How We Verify Our Legal Data

Our lease documents print real legal deadlines: how many days a landlord has to return a deposit, the required notice before entry, the grace period before a late fee can be charged. A wrong value here becomes a wrong deadline in someone's signed lease, so we hold this data to a primary-source standard. This page explains exactly how.

We use official primary sources only

Every per-state value comes from an official government source: the state landlord-tenant statute itself, read on the legislature's own site. We load the live official page and record the exact non-search URL along with the verbatim sentence the value rests on.

We do not treat a Google or Bing result snippet as the final authority, even when it quotes an official site. Snippets truncate the exemptions, provisos, and effective dates that change what a rule actually means. We also do not rely on legal aggregator sites such as Justia, FindLaw, or Nolo as the source of truth. They are useful for finding a statute number, but the codified statute is always the final word.

We read the full statute, not just the headline number

Deadlines often hide their real meaning a few subsections down. Reading the full statute is how we catch errors that a quick search would repeat. In our 2026 review, reading Alabama's deposit statute in full caught that the return deadline was 35 days, not the 60 days the data previously held. When a state genuinely has no rule, we say so rather than inventing one: Georgia has no statutory residential late-fee cap, so we set that value to "no statutory cap" rather than guessing a number.

What our last review covered

In May 2026 we audited all 51 US jurisdictions (50 states plus the District of Columbia). The review covered security-deposit return deadlines, deposit interest and separate-account rules, late-fee caps and grace periods, entry-notice requirements, month-to-month termination notice periods, and required disclosures, with each value read from the official statute and logged with its URL and verbatim text. Examples of values confirmed or corrected in that review:

• Washington deposit return confirmed at 30 days, per RCW 59.18.280.
• Connecticut deposit return corrected to 21 days, reflecting Public Act 23-207.
• Illinois deposit return confirmed at 45 days, per the Security Deposit Return Act.
• Alabama deposit return corrected from 60 to 35 days after a full read of the statute.
• North Carolina month-to-month notice set to 7 days, per N.C. Gen. Stat. 42-14, with the statute text shown on the page.

Many of these values print directly into the lease you generate, which is why we treat them as the highest-stakes data on the site.

What we are not

Your Lease Agreement is a document-preparation service, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. Laws change, and a rule can shift between our reviews. For a high-value tenancy or a question specific to your situation, consult a licensed attorney in your state. The requirements we display reflect our most recent verified review, and we link the governing statute on every state page so you can confirm the current rule yourself.

Found something wrong? Tell us

If you believe a value is out of date or incorrect, email [email protected] with the state, the field, and a link to the official source. We re-verify against the primary source and correct it promptly when warranted.

Your Lease Agreement is operated by 7H Ventures LLC, based in Georgia. Legal data last reviewed May 2026.