Illinois Just Banned 11 Rental Fees. If You Manage Property Anywhere, Read the List.
On June 26, 2026, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed House Bill 3564 into law. It amends the Illinois Landlord and Tenant Act to ban eleven specific fees that property managers and landlords have charged for years, and it caps application fees at $50. The law takes effect January 1, 2027.
If you don't manage property in Illinois, it's tempting to skip this one. Don't. This is the same pattern that showed up with algorithmic rent-pricing bans and portable screening report laws this year: one state writes a detailed list, and other state legislatures borrow the language almost line for line the next session. The list itself is also a useful audit tool no matter where your units sit, because it names the exact fees that quietly became standard practice across the industry and that a tenant's lawyer can now point to as "the stuff Illinois decided was unfair."
The 11 fees HB 3564 bans outright
Starting with leases entered into on or after January 1, 2027, Illinois landlords and property managers cannot charge:
- An application or screening fee above $50 (narrow exception if a third-party background check actually costs more, and only if the landlord fronts the cost and bills the applicant within 14 days)
- A fee to modify or renew a lease
- An eviction notice or filing fee charged before a court has entered an order
- An after-hours maintenance request fee
- A fee just to contact the landlord or property manager about maintenance
- A travel fee for a repair technician to show up
- A maintenance hotline access fee
- A routine maintenance fee
- A pest control fee, when the tenant didn't cause the infestation
- A move-in or move-out walkthrough fee
- A lockout fee
On top of the list, the law requires landlords to disclose every non-optional fee in the listing or lease in a "clear and conspicuous" way, and to state plainly whether utilities are included in rent. A companion bill, HB 5234, pushed the original effective date back six months (from July 1, 2026 to January 1, 2027) to give the industry more runway, which is itself a signal that the legislature expects this to be hard to implement cleanly.
Why this isn't just an Illinois story
The FTC has had rental junk fees in its sights since early 2026, Colorado passed its own total-price advertising law that took effect January 1, 2026, and several cities layered on local junk-fee ordinances this year. HB 3564 is the most specific version yet: it doesn't just say "disclose your fees," it names categories and makes them illegal to charge at all. That specificity is exactly what makes a bill easy for another state's legislative staff to copy.
The practical risk isn't a headline fine. The statute gives tenants a private right of action, meaning a tenant (or their attorney) can sue directly for an injunction, actual damages, and attorney's fees. If your lease template or fee schedule has three or four of these line items baked in across a whole portfolio, that's not one dispute, it's the same defect repeated across every unit using that template.
What to actually check this quarter
You don't need a lawyer to do the first pass. Pull your current lease template, your fee schedule, and whatever automated reminders or portal messages reference a fee, and check each one against the eleven items above. A surprising number of "standard" fees (a $25 after-hours call fee, a $15 hotline fee, a move-out inspection charge) sit on this list even if you've never thought of them as a group.
This is also the kind of recurring compliance check that's easy to let slip because nobody owns it full-time. An agent that reads your current lease templates and fee disclosures, flags anything that now matches a banned category in Illinois or a state that follows its lead, and drafts the corrected language for a person to review and approve is a reasonable way to keep this from becoming a portfolio-wide problem instead of a one-off fix. The agent proposes the edit; you or your attorney still approves what actually goes in front of a tenant.
Sources: GC Realty, "HB 3564 Is Now Law: January 2027 Changes for All Illinois Landlords" and Mondaq, "Illinois Rental Fee Changes In 2027: What Landlords And Property Managers Need To Know."