Add-on utility fees lead to evictions for low-income US tenants

California cities ban Rubs billing as tenant strikes spread to Seattle

In 2024, Constance Soule, an 81-year-old Alzheimer’s patient with a federal housing voucher, received a notice from her landlord giving her 10 days to vacate her apartment in Larkspur, California, across from the Golden Gate Bridge. The notice did not concern her rent — she had paid it. It concerned “ratio utility billing system” charges, fees billed on top of rent that her landlord, Greystar — the country’s largest apartment manager — had tacked onto her monthly bill. Soule’s older sister, Margot Jones, described the accumulating charges: “It just kept adding up. I said, ‘She’s paid her rent. You’re charging her all these extra fees.’”

Rubs, as the charges are known within the apartment industry, differ from standard utility bills in several ways. The fees are owed to the landlord — not to a utility company — and are typically administered through a third-party billing company. Leases that include Rubs are commonly written so that tenants can be evicted for nonpayment of utilities even if rent is current. Many apartment listings and lease documents do not disclose specific Rubs amounts upfront, instead labeling charges as “usage based” or “third party.” Bills sent to tenants are calculated by formulas based on factors such as unit square footage, the number of residents, or the share of occupied units in a building, rather than reflecting individual usage.

The pattern is familiar to Lucie Hollingsworth, policy director of Legal Aid of Marin, the agency that helped Soule navigate the eviction notice. Hollingsworth estimated that a majority of the eviction cases her agency currently sees for “nonpayment” involve tenants who could not pay their utility charges. Tenant attorneys and advocates in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Columbus, Ohio, told the Guardian that utility-related eviction cases appear to be increasingly common, though no national data tracks evictions by cause.

In Nevada, Jaslyn Cosey, a disabled tenant at Greystar’s Glo complex in Las Vegas, faced approximately $140 a month in fees covering common-area gas, electric, and maintenance, plus administration, service, and individual sewer, trash, and water charges. Cosey said the charges were described in her lease as “usage based” and “third party,” leaving her uncertain about what she owed or how the amount was determined. “I didn’t know that it would be considered rent,” Cosey said. After she fell behind and a state assistance program sent funds to cover her back rent, Greystar applied that money to her utility fees instead, according to court claims, and then pursued her eviction. Last September, Cosey filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that Greystar charged “unreasonably high utilities fees” and failed to disclose a clear formula for calculating utility costs. In court documents, Greystar denied the allegations and called the suit an attempt “to transform a straightforward landlord-tenant accounting dispute into a sweeping consumer-fraud class action.” The case, now in U.S. district court in Nevada, is pending.

The industry’s largest players defend Rubs as a tool for handling buildings that lack individual meters and as a way to encourage conservation. Utah-based Conservice, which the Guardian reports manages nearly 8 million “utility service points” and markets itself as “real estate’s one true hope for full-service utility management,” said in a statement that “Rubs is much better for the tenants, owners and environment than in-rent utilities.” A Conservice marketing video features an image of hundred-dollar bills and a voiceover stating that “When you choose Conservice billing, you’ll experience higher revenue.” An April marketing email from Livable, another ratio utility biller, encouraged potential customers to “turn utility billing into a revenue tool.” Highlighting revenue to potential customers makes sense, said Livable’s CEO Dan Sharabi, “because it speaks to a benefit relevant to them: cost recovery.”

Scrutiny of the practice is increasing on multiple fronts. Utility and trash fees were the most common complaint among nearly 500 public comments submitted to the Federal Trade Commission this spring as part of an agency rule-making process examining renter fees, the Guardian’s analysis found. In December 2025, Greystar agreed to a $24 million FTC settlement limiting some unpriced add-on fees after the agency alleged the company had violated fair-competition laws by charging junk fees. The settlement, however, allows Greystar to continue to charge unpriced add-on utility fees in listings and advertisements. As part of the rule-making, Greystar has urged the FTC to replicate those settlement terms industry-wide and to exclude variable utility costs from any disclosure requirement.

Tenants have begun to organize in response. In Los Angeles, members of the Virgil Square Tenants Association have been on a “Rubs strike” against their property manager, Equity Residential, since June 2025. The tenants refuse to pay their utility bills until Equity Residential provides documentation of building-wide utility costs; tenant ledgers show monthly utility charges totaling as much as $226 a month. Members have hung handmade signs from their buildings that read: “Ratio Utility Billing Scam.” Marty McKenna, a spokesperson for Equity Residential, said the company’s utility practices are “fully compliant with California law” and did not address questions about the building’s utility costs.

In Seattle, tenants at the Qualman apartments went on their own Rubs strike this year after the building switched from a flat $50 monthly utility fee to a Rubs-based system; tenant ledgers show monthly charges averaging $143 since the change. The strike ended in June when the landlord threatened eviction. Lexy Salas, one of the Qualman tenants, said she and her neighbors have since formed a citywide group, Seattle Ban Rubs, that has collected complaints from 128 other buildings. Colin Smith, a property manager at Cornell & Associates, said in an email that Rubs are legal in Seattle and that the company switched to Rubs to distribute utility costs more equitably among tenants; he did not address questions about whether the company had provided tenants with the underlying bills.

Legal and regulatory responses have multiplied. California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta reached a settlement in fall 2025 of nearly $500,000 with Mission Rock Residential to resolve allegations that the company had used Rubs to make “shadow” rent increases that violated state limits. “Some California landlords have tried to get away with illegal rent increases by shifting utilities and other fees to tenants and pretending those new charges are not ‘rent,’” Bonta said in announcing the settlement. At least 13 lawsuits have challenged Rubs since the start of 2025 across five states, the Guardian reported. Eight California cities — including Alameda and West Hollywood — have banned the use of Rubs in most arrangements; New York City officials announced in July that they plan to develop regulations on utility fees as part of a broader effort to address “rental ripoffs”; Seattle passed legislation in August that bans many apartment fees, with officials indicating they may also move against Rubs; and Los Angeles’s city council is considering stronger Rubs protections.

Soule never returned to the Larkspur apartment. In her next unit, she again encountered Rubs charges — water, sewer, trash, water heating, plus administration and service fees. Ledgers reviewed by the Guardian show that her new studio apartment charged an average of $257.92 a month for mandatory utilities between December 2024 and June 2026, with fixed fees averaging $9.15 a month, totaling more than $5,500 over and above her rent. “I didn’t realize they existed in other places,” Jones said. “I just stepped out of the frying pan and into the fire.” The new fees, Jones said, are not the only difference. “It’s a nightmare,” she said. “It’s a constant worry.”