Our editorial & review process

Last updated: September 2, 2026 · How we source & update

How we source and check this

Every legal figure on this site is tied to the statute, regulation or official agency page it comes from, with the date it was checked. Values we have not confirmed against an official source are labeled rather than guessed, and pages carry the date they were last updated. Renter Shield publishes legal information, not legal advice, is not a law firm, and does not promise outcomes.

Renter Shield exists to help renters understand their rights and act calmly and on the record. Because this is legal-adjacent information, we hold our content to a careful standard. Here is how we write, label, and check it. This policy applies to all Renter Shield renter-rights content, covering all 50 U.S. states and Washington, D.C.

Information, not legal advice

Everything here is general legal information to help you understand your options and prepare — not legal advice, and not a substitute for a lawyer. Renter Shield is not a law firm, and using it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Tenant rights depend on your state, city, lease, housing type, and timing, and laws change.

How we write

Our content is written in plain, tenant-first language. We explain the general rule and the first safe steps, and we route the specific, jurisdiction-dependent details — exact deadlines, limits, and amounts — to the app or to official sources, rather than stating a number that may be wrong for your situation.

Numbers-from-verified-sources rule

We deliberately do not publish specific legal figures — deposit deadlines, notice periods, rent caps, or fee limits — as blanket facts on these public pages. Those values vary by jurisdiction and change over time. Inside the app, jurisdiction-specific figures are drawn from a knowledge base and shown with their source and a “last verified” status so you can confirm before relying on them.

Content labels

We label content honestly so you know what you are reading:

Educational — general information written by our team; not attorney-reviewed.
State-verified — a specific figure confirmed against an official source, shown with its citation and date in the app.
Tool-generated — output from a calculator or checker, based on the inputs you provide.
Legal-aid referral — a pointer to a free legal-aid or government resource.
Emergency resource — safety and crisis help, always free and never gated.

How we source and update renter-rights information

Renter-rights content on this site follows a fixed source hierarchy. We work down the list and stop at the highest-authority source that actually answers the question.

Primary law — state statutes, codes, and municipal ordinances published by the legislature, secretary of state, or city clerk.
Government housing agencies — state and city housing, code-enforcement, and rent-board pages.
Courts and legal aid — court self-help centers, judicial-branch forms, and publications from legal-aid organizations.
Federal agencies — HUD and CFPB guidance for protections that apply nationwide.

What we do not use as a source: content aggregators, law-firm marketing pages, unattributed summaries, other renter apps, or AI-generated text. If a claim cannot be traced to a source in the list above, it is not published as verified.

When a page gets updated

A legislative session or ordinance change affects the rule.
An official source moves, is replaced, or is withdrawn.
A reader reports a correction — see Corrections.
A scheduled re-check of the jurisdiction's sources comes due.

What the status labels mean

Sourced — traced to an official source, shown with its citation and the date it was checked.
Unverified — labeled as unverified and never presented as a confirmed figure. We would rather show you a gap than a guess.
Not attorney-reviewed — our content is written and source-checked by our team. It is legal information, not legal advice, and we do not present it as attorney-reviewed.

Specific jurisdiction figures — deposit deadlines, notice periods, fee limits — are shown inside the app with their source and review status rather than asserted as blanket facts on public pages. One exception is deliberate and labeled: our Renter Rights Data pages publish transcribed values for research use, are marked as not attorney-reviewed on every row, and are held out of search indexing until legal review completes.

Corrections

If you spot something that looks wrong or out of date, email hello@rentershield.app with the page address and what looks wrong. A person reads it. We aim to reply within 1–2 business days, and if a correction is needed we make it and update the page date. We update pages as laws change and note when a page was last updated. You can also reach us through Support.

Emergency resources are always free

You never need Renter Shield to get help. Call 211 · in a crisis, call or text 988 for local assistance, find free legal aid at lawhelp.org, read HUD tenant rights, or call 911 in an emergency.

Legal review policy — and what “published” means here

A page on this site is published under exactly one of two bases, and we tell you which:

Attorney reviewed. A licensed attorney has read the exact wording, recorded the jurisdictions they are admitted in, and signed off. The approval binds to that revision — if the wording changes, the approval lapses and the page is re-held until it is reviewed again. Pages currently in this state: 0.
Owner-published, not attorney reviewed. The site owner has decided to publish material no attorney has read, and accepts that risk. We only do this for pages that assert no deadline, no dollar amount and no state-specific rule — so there is no statutory value to be wrong about. Every such page carries a visible accuracy release saying exactly that. Pages currently in this state: 8.

This is enforced by the build, not by intention: an owner-published page that starts asserting a deadline fails our checks and does not ship. Neither basis is ever described as the other.

What is deliberately not published. We hold back material we have positive reason to believe is wrong, and that hold is not something an owner decision overrides. It currently covers five cross-state comparison tables and a deposit-deadline dataset built on 318 quarantined claim records — values found to be incorrect, and in one case a draft measure rendered as if it were enacted law. A disclaimer can cover uncertainty. It cannot make a wrong eviction deadline safe to act on.

Provider listings follow the same rule: 0 of 306 researched legal-help records have been verified by a person, so none is published. See how that inventory works.