MASSACHUSETTS RENTERS ARE already grappling with sky-high housing costs. Now imagine trying to renew your lease, only to be hit with a $300 lease renewal fee. Or needing to sublet your apartment for a few months and being told that’ll cost another $400. Or logging in to pay rent and finding there’s a $15 processing fee, with no way to avoid it.  

These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re real charges to tenants across the Commonwealth, and they’re examples of a broken rental system filled with hidden, predatory fees. 

Throw on top of these charges – charges which buy the renter quite literally nothing – the broker’s fee that often adds a whole month’s rent on top of move-in costs like security deposit and first- and last-months’ rent and you see one of the reasons so many families and students are leaving the state for more affordable places to live. 

In 2024, more than half of all Massachusetts renters – 51 percent – were cost-burdened, spending over 30 percent of their income on rent. That number includes families in Gateway Cities, working professionals in Boston, and seniors in small towns. The weight of rent alone is enough to put many families on the brink when it comes to paying for utilities, prescriptions, and even food, yet tenants are being asked to shoulder, often unexpectedly, far more through unjustified add-on costs. 

There are solutions. Gov. Healey and the Legislature appear ready to repeal the broker’s fees paid by renters, and legislation that would get rid of other junk fees is now before the Legislature. 

H.1553/S.984 – An Act to Regulate Junk Fees in Rental Housing, filed by Reps. Sam Montaño and Amy Sangiolo, and Sen. Jamie Eldridge, is a targeted, common-sense solution that ends the nickel-and-diming of renters through junk fees that are both exploitative and destabilizing. 

The bill would stop landlords and brokers from gaming the system by charging for things they shouldn’t. For instance, landlords are already prohibited by law from charging certain upfront costs – but loopholes in the law allow the brokers to do so instead. This bill closes that loophole and limits permissible upfront charges to just first month’s rent, last month’s rent or a security deposit, and a lock change fee — nothing more. 

It also tackles lease renewal and subletting/assignment fees, which tenants often have no choice but to pay in order to keep a roof over their heads. I recently spoke to a tenant in Roxbury who was charged $350 simply for swapping roommates at the end of his lease term. The kicker? Nothing about the lease changed – not the rent, not the terms, nothing. That fee was pure profit. 

Another tenant in Worcester was forced to use the landlord’s online rent portal – which came with a $15 monthly processing fee.  

This bill would prohibit these kinds of portal fees unless an alternative, no-cost option is provided. 

This bill also protects tenants from being charged for attorneys’ fees without court oversight to prevent what happened to a tenant recently, where even after her case was dismissed, she still owed her landlord $6,000 in attorney fees. 

Housing instability doesn’t happen in a vacuum – it’s often death by a thousand cuts. Junk fees are one of those cuts. The Legislature can offer renters a measure of relief, fairness, and predictability in an increasingly unpredictable housing market. 

Mark Martinez is a housing attorney with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute.