About Deposit Record
A free deposit tool, and the statute behind every rule.
Deposit Record helps a landlord return a security deposit correctly, state by state, with the deadline, the deduction limits, and a ready-to-send letter each cited to the law it comes from.
No sign-up, nothing about your tenancy stored, never paywalled. Just the rules, the math, and the letter.
Why it exists
Returning a deposit sounds simple, but every state sets a hard deadline, limits what you can deduct, and adds real penalties for getting it wrong: in Texas, a landlord who acts in bad faith can owe the tenant $100 plus three times the amount wrongfully withheld plus their attorney’s fees; in California, a court can add up to twice the deposit on top of actual damages if the landlord kept it in bad faith; in Florida, a landlord who misses the 30-day claim-notice deadline forfeits any claim against the deposit and must return it, though a separate damages suit still survives, and the prevailing party in a deposit dispute recovers attorney fees either way; in New York, a landlord who is one day past the fourteen-day deadline forfeits the right to keep any portion of the deposit, including money genuinely owed for unpaid rent and real damage; and in Colorado, whose 2026 rewrite most other sites still get wrong, wrongfully keeping a deposit can cost three times the amount withheld plus the tenant’s attorney fees. The rules are scattered across the statutes and buried in blog posts. This puts the deadline, the deduction rules, and a ready-to-send itemized letter in one place, each tied to the section of the statute it comes from.
What it actually does
You answer a short set of plain questions about the tenancy: the dates, the deposit, what you want to deduct. The tool applies your state’s own rules to those facts and gives you three things. First, your deadline, counted the way your state counts it, which is rarely just “30 days from move-out”. Second, your deductions set against the limits your state actually imposes, since several states publish a closed list and normal wear and tear is never on any of them. You decide whether a given item qualifies; the tool does not classify it for you. Third, an itemized return letter naming the statute it complies with, which you can edit, print, and send.
The letter is the part that does not exist elsewhere. Plenty of sites will summarise the law at you. Very few will do the arithmetic on your dates and hand you the document the statute expects you to produce.
What it deliberately will not do
It will not tell you whether a particular deduction is lawful in your situation, whether anyone acted in bad faith, or what a court would decide. Those are legal judgments, and this is not a law firm. Where a rule genuinely has no settled answer, the tool says so and points you at a licensed attorney rather than inventing one.
It also does not guess. If a city requires deposit interest but no current published rate can be verified, the tool states the duty and refuses to produce a number, because a wrong rate is wrong money.
Scope is set per state rather than globally, because the states draw the line differently. All five cover ordinary residential tenancies and none covers commercial leases, but the edges vary. Manufactured-home lots are one divergence: Texas, California and Florida each put them under a separate statute and out of scope, while Colorado covers a mobile home in a mobile home park and applies its own overlay. New York is another: the Legislature cut rent-controlled apartments and five institutional categories out of the 2019 deposit package in § 7-108(1-a), so this tool declines to answer for them rather than guessing. The trust duty in § 7-103 still binds every New York landlord, with no carve-outs at all. Each state page states its own scope.
Who it’s for
Small and do-it-yourself landlords who manage their own rentals and don’t have a property manager or a lawyer on call for a routine deposit return. If you just had a tenant move out and you’re trying to do this right, this is for you.
Nothing you type leaves your browser
The dates, amounts and descriptions you type are never sent anywhere. Every calculation runs on your own device and the pages are plain static files, so there is no account, no server holding your tenancy, and nothing to breach. The Privacy Policy spells out the little that is measured.
How it stays free
The tool is free and always will be. We plan to earn a little from clearly labeled links to services landlords already use, like landlord insurance and banking. Those never change the law we show you, and the core tool is never paywalled.
Found a mistake?
Accuracy is the product, so if you think a rule is wrong or out of date, we want to hear it. Read how we verify the law, or get in touch at security@orygn.tech.
Built by Orygn LLC, not a law firm. Deposit Record is built and maintained by Orygn LLC, an independent Texas software company. Using the tool creates no attorney-client relationship: it is general information that cites the statute, not legal advice. The full terms are in our Terms of Use, and exactly how we handle data (short version: it stays in your browser) is in our Privacy Policy.