Recover a withheld security deposit in small claims court

  1. Look up your state's security deposit statute and its deadline
    25 min

    This step produces your statute sheet — one page you can quote from in every later step: the exact code section, the return deadline in days, the itemisation rule, and the bad-faith penalty. The tricky part is that the deadline and the penalty usually sit in different subsections, and the clock starts from a different trigger in different states.

    Keep: the statute sheet — section number, deadline and its trigger, itemisation rule, and penalty. It anchors the breach calculation in the next step and the multiplier in the demand letter.