Who pays the ACH fee on rent payments?

What each platform charges your tenant

Sorted by bank-transfer fee, cheapest first. Sources and how each figure was obtained are listed at the bottom of this page.

On $1,500.00 rent

Flat fees and percentage fees diverge fast. Here is one month, per payment method, at $1,500.00 rent:

A card payment on $1,500.00 rent costs roughly 22× a $2.00 bank transfer. Whoever is paying it, that is the single biggest cost in online rent collection — larger than most platforms’ entire subscription.

Why these numbers are hard to find

We went looking for tenant-side fees on each vendor’s pricing page first, because that is where a landlord would look. 3 of the 5platforms here don’t publish them there — RentRedi, Innago, Landlord Studio. The figures live in help-center articles instead, which is a reasonable place to document a setting and a poor place to disclose a price.

There is a straightforward reason. When a platform charges the landlord nothing, the payment fee isthe business model, and a pricing page that says “free” is doing more work if the per-transaction charge is a click away. That is not fraud — the numbers are published, and every platform here lets the landlord absorb the ACH fee if they’d rather. But “free” describes the landlord’s invoice, not the cost of the arrangement, and the renter is the one who notices.

What we charge, including where we’re worse

A page complaining that vendors bury their fees is worth nothing if we bury ours. Keyhold passes Stripe’s rates through at cost and adds no margin: 0.8% capped at $5.00for a bank transfer, 2.9% + $0.30 for a card. So our number is a percentage where everyone else’s is a flat fee.

That cuts against us here. On $1,500.00 rent the 0.8% reaches the cap, so a bank transfer costs $5.00 — against $1.00 at RentRedi and $2.00 at Innago or TurboTenant. Per transaction, we are still the most expensive option in this table, and above about $250 rent we always will be, because a percentage beats a $2.00 flat fee only on small amounts.

The difference worth weighing is whothe fee lands on. Ours is charged to the landlord and never added to the tenant’s payment. Most platforms above default it to the tenant and let the landlord opt to absorb it; on Avail’s free plan the tenant pays it either way. So the comparison is roughly $5.00 of yours against $2.00of theirs — a real gap, in a currency you may or may not care about. Decide which you’d rather, and note that we have an obvious interest in you picking the second framing.

Questions

Who pays the ACH fee on rent payments?

On most landlord platforms the tenant pays it by default, and the landlord can choose to absorb it instead. RentRedi ($1.00), Innago ($2.00), TurboTenant ($2.00) and Landlord Studio ($2.50) all default the bank-transfer fee to the tenant while letting the landlord take it on. Avail charges the tenant $2.50 per bank transfer on its free plan and drops it to $0 on Unlimited Plus at $9 per unit per month.

Why is 'free' landlord software not free?

Because the tenant is paying for it. Platforms that charge landlords nothing recover the cost at the payment layer — a flat fee on every bank transfer and a percentage on every card payment, charged to the renter. It is a real business model, not a scam, but it means 'free' describes the landlord's invoice rather than the total cost of the arrangement.

Is a card fee always worse than an ACH fee?

Almost always, because card fees are a percentage and ACH fees are usually flat. At $1,500.00 rent, a 3.49% card fee is $52.35 while a $2.00 flat ACH fee stays $2.00. The gap widens as rent rises.

Can a landlord legally charge a tenant a convenience fee for paying rent?

It depends on the state, and some restrict or prohibit it. This page reports what platforms charge; it is not legal advice. Check your state's rules and your lease before passing a payment fee to a tenant.