What Questions Can a Landlord Ask a Prospective Tenant?

A landlord can ask a prospective tenant about identity, income and employment, rental history, criminal convictions, how many people will live in the unit, pets, and smoking. What a landlord cannot ask about is anything that reveals a federally protected characteristic: race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, or disability. Everything else sits somewhere between those two poles, and the gray areas are where most applicants get asked for more than they’re required to give.

Identity and Basic Contact Information

Every application asks for your full legal name, current address, phone number, and email. Most also ask for your date of birth and Social Security number, because both are typically needed to run a credit or background check. If handing over your SSN upfront makes you uneasy, you can ask whether the landlord will accept it only when you sign the written authorization for the actual background check.

If you don’t have a Social Security number, an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN), driver’s license, or passport can often substitute. Criminal background and eviction searches generally rely on name, date of birth, and address history, so a landlord can still screen you without an SSN.

Employment and Income

Can-they-ask questions about money are easy: yes, and in detail. Expect to be asked for your employer’s name, your job title, how long you’ve worked there, and your gross monthly or annual income. Landlords commonly request pay stubs, W-2 forms, tax returns, or bank statements as backup. If you’re self-employed, tax returns or profit-and-loss statements usually stand in for pay stubs.

Many landlords apply an informal rule that your monthly income should be at least three times the rent. That ratio is industry convention, not law. In places that prohibit source-of-income discrimination, a landlord who applies an income ratio has to count all qualifying income, including housing voucher subsidies.

Credit reports are fair game, but only with your written permission. The Fair Credit Reporting Act allows a consumer report to be furnished only in response to the consumer’s written instructions or where the requester has a legitimate business need tied to a transaction the consumer initiated.¹ Submitting a rental application counts as that kind of transaction, but your written consent still has to come first.²

Questions about past bankruptcies are allowed. A bankruptcy filing is public record and can appear on a credit report for up to ten years.³ Some landlords treat it as a red flag; others look past it when the rest of the finances hold up.

Rental History and References

Landlords want to know how you’ve behaved as a tenant before, and they can dig into this thoroughly. Expect questions about where you’ve lived for the past several years, how long you stayed at each address, and why you left. You’ll typically be asked for contact information for previous landlords so the new one can call and verify.

Eviction history gets the most scrutiny. A landlord can ask directly whether you’ve ever been evicted, and they can verify your answer through court records and screening services. Under the FCRA, eviction-related civil judgments can appear on a background report for up to seven years from the date of entry.³ Beyond formal evictions, landlords often ask about late payments, lease violations, or property damage at past rentals.

Gaps draw questions, too. A stretch of months or years with no verifiable housing raises concerns, and a landlord is within their rights to ask what you were doing then. You aren’t legally required to answer, but refusing usually counts against you. A credible explanation beats silence.

Landlords may also request personal or professional references beyond your previous landlords. These carry less weight than verified rental history, but they help if you’re a first-time renter or your tenancy record is thin.

Criminal History

A landlord can ask about criminal convictions, and under federal law a background check can include conviction records with no time limit.³ Arrests that didn’t lead to a conviction can only appear on a background report for seven years, and HUD guidance says denying housing based solely on an arrest, without a conviction, doesn’t hold up as a legitimate screening criterion.⁴

HUD guidance issued in 2016 warned that blanket policies rejecting every applicant with any criminal conviction are likely to violate the Fair Housing Act, because criminal justice involvement isn’t evenly distributed across racial and ethnic groups. A policy that disproportionately excludes people of a particular race or national origin triggers a disparate impact analysis. To survive that analysis, a landlord’s screening policy has to weigh the nature and severity of the offense, how long ago it occurred, and what the applicant has done since. A growing number of jurisdictions have passed “fair chance housing” laws that go further, restricting when and how criminal records can be considered at all.

Occupants, Smoking, and Pets

Landlords can ask how many people will live in the unit. That’s a legitimate question tied to building codes, lease terms, and the capacity of the space. What they can’t do is use occupancy limits as a backdoor to exclude families with children. HUD treats a general policy of two people per bedroom as reasonable, but even that standard can be challenged depending on bedroom size, unit layout, children’s ages, and the capacity of building systems.⁵ A limit that caps the number of children per unit, rather than the total number of people, is far more likely to be discriminatory.

Questions about smoking are standard and legal. Landlords can ask whether you smoke and can enforce no-smoking clauses in the lease.

Landlords can also ask whether you have pets, and what type, breed, and size. Pet policies and breed restrictions are allowed. The important carve-out: service animals and emotional support animals are not pets under federal fair housing law, and the usual pet rules don’t apply to them.

For a trained service animal, usually a dog, the questions are narrow. HUD recommends asking only two things: whether the animal is required because of a disability, and what task the animal has been trained to perform. The landlord cannot ask about the nature of the disability or demand documentation for the animal.⁶

For emotional support animals and other assistance animals, a landlord has slightly more room when the disability or the need for the animal isn’t obvious. In those cases, they can request documentation from a healthcare professional confirming that the person has a disability and that the animal provides disability-related support. The landlord is never entitled to know the specific diagnosis, cannot require a particular form or notarized statements, and cannot charge pet fees or deposits for the animal.⁶

Questions a Landlord Cannot Ask

The Fair Housing Act makes it illegal to refuse to rent to someone, or set different terms, because of race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, or disability.⁷ That prohibition reaches beyond outright refusals. It also covers statements, advertisements, and questions that indicate a preference based on any of those characteristics.⁸

In practice, a landlord cannot ask you:

About race or ethnicity. That includes questions about where your family is “originally from” or what race you identify as.
About religion. That includes what church you attend, whether you observe particular holidays, and any question about religious practices.
About sex. Under the prevailing interpretation of “sex” in civil rights law following the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Bostock v. Clayton County, this extends to sexual orientation and gender identity.
Whether you have children, are pregnant, or plan to have children. The FHA specifically protects families with children under 18, with limited exceptions for qualifying senior housing.⁷
Whether you have a physical or mental impairment, what medications you take, or whether you’ve been hospitalized. A landlord can ask whether you need a reasonable accommodation or modification, but not what your disability is or how severe it is.⁷

Any question that serves no screening purpose other than to reveal a protected characteristic is suspect. A landlord who asks where you were born may be screening by national origin even if the question is framed as curiosity.

Citizenship and Immigration Status

Citizenship sits in a legal gray area for private landlords. The Fair Housing Act doesn’t list citizenship as a protected class, but national origin is protected, and HUD has warned that screening by citizenship or immigration status can function as national origin discrimination in practice. If a landlord’s citizenship inquiries disproportionately affect people of particular national origins, HUD will investigate. The safeguard is consistency: a landlord who asks for identity documents has to ask every applicant for the same documents, not just those who appear to be foreign-born.

This is a different situation from federally subsidized housing, where public housing agencies are required by law to verify citizenship or eligible immigration status before providing assistance. Private landlords renting their own property have no such obligation, and using immigration status as a screening criterion exposes them to fair housing complaints.

State and Local Additions to the Federal List

Federal law is the floor. Many states and local jurisdictions have expanded their protected classes beyond the federal seven. Common additions include marital status, age, source of income, sexual orientation, gender identity, and military or veteran status. Source-of-income protections matter especially for voucher holders: these laws stop landlords from rejecting applicants simply because they pay rent through a housing choice voucher or other public assistance. An estimated 57 percent of voucher holders now live in jurisdictions with some form of source-of-income protection, a figure that has grown as more states have adopted these laws.

Because the extra protections vary so much by location, check with your local fair housing agency or housing authority to find out which classes are protected where you live. A question that’s perfectly legal in one city can violate a local ordinance in another.

Your Rights When They Do Ask

Handing over your Social Security number, bank statements, and employment records puts real personal information at risk. Federal law gives you specific protections, and most applicants don’t know about them.

Written Consent Comes First

A landlord cannot pull your credit report without your written permission. The FCRA limits who can access your consumer report and for what purpose. A rental application you initiate qualifies as a legitimate business transaction, but the landlord still needs your written authorization.¹ You can ask what screening company will be used and what the report will cover before you sign.

If You’re Denied

When a landlord denies your application based even partly on information in a credit or background report, they must give you an adverse action notice. It isn’t optional. Under the FCRA, the notice must include the name, address, and phone number of the screening company that provided the report, a statement that the screening company didn’t make the decision to reject you, and notice that you have 60 days to request a free copy of the report from that company.⁹ The landlord also has to disclose the credit score they used, if one was a factor. Take that 60-day window seriously. Errors in tenant screening reports are not rare, and disputing an inaccurate report can change the outcome of your next application.

What Happens to Your Information Afterward

Every landlord who collects consumer report information is subject to the FTC’s Disposal Rule. The rule requires landlords to destroy that information using reasonable measures once they no longer need it. Acceptable methods include shredding paper documents so they can’t be reconstructed and erasing electronic files so the data can’t be recovered.¹⁰ A landlord tossing your application with your Social Security number into an open dumpster is violating federal law. You can ask how your information will be stored and disposed of before you hand it over.

1
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 U.S. Code 1681b – Permissible Purposes of Consumer Reports
2
Federal Trade Commission. Using Consumer Reports: What Landlords Need to Know
3
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1681c – Requirements Relating to Information Contained in Consumer Reports
4
Federal Trade Commission. Tenant Background Checks and Your Rights
5
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Keating Memo on Occupancy Standards
6
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Assistance Animals
7
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 USC 3604 – Discrimination in the Sale or Rental of Housing
8
Department of Justice. The Fair Housing Act
9
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 U.S. Code 1681m – Requirements on Users of Consumer Reports
10
Federal Trade Commission. Disposing of Consumer Report Information? Rule Tells How