Seattle Bans Pet Rent and Package Fees: What Takes Effect in 2027

Seattle has banned pet rent, package fees and administrative charges in rental housing. Mayor Katie B. Wilson signed Ordinance 127497 after an 8-0 council vote, but the rules do not bite until July 1, 2027, and only for leases entered or renewed after that date.

Information last verified on September 25, 2026. This is a developing story; we update it as the record changes.

Status: Signed into law. The Seattle City Clerk's legislative record shows the City Council passed Council Bill 121254 as amended on August 11, 2026, that Mayor Katie B. Wilson signed it on August 18, 2026, and that the City Clerk attested it the same day as Ordinance 127497. The Mayor's Office published its signing announcement on September 16, 2026. Section 18 of the ordinance sets the effective date in plain terms: "Sections 1 through 17 of this ordinance shall take effect on July 1, 2027." The operative code sections apply to "any rental agreement or renewal of a rental agreement entered into after July 1, 2027."

Jurisdiction scope: This is a City of Seattle ordinance. It amends the Seattle Municipal Code and it binds landlords of dwelling units in Seattle, small landlords and affordable housing providers included; the City's official FAQ states that short-term rentals such as Airbnb are not covered. It does not apply elsewhere in King County, anywhere else in Washington, or in any other state. Renters outside Seattle are governed by Washington's Residential Landlord-Tenant Act at chapter 59.18 RCW and by any separate local ordinance their own city has adopted.

What Happened

The legislation began as a mayoral transmittal. The City Clerk's record shows the bill reached the Council on July 1, 2026, was referred to the Housing, Arts, and Civil Rights Committee on July 14, and was recommended for passage as amended on August 3. The full Council passed it as amended on August 11, 2026, by a vote the Mayor's Office reports as 8-0. The Clerk submitted it for signature on August 13, the Mayor signed it on August 18, and the Clerk attested it as Ordinance 127497 the same day.

There is a wrinkle in the public record worth naming precisely, because dates are the whole story in legislation like this. The Mayor's Office published its announcement, headlined as the signing of the junk fee legislation into law, on September 16, 2026. The City Clerk's legislative history records the Mayor's signature a month earlier, on August 18, 2026, and the signed ordinance document carries an August 18, 2026 certification timestamp. We use the Clerk's dates as the legal record of enactment and treat September 16 as the date the Mayor's Office announced it publicly. Neither date starts the fee rules running.

The bill's formal title describes the package: an ordinance requiring disclosure of fees, prohibiting and limiting certain fees, requiring retention of compliance records, expanding investigation authority, and establishing new enforcement mechanisms. It amends five existing sections of SMC Chapter 7.24 and adds eleven new ones.

The sponsor was Councilmember Dionne Foster. "Renters shouldn't have to navigate a maze of hidden costs just to understand what their housing will actually cost them," Foster said in the Mayor's Office release. Mayor Wilson said in the same release that "junk fees have been a constant source of unnecessary stress for renters across Seattle, and their removal will provide much-needed peace of mind." City Attorney Erika Evans said the ban "provides tenants fairness and transparency."

Lam Ho, General Manager of the Transit Riders Union, was quoted in the release saying the ordinance "provides the strongest enforcement mechanisms of any WA renter protections." That is an advocate's characterisation offered by a supporting organisation, and we have not independently compared Seattle's provisions against every other Washington ordinance.

The ordinance's recitals set out the City's reasoning: a 2023 National Consumer Law Center study finding 89 percent of renters paid one or more fees on top of rent, City figures putting 38,365 Seattle renter households in the cost-burdened range and 33,795 in the severely cost-burdened range, and research on why a landlord who advertises an all-in price loses market share to competitors advertising a low base rent with fees unbundled. The recitals frame that last point as a collective action problem that will not self-correct.

What the Ordinance Bans

The structural move here matters more than any individual fee on the list, and it is the part most likely to be described loosely elsewhere. The ordinance does not simply enumerate forbidden fees. It inverts the default.

New SMC 7.24.040.A provides that a landlord "may not require a tenant to pay any mandatory or optional fee, except as provided in this Chapter 7.24 or Chapter 7.25, or chapter 59.18 RCW." Anything outside those three bodies of law, the section continues, "regardless of the name or description of the fee, constitute unfair or excessive fees, which are prohibited." A second sentence closes the disclosure loophole: fees not disclosed as required by new SMC 7.24.039 are themselves unfair or excessive fees and are prohibited.

That is a permitted-list regime. Administrative service fees, lease signing and renewal fees, month-to-month premiums, repair request fees, benefits package fees, valet garbage fees, technology fees and the rest of the catalogue are barred not because each is named, but because none appears on the permitted list. The City's own FAQ names that same set of charges as prohibited.

New SMC 7.24.040.C then goes further for a specific group of fees, which cannot even be offered as optional extras:

• Any fee for the use of an in-unit appliance or other feature of a dwelling unit, with one carve-out for renting a portable cooling device as allowed by Section 1 of Chapter 184, Laws of 2026.
• Any fee for a tenant's access to common areas, except where the fee buys exclusive temporary use of a common facility, such as renting a clubhouse for a private event.
• Any fee to accept rent or other payments by personal check, money order, cashier's check, or automated clearing house transfer.
• Any fee to receive or collect mail, for package collection and distribution, or for access to the mailbox associated with the unit.
• Any fee for performing a landlord duty already required by SMC 22.206.160 or RCW 59.18.060.
• Any fee for a partial change of tenancy when adding or removing a tenant from the agreement, though screening fees under SMC 7.24.035.B are excluded from that bar.
• Any fee associated with keeping a pet, other than a pet damage deposit under SMC 7.24.038, "whether the fee is imposed once or periodically and regardless of how the fee is named or described." That language is what ends pet rent.
• Any fee for landlord-provided insurance, unless the landlord satisfies the optional-service conditions, gives the tenant the policy in advance with a clear statement of whether it covers the tenant's personal property or loss of use, notifies the tenant of policy changes within five days, and meets minimum standards to be set by Director's Rule.

SMC 7.24.040.C.9 leaves the list open-ended. The Department may designate any other optional fee as unfair or excessive by Director's Rule, weighing factors the section spells out, including whether the associated service provides a meaningful and substantial benefit, whether the fee is commensurate with the landlord's cost, whether the charge is substantively similar to rent, and whether the fee may contribute to an eviction.

New SMC 7.24.039 handles the pricing side. For any agreement or renewal entered into after July 1, 2027, a landlord must disclose, in every advertisement, listing and rental application, and again on a form of no more than two pages placed conspicuously before the first page of the lease: the monthly rent; the amount and duration of any discount or concession; all utilities the tenant is responsible for; any utilities included in rent; the amounts of all mandatory and optional fees, including variable fees; and the total monthly cost the tenant will pay, including estimated utilities, excluding optional fees and excluding concessions that do not run the full lease term.

Online listings may hyperlink to the disclosure where space genuinely will not allow the full text, but the link must be obvious, labelled as leading to the fee disclosure, and must land the reader directly on the information. Landlords are not liable for listings they did not authorise, which is the ordinance's answer to third-party aggregator sites. Variable fees and utility charges must be disclosed as a trailing 12-month average, or a clearly labelled estimate for new construction, with a monthly statement of actual amounts. The disclosure must be refreshed every 12 months, unless the lease term exceeds one year with acknowledgement, witness or seal under RCW 59.18.210, and again on any change to a non-variable fee. It must be served under RCW 59.12.040, and no fee may be charged for preparing or delivering it. The Director must publish a model form with translations in the five languages most commonly spoken in Seattle other than English.

What Landlords May Still Charge

This is the half of the ordinance most likely to be summarised wrongly, because a headline about banning fees invites the assumption that everything is gone. It is not. New SMC 7.24.040.B preserves an explicit list of permitted charges:

• Late rent fees, under existing SMC 7.24.034.
• Security deposits and nonrefundable move-in fees, under existing SMC 7.24.035.
• Screening fees, under SMC 7.24.035.B. Tenant screening charges survive intact, and they are also excluded from the ban on partial-change-of-tenancy fees. A separate pet screening charge does not survive: the City's official FAQ lists pet screening among the prohibited fees, which follows from the SMC 7.24.040.C.7 bar on any fee associated with keeping a pet.
• Pet damage deposits, under existing SMC 7.24.038. A refundable pet damage deposit is permitted; recurring pet rent is not. That distinction is the single most consequential line in the ordinance for renters with animals.
• Utility fees, under SMC Chapter 7.25, which is left as a separate regime with its own disclosure rules.
• Key replacement where the replacement is necessary through the tenant's fault, capped at the lesser of the landlord's actual cost or $50.
• Lockout access caused by the tenant's fault, capped at $50 between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday through Friday and $150 outside those hours, with no fee at all where the landlord is already at the property when access is requested.
• Returned payment fees for insufficient funds, capped at the lesser of the bank's actual charge to the landlord or $31.
• Damage reimbursement for repair of damage to the unit or property or replacement of fixtures, as allowed by RCW 59.18.180(1) and subject to the documentation requirements of RCW 59.18.280.
• Default or abandonment liability under RCW 59.18.310, with an express bar on assessing any additional lease break fee on top.
• Optional goods and services, but only under six conditions: the fee is disclosed as optional; the tenant opts in affirmatively in writing; the landlord gives written notice of how to opt out; the tenant may opt out at any time without penalty or cost; where a third party supplies the service, the fee may not exceed the landlord's actual cost; and a bundle must also be offered as separately available components rather than only as a bundle.

The dollar caps on deposits and move-in fees themselves come from the pre-existing Seattle sections that the ordinance points to rather than rewrites. According to the City's official FAQ on the legislation, move-in charges including screening fees, security deposits and pet deposits are capped in combination at one month's rent, pet deposits are limited to 25 percent of rent, and late fees are capped at $10 per month. Those limits sit alongside Washington's statewide landlord-tenant rules, which the ordinance does not displace.

New SMC 7.24.045 adds a records duty. Landlords must retain rental agreement compliance records for three years, and where a landlord fails to retain adequate records, a rebuttable presumption of violation arises for every period and every tenant the missing records cover, overcome only by clear and convincing evidence.

How It Is Enforced

Enforcement runs on four tracks at once.

Administrative investigation. New SMC 7.24.170 gives the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections power to investigate any landlord, on the Director's own initiative or on a report from a tenant or any other person. SMC 7.24.170.A.2 authorises "individual, building-wide, and company-wide investigations," so one complaint can open an inquiry across a whole portfolio. The Director may demand documents and issue interrogatories, reporter identities stay confidential to the maximum extent the law permits, and an investigation must commence within three years of the alleged violation, tolling the civil limitations period while it runs.

The treble recovery. New SMC 7.24.190.B is the provision behind the "three times" figure in the Mayor's announcement. A landlord found in violation of SMC 7.24.040 is liable to the tenant for "full reimbursement of all prohibited fees charged plus interest, and double the amount of the prohibited fees charged." Reimbursement plus double the amount is three times the illegal fees in total, with interest at 12 percent per annum from the date the fee was charged, or the maximum rate permitted by RCW 19.52.020. Where a landlord's failure to produce records makes the exact figure impossible to pin down, the Director may estimate it by just and reasonable inference, including from representative tenant testimony covering a class of tenants.

Civil penalties run separately to the Department: $750 for a first violation, $1,500 for each subsequent one, and $5,000 for retaliation or for wilfully obstructing the Director or Hearing Examiner. Citation penalties under amended SMC 7.24.130.F rise to the same $750 and $1,500 figures, and from January 1, 2028 all of these amounts adjust annually by the housing component of the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue CPI-U. The Director may waive 75 percent of the Department's penalties if the landlord pays the tenant in full within ten days of the Order of Investigative Findings, 50 percent within 15 days, and nothing after that.

The City Attorney. Amended SMC 7.24.120.D lets the Director, in collaboration with the City Attorney's Office, refer an investigation to that office for a civil action before an Order of Investigative Findings has even issued, and provides that the City Attorney may impose remedies consistent with SMC 7.24.190. That is the statutory basis for taking a landlord to court for three times the illegal fees. New SMC 7.24.240 provides that money the City collects for a tenant is held in trust and paid over to that tenant. A prohibited fee a landlord has already referred out for collection raises a separate question under state law, which our guide to collection practices and garnishment rules in Washington covers.

The private right of action. Amended SMC 7.24.060 is broadened from a handful of named sections to the whole of Chapter 7.24. A tenant may sue for actual damages plus interest, double the amount of any prohibited fee or security deposit unlawfully charged or withheld, an amount equal to double the SMC 7.24.130.F citation penalty for each violation found, and reasonable attorney fees and costs. Including a prohibited provision in a new or renewed agreement carries up to $4,000 plus fees, raised from $3,000; retaliation carries up to $6,000 plus actual damages and fees. SMC 7.24.060.A.4 allows one or more tenants to seek relief on behalf of similarly situated tenants whose claims arise from the same policy or practice.

The cure defence is narrow. Under SMC 7.24.060.E, a landlord who within 30 days of a prohibited fee notice reimburses every similarly situated tenant in full with interest, pays double the fees on top, and notifies the Department, gains a defence against civil actions by those compensated tenants. One notice gives constructive notice as to every similarly situated tenant in the same building. Under SMC 7.24.060.F, repeating the same prohibited fee within 24 months of a cure forfeits the defence against claims for prohibited lease provisions. SMC 7.24.060.D bars recovering twice for the same harm from different forums, and amended SMC 7.24.050 reduces the rent figure in an unlawful detainer action by the amount of any prohibited fee.

What Washington State Law Already Required

None of this replaces the state baseline, which continues to govern renters across Washington and is the floor Seattle is building on. Our guide to Washington deposit, rent cap and notice rules covers the wider chapter; the provisions most relevant here are these.

Deposits and move-in money. RCW 59.18.253 makes it unlawful to charge a fee or deposit for a place on a waiting list, requires a receipt and a written statement of the retention conditions immediately on payment, and caps a fee or deposit to hold a unit at 25 percent of the first month's rent, which must be credited to rent or the security deposit if the tenant moves in. Tenant screening service and background-check costs are expressly excluded from that holding fee or deposit under RCW 59.18.253(4)(b), so they do not count against the 25 percent cap. RCW 59.18.285 forbids designating any nonrefundable money as a deposit and requires a written agreement identifying the fee as nonrefundable; without the writing the landlord is liable for the full amount, and a fee not labelled nonrefundable is treated as a refundable deposit under RCW 59.18.260, 59.18.270 and 59.18.280. RCW 59.18.610 gives tenants the right to pay deposits, nonrefundable fees and last month's rent in installments, and RCW 59.18.670 governs deposit waivers and fee-in-lieu arrangements.

Late fees. RCW 59.18.170(2) bars a late fee on rent paid within five days of the due date, and allows the fee to run from the first day after the due date once rent is more than five days late. That provision sets timing, not a ceiling. Seattle's $10 monthly cap under SMC 7.24.034 is a local rule, which is why late fee exposure differs sharply inside and outside the city.

Rent increases. RCW 59.18.700, enacted by 2025 c 209 s 101, bars a rent increase during the first 12 months of a tenancy and caps increases in any 12-month period at 7 percent plus CPI, or 10 percent, whichever is less, except where an exemption under RCW 59.18.710 applies, with the section set to expire July 1, 2040. Its enforcement provision allows recovery of excess rent, fees or other costs paid by the tenant. The state rent cap and Seattle's fee ordinance address related but distinct problems: how fast rent itself can move, and what can be charged alongside it.

Cooling devices. RCW 59.18.740, as enacted by 2026 c 184 s 1, bars fees for the use, inspection or installation of a portable cooling device while preserving a landlord's ability to charge "for the rental of a portable cooling device rented by a tenant from the landlord." That is the exact source of the single carve-out in Seattle's in-unit appliance fee ban, and a useful illustration of the local and state layers interlocking rather than competing.

Readers comparing regimes can start from our landlord-tenant laws by state index, which sets out each state's deposit, fee and notice rules separately.

Analysis: Why This Matters

The following is analysis from the Recording Law Editorial Team.

The reporting instinct with a law like this is to lead with the banned-fee list. We think the permitted-list architecture in SMC 7.24.040.A matters more, and will matter longer.

Enumerated bans in fee regulation tend to age badly, because naming a fee invites renaming it. A rule that forbids "pet rent" is answered by an "animal amenity charge." Seattle's drafters addressed that in two places: the general rule reaches any fee not expressly permitted "regardless of the name or description of the fee," and the pet provision separately bars any pet-associated charge "whether the fee is imposed once or periodically and regardless of how the fee is named or described." Those clauses do the durable work. The second structural choice worth noting is that non-disclosure is itself a violation that makes a fee illegal rather than a paperwork failure: an otherwise permitted fee becomes an unfair or excessive fee if it was not disclosed under SMC 7.24.039. That couples the transparency half of the ordinance to the money remedies in the enforcement half.

The July 1, 2027 date deserves more attention than it usually gets, and the precise wording matters more than the date alone. The operative sections apply to agreements and renewals "entered into after July 1, 2027." That is not a rule that switches on for all tenancies that day. A Seattle tenant on a fixed-term lease signed in 2026 or early 2027 sits outside the new fee rules until that lease is renewed or replaced, so the ordinance will phase in across the city's rental stock over roughly the year following the effective date as leases turn over. Anyone reading a summary that says Seattle banned pet rent should hold both halves of the sentence: the ban is real, and the earliest it can reach any given tenancy is a new agreement or renewal after July 1, 2027.

The runway between signing and effectiveness is doing real work too. The Director must produce a model disclosure form with translations, and holds rule-making authority both to add optional fees to the prohibited list under SMC 7.24.040.C.9 and to set minimum standards for landlord-provided insurance. The regime's shape on day one will depend on Director's Rules that do not exist yet, which is why we treat this as a developing story rather than a settled one.

The enforcement design, finally, pairs a strong administrative track with a strong private one and connects them. Company-wide investigation authority, an estimation power that punishes poor record-keeping, penalties that step up for repeat offenders, a cure defence that costs three times the fee to invoke and evaporates on repetition, and attorney fees on the private side all point the same way: the ordinance assumes fee practices are set at the portfolio level rather than the unit level, and aims its remedies accordingly. Whether that assumption holds is a question the first enforcement cycle after July 2027 will answer.

Disclaimer: This article is general legal information about a municipal ordinance, not legal advice. How the ordinance applies turns on the specific terms and dates of an individual rental agreement, and the Director's Rules that will fill in parts of the regime have not yet been issued. Questions about a particular tenancy should go to a licensed Washington attorney or to the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections.

Related articles

• Washington landlord-tenant law: deposits, rent cap and notice requirements
• Landlord-tenant laws by state
• Washington debt collection law, if a landlord refers a disputed fee to a collector

Last updated: 2026-09-25. This is a developing story; details verified as of 2026-09-25.