisfied duty 1 and violated duty 2. Both are violations of “this section,” and subdivision 2 does not rank them.

Duty 4 does less work than a tenant hopes. It requires the landlord to say whether utilities are in the rent. It does not require an amount, an estimate, or a range.

Disclose, or include? The two statutes chose different verbs

This is where the two statutes separate, and the difference cuts in opposite directions.

Section 325D.44, subd. 1a(a), makes it a deceptive trade practice to advertise, display, or offer “a price for goods or services that does not include all mandatory fees or surcharges.” The verb is include. The advertised number itself has to be the all-in number.

Section 504B.120’s third sentence says a unit advertised for a residential tenancy “must disclose the nonoptional fees included with the total amount for rent in any advertisement or posting.” The verb is disclose.

I read those as different obligations. A listing that shows rent, names each nonoptional fee, and states a total satisfies the landlord-tenant statute’s advertisement sentence on its face; the same listing, if the headline number is the bare rent, is exposed under subd. 1a(a), which wanted the fees inside the price to begin with. So the statute that demands more of a listing pays the tenant nothing directly, and the statute that demands less trebles damages. A landlord who reads only one of them will get the other one wrong.

Both, incidentally, reach the same document. A hypothetical listing at $1,695 with a first page of the lease that totals $1,865 is a single set of facts with two statutory homes.

Treble damages of what? The statute never says

Subdivision 2 names a multiplier and never names a base. That is how chapter 504B usually writes a trebling provision — § 504B.221(a) and § 504B.231(a) each let a tenant “recover from the landlord treble damages or $500, whichever is greater,” and neither names a base either. Where the chapter fixes a damages figure outright, though, it says what the figure is built on.

Compare the neighbors. The applicant screening fee statute, § 504B.173, subd. 4(a), makes a violating landlord “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” — base named, penalty capped. The security deposit statute, § 504B.178, subd. 4, fixes the damages at “an amount equal to the portion of the deposit withheld by the landlord and interest thereon as provided in subdivision 2, as a penalty,” on top of the wrongfully withheld deposit itself. I have written about that mechanic in Minnesota’s security deposit statute.

Section 504B.120, subd. 2 names neither a base nor a cap. The candid reading is that “treble damages” means three times the damages the tenant proves, and the tenant therefore has to prove damages — which in a fee case means the undisclosed charges actually paid, month by month, with the lease and the ledger to show them.

A tenant who paid $70 a month in nonoptional fees that never appeared in a Total Monthly Payment across a twelve-month term is arguing about $840 trebled, not about the whole rent trebled. I would plead the overcharge as the base and say so in the complaint rather than leave the court to guess.

Note also the asymmetry inside the one sentence: the landlord is liable for treble damages — mandatory on a violation — while the court may award reasonable attorney fees. Fees are discretionary. There is a second route to them worth checking in any residential case: § 504B.172 gives the tenant reciprocal attorney fees where the lease gives them to the landlord, so read the lease’s fee clause before assuming fees are out of reach. The broader map of Minnesota fee-shifting provisions is at who pays the attorney fees.

Which leases does it reach?

Leases signed on or after January 1, 2024, and no earlier ones.

Section 504B.120 was enacted at 2023 Minn. Laws ch. 52, art. 19, § 84. Section 84 carries no effective-date clause of its own. Section 90 of the same article supplies it for the whole group:

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

Two consequences a practitioner should hold onto. First, a tenancy that has rolled over month to month since 2022 on the same signed lease is outside the section; the trigger is the signature, not the rent payment.

Second, the applicability clause is written in terms of leases even though two of the four duties speak to advertisements. The plaintiff in subdivision 2 is “the residential tenant,” so the person who can collect is someone who ended up in the tenancy — a prospective renter who read a deficient listing, walked away, and rented elsewhere is not a residential tenant of that landlord and has no claim under subdivision 2 to bring. That is a real limit and it should be stated plainly rather than argued around.

What counts as a “nonoptional” fee?

Chapter 504B does not define the word. Section 504B.001 defines the chapter’s terms in seventeen subdivisions — landlord, lease, residential tenant, and residential building among them — and “nonoptional” is not one of them. Neither is “rent.”

That leaves the ordinary meaning, and my reading of it is the practical one: a nonoptional fee is a charge the tenant must pay to hold the tenancy under the lease that tenant actually signed. Applied to the charges that turn up in real leases:

Amenity, technology, media, common-area, and valet-trash fees billed to every unit with no opt-out are nonoptional. They belong inside the Total Monthly Payment.

Parking depends on the arrangement. A stall assigned to the unit and billed every month whether the tenant owns a car or not is nonoptional. A garage contract the tenant may sign or decline, where the tenancy is unaffected by the choice, is optional — and if the tenant declines it, there is nothing to put in the total.

Pet rent is the closest question, and I do not think it is close once you fix the frame. The duty in sentence one is to disclose all nonoptional fees “in the lease agreement,” and sentence two sums those fees for that lease. A tenant who signed a pet addendum owes pet rent every month of the term and cannot decline it without surrendering the animal. Measured against the lease actually signed, it is nonoptional and it goes in the total. A building-level policy that a tenant may keep a pet does not make a signed monthly charge optional.

A utility administrative billing charge is nonoptional wherever the landlord bills utilities separately from rent. Section 504B.216, subd. 8, permits exactly one such charge per billing period and provides that it “must not exceed $8.” The tenant cannot decline it and cannot shop for it. Eight dollars a month, trebled across a term, is not a large number; it is also not zero, and it is the sort of line that sits outside a Total Monthly Payment because nobody thought of it as a fee.

Late fees are not nonoptional. Section 504B.177(a) permits a late fee only where landlord and tenant “have agreed in writing that a late fee may be imposed,” requires the agreement to specify when it is imposed, and caps it — “In no case may the late fee exceed eight percent of the overdue rent payment.” The charge is contingent on the tenant’s own nonpayment. A contingent charge is not part of a monthly sum.

The applicant screening fee is not in the total either. It is governed by § 504B.173, it is paid by an applicant before there is a tenancy, and it is not a monthly charge. A security deposit is not a fee at all — it is held for the tenant and bears interest under § 504B.178, subd. 2.

Now set that against the junk fee law, because the two statutes did not choose the same word. Section 325D.44, subd. 1a(b), says “mandatory fee” includes but is not limited to a fee that “(1) must be paid in order to purchase the goods or services being advertised; (2) is not reasonably avoidable by the consumer; or (3) a reasonable person would expect to be included in the purchase of the goods or services being advertised.” Those prongs are disjunctive, and clause (3) is the broad one. The legislature defined mandatory fee and left nonoptional undefined. A genuinely declinable charge can therefore fall outside § 504B.120 and still be a mandatory fee under subd. 1a(b)(3) — which is one more reason not to plead only one of them.

The utility rules live in § 504B.216, not in the one-sentence disclosure duty

Duty 4 gets a tenant one sentence in the lease. The substantive utility-billing rules for a building whose service is measured by fewer meters than it has units are in § 504B.216, and they are specific:

• “Apportionment of electricity is prohibited.” § 504B.216, subd. 5(a). Flat prohibition, no exception in the subdivision.
• Apportioned natural gas must be allocated by the unit’s square footage as a proportion of all units’ square footage, and apportioned water and sewer by the number of tenants listed on the lease as a proportion of all leases’ occupancy. Subds. 6(b), 7(b).
• The landlord “must not charge any tenant for water and sewer usage in common areas; in spaces used exclusively or primarily by the landlord; in vacant units; for maintenance of the property; or for shared amenities, including but not limited to laundry facilities and pools.” Subd. 7(c).
• One administrative billing charge per billing period, capped at $8; one late payment charge per billing period for utilities, capped at $5 per month, not compounded. Subds. 8, 9.
• Beyond those two, subd. 8 provides that “no other fees or charges may be imposed on or collected from tenants for utility service, including but not limited to any administrative, capital, or any other expenses associated with the installation, maintenance, repair, replacement, or reading of submeters, unless the expense involving a submeter is due to the tenant’s willful, malicious, or negligent conduct.”
• The rights in the section “may not be waived or modified” and “are in addition to and do not limit other rights that may be available to the tenant in law or equity.” Subd. 14(2), (3).

A tenant looking at a utility line on a monthly statement is therefore holding two questions at once: whether the charge was lawful at all under § 504B.216, and whether it was disclosed where § 504B.120 required it to be.

Landlord includes the agent; residential tenant includes the occupant who never signed

“Landlord” is defined broadly and deliberately at § 504B.001, subd. 7: “an owner of real property, a contract for deed vendee, receiver, executor, trustee, lessee, agent, or other person directly or indirectly in control of rental property.” That reaches the management company that wrote the listing and the leasing agent who handed over the document, not only the entity on the title. A landlord who outsourced the advertisement did not outsource the duty.

“Residential tenant” is defined at subd. 12 as “a person who is occupying a dwelling in a residential building under a lease or contract, whether oral or written, that requires the payment of money or exchange of services, all other regular occupants of that dwelling unit, or a resident of a manufactured home park.” The middle clause matters. Regular occupants of the unit are residential tenants by definition whether or not they signed, and subdivision 2 makes the landlord liable “to the residential tenant.” A manufactured-home-park resident is covered by name.

The oral lease has no page one

Duty 2 requires a first page. An oral tenancy does not have one.

Minnesota requires a written lease only from landlords of “a residential building with 12 or more residential units.” § 504B.111. Below that threshold a lease may be oral — § 504B.001, subd. 8, defines “lease” as “an oral or written agreement creating a tenancy in real property” — and an oral lease cannot carry a Total Monthly Payment on page one. Duties 3 and 4 still bite, because a unit advertised for a residential tenancy is advertised the same way whether the landlord papers the deal or not. Duty 1 arguably survives as a disclosure obligation. Duty 2 has no mechanical application. I flag it because a small-landlord fee case will be built on the advertisement, not on the lease form.

Do the two statutes stack?

They do, and nothing in either one says otherwise.

Start with whether an apartment listing is even within the junk fee law. Subdivision 1a(a) reaches a price “for goods or services,” and the Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act does not define either word — § 325D.43 defines seven terms, all of them about marks, articles, and trade names, and none of them narrows the act to chattels. The structure of the exemption subdivision points the same way: § 325D.44, subd. 1b(3), exempts “any fees, surcharges, or other costs associated with settlement services, as defined in the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act,” and then adds, “This clause does not apply to real estate broker commissions and fees.” A legislature that thought real property transactions were outside subdivision 1a had no reason to write either sentence.

Residential leasing by a business landlord is conduct “in the course of business, vocation, or occupation.”

Then the cumulative-remedy clauses, and there are three of them pointing the same direction. Section 325D.45, subd. 3: “The relief provided in this section is in addition to remedies otherwise available against the same conduct under the common law or other statutes of this state.” Section 325D.44, subd. 3: “This section does not affect unfair, deceptive, or misleading trade practices otherwise actionable at common law or under other statutes of this state.” And on the landlord-tenant side, § 504B.216, subd. 14(3), makes that section’s utility rights “in addition to and do not limit other rights that may be available to the tenant in law or equity.”

The division of labor writes itself. Section 504B.120 pays. Section 325D.44 stops the practice. A tenant who wants both pleads both.

Conciliation court fits the money claim, not the injunction

Most of these claims are small, and conciliation court takes claims up to $20,000 under § 491A.01, subd. 3a(a)(1). A $70-a-month fee across a twelve-month term, trebled, is $2,520 — comfortably inside that limit and, for a lot of tenants, not worth a district court filing fee to chase. The forum has one relevant blind spot: § 491A.01, subd. 4(6), excludes actions “involving injunctive relief” except as subdivision 5 allows. So the money statute fits in conciliation court and the junk fee statute’s injunctive remedy does not. Our walk-through of that court is at Minnesota conciliation court.

Do not sit on it. Whichever limitations period applies to a treble-damages claim under subdivision 2, waiting costs the tenant the evidence long before it costs the claim — listings come down, portals purge, and the screenshot that proves what the unit was advertised at is gone. Bring it while the listing, the lease, and the ledger are all still in hand.

A tenant who raises a fee problem and then gets a termination notice should read the retaliation statute at the same time; I covered its presumption and its timing in landlord retaliation under § 504B.285.

Has any Minnesota court construed § 504B.120?

Not that I can find. Now, what that does and does NOT establish.

I searched for decisions citing the section by number and for decisions using its operative language, in five phrasings across two corpora: the statutory cite “504B.120,” the phrase “nonoptional fees,” the phrase “Total Monthly Payment,” and “prohibited fees” paired with “landlord,” plus a general web search for reported or unpublished Minnesota decisions applying the section. Every one came back empty as to § 504B.120. I calibrated each search against terms I knew were present.

In the case-law corpus, the cite “504B.285” returns eleven decisions including a Minnesota Supreme Court opinion filed September 24, 2025; “504B.161” returns thirteen, including a Minnesota Supreme Court opinion from April 2024; and the phrase “Total Monthly Payment” returns a Minnesota Supreme Court opinion from May 2025. On the web side, the same search form surfaced a nonprecedential Minnesota Court of Appeals decision on tenant fees filed June 15, 2026, which I pulled from the Judicial Branch’s own archive — the channel reaches Minnesota decisions well after § 504B.120 took effect. The searches work, and they reach both current Minnesota opinions and that exact phrase.

That is a well-supported negative, not a certainty. The Minnesota Judicial Branch’s own opinion search was not reachable from the machine I ran this on, and an unpublished district court order construing a 2024 statute would not appear in any of these corpora anyway. What I can say is that the section has no appellate gloss I can locate: no reported construction of “nonoptional,” no decision on what “treble damages” multiplies, no holding on whether the advertisement sentence supports a claim by a tenant who signed after reading a deficient listing. Those are open, and the text is all anyone has.

What I tell a tenant to keep

Photograph or print the listing the day you apply, with the URL and the date visible, and do it again the day you sign — the two versions are frequently not the same document. Keep page one of the lease and every addendum that adds a monthly charge, because the addenda are usually where the fees live and the first page is where the statute says the sum has to be. Keep twelve months of statements rather than twelve months of receipts; the statement shows the charge by name and the receipt shows only a number. And write down what the leasing agent said the rent was, with the date, because that is an offer of a price, and § 325D.44, subd. 1a(a), reaches offers.

Madgett Law, LLC

Madgett Law, LLC represents Minnesota consumers and tenants in deceptive pricing and consumer fraud disputes, landlord-tenant matters, debt collection, and credit reporting cases, in state and federal court. If you are paying a monthly charge that was not in the Total Monthly Payment on the first page of your lease, or that was not in the listing you answered, we can tell you whether a statute reaches it and whether the amount justifies a claim. Call 612-470-6529 or send us a message.

Sources: Minn. Stat. § 504B.120, subd. 1 (lease disclosure of all nonoptional fees; Total Monthly Payment on the first page; advertisement or posting disclosure; utilities included or not included) and subd. 2 (landlord liable to the residential tenant for treble damages; court may award reasonable attorney fees); Minn. Stat. § 504B.001, subd. 7 (“landlord,” including agent and person directly or indirectly in control of rental property), subd. 8 (“lease” means an oral or written agreement), subd. 12 (“residential tenant,” including all other regular occupants and manufactured home park residents); Minn. Stat. § 504B.111 (written lease required only for buildings with 12 or more residential units); Minn. Stat. § 504B.172 (reciprocal attorney fees where the lease provides them to the landlord); Minn. Stat. § 504B.173, subd. 4(a) (applicant screening fee remedy — fee plus civil penalty of up to $100, costs, and fees); Minn. Stat. § 504B.177(a) (late fee requires written agreement; may not exceed eight percent of the overdue rent payment); Minn. Stat. § 504B.178, subd. 2 (interest on security deposits), subd. 4 (damages equal to the portion withheld, as a penalty); Minn. Stat. § 504B.216, subd. 5(a) (apportionment of electricity prohibited), subd. 6(b) (natural gas allocated by square footage), subd. 7(b)–(c) (water and sewer allocated by listed occupancy; no charge for common areas, landlord spaces, vacant units, maintenance, or shared amenities), subd. 8 (single administrative billing charge per billing period, not to exceed $8; no other utility fees or charges), subd. 9 (utility late payment charge capped at $5 per month, not compounded), subd. 14(2)–(3) (rights may not be waived; rights are additional); Minn. Stat. § 325D.43 (Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act definitions — no definition of “goods” or “services”); Minn. Stat. § 325D.44, subd. 1a(a) (advertised, displayed, or offered price must include all mandatory fees or surcharges), subd. 1a(b) (three-prong “mandatory fee” definition), subd. 1b(3) (RESPA settlement-services exemption; real estate broker commissions and fees not exempt), subd. 3 (other law unaffected); Minn. Stat. § 325D.45, subd. 1 (injunctive relief), subd. 3 (remedies cumulative); Minn. Stat. § 491A.01, subd. 3a(a)(1) (conciliation court jurisdiction to $20,000), subd. 4(6) (no jurisdiction over actions involving injunctive relief); 2023 Minn. Laws ch. 52, art. 19, § 84 (enactment of § 504B.120) and § 90 (sections 83 to 89 effective January 1, 2024, applying to leases signed on or after that date); 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 111, §§ 1–2 (enactment of § 325D.44, subds. 1a and 1b; effective January 1, 2025). This article is general legal information about Minnesota law. It is not legal advice, it does not create an attorney–client relationship, and no particular outcome is promised or implied.