How we verify
Accuracy is the product.
A wrong rule is worse than no tool. So every number on this site is traced to the statute it comes from, shown with its citation and the date we last checked it, and built so you can verify it yourself.
Most landlord guides paraphrase the law and never show their work. We do the opposite. Right now this tool carries 137 cited rules across 5 states, drawn from 36 distinct official sources, including 113 passages quoted word for word. Here is exactly how they are sourced, checked, and kept current.
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Traced to the primary source
Every rule comes from the primary source that governs it: the Texas Property Code, Chapter 92, the California Civil Code, section 1950.5, the Florida Statutes, Chapter 83, the New York General Obligations Law, sections 7-103 and 7-108 (and section 7-107 for rent-stabilized units), the Colorado Revised Statutes, article 12 of title 38 (sections 38-12-101 to 106, with sections 38-12-102(4) and 38-12-103 as rewritten by HB25-1249, plus section 38-12-207 for a mobile home in a mobile home park, and the City of Boulder's municipal code for its deposit-interest ordinance), and, where a California city adds a deposit-interest ordinance, that city's own municipal code and rent-board publications. No blog summaries, no secondhand charts. Where a state’s own site does not serve a section we need, we say which mirror we used and hold the quote to the enacted text.
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Shown with its citation
Each rule displays its exact section, for example Tex. Prop. Code § 92.103, linked to the official statute, so you can read the law yourself.
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The statute text, verbatim
Where it helps, we show the actual wording of the law next to the plain-English explanation, so you see the source and not just our interpretation of it. There are 113 such passages on this site. Nearly all are stored exactly as their source prints them. Colorado's 2026 rules are the deliberate exception: they come from an enacted act that prints deletions struck through and additions in capitals, so those passages are stored as the section READS once the amendment applies, which is the wording that now governs rather than the printer's markup. The weekly check knows the difference and holds each quote to the form it is stored in.
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Independently re-checked
Each rule is derived from the primary sources, then checked again against them by a separate, adversarial review whose job is to disagree. Where a rule is a combined reading of more than one section rather than a single sentence, we label it "our reading" and explain it.
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Dated
Every rule carries a "last verified" date. A specific, recent date is the clearest honest signal that the information is current and actively maintained.
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Re-checked by machine, every week
A scheduled job re-fetches the official sources every Monday and asserts that each published quote is still present in the source it came from, whether that is the statute, an enacting act, or a court opinion. If a quote moves, the run fails and opens an issue. This is the part that catches a legislature quietly rewriting a subsection between our reviews.
You don’t have to take our word for it. On the tool, each rule you are shown displays its section linked to its official source, the verbatim statute text wherever there is text to quote, and a last-verified date. Where a rule is our synthesis of more than one section, we mark it so you know exactly what is the statute and what is our reading.
What the weekly check actually does
“We keep it up to date” is easy to write and hard to trust, so here is the mechanism. Every Monday an automated job re-fetches the 30 sources that back a quoted passage or sit on the watch list, and re-asserts each of the 113 quoted passages against the page it was taken from. It is looking for one thing: a sentence we publish that is no longer in its source. For most passages that source is the statute. For the handful that live only in an enacting act or a court opinion, it is that act or opinion, because those words appear in no codified statute and asserting them against one would fail forever.
If a passage has moved, the run fails and files an issue rather than continuing quietly. That distinction matters more than it sounds. The failure mode we are guarding against is not a dramatic one, it is a subsection being renumbered or a phrase being struck during a legislative session while the page around it looks unchanged.
The same job watches for new court decisions touching the statutes we cite, and it tracks a fingerprint of each statute and enacting-act page it fetches, so that a change outside our quoted text still gets looked at. Court opinions and agency PDFs are deliberately not fingerprinted: they render differently from different networks, and a fingerprint on them cries wolf every week. Sources that cannot be read at all are reported as unverified rather than counted as passing, because an admitted gap can be fixed and a false green cannot even be seen.
What a “last verified” date does and does not promise
It promises that on that date a human read the rule against the primary source and agreed with it. The oldest such date on the site right now is June 25, 2026.
It does not promise that the law has not changed since, that every court reads the statute the way we do, or that your situation is the ordinary one the statute describes. Legislatures amend deposit law regularly, and an amendment can be signed months before it takes effect. Where a rule turns on a date, we show the date.
Corrections we have made
A verification process that has never caught anything is not a verification process. These are real corrections to rules this tool had already published, and each is the kind of error that a summary-of-a-summary would carry indefinitely.
- Hayward, California. We had listed an ongoing deposit-interest duty. Hayward repealed and replaced the ordinance that created it in 2019, and the replacement defers security deposits to state law, which requires no interest. The rule now says no payment is required and explains why.
- Santa Monica, California. We had the money answer right, that no interest payment is owed to the tenant, and were missing a duty that is still live: the deposit must still be held in an interest-bearing account. Being right about the payment is not the same as being complete about the obligation.
- Colorado, statewide. HB25-1249 rewrote the deposit statute effective January 1, 2026. Several free codification mirrors still serve the pre-2026 text, so the Colorado rules here are asserted against the enacted act itself rather than against a mirror. A good deal of published Colorado guidance still describes the repealed version.
What this is, and what it isn’t
This is general legal information, presented as clearly and accurately as we can make it. It is not legal advice, and the tool is not a law firm. It explains the rules and does the math on the facts you enter. It does not decide whether your specific deductions are lawful or whether anyone acted in bad faith. Those are questions for a court, and for genuinely unusual situations you should talk to a licensed attorney in your state.
Found something wrong?
Accuracy is the product, so a correction is a gift. If you think a rule is off or out of date, email security@orygn.tech and we will re-verify it against the statute and fix it, with a fresh “last verified” date.