Are nail holes normal wear and tear?

In most states a handful of small picture-hanging holes reads as ordinary use, because the statutes define wear by the intended use of a dwelling and hanging pictures is intended use. Dozens of anchors, holes torn through drywall, or a wall mount ripped out are a different question. The safer line on your itemization is not 'nail holes' but 'patch and paint of a 3-foot section of drywall damaged by a television mount'.

Can I charge the tenant for repainting the whole unit?

Rarely for the whole unit. Interior paint is the classic ordinary-use item, and a routine repaint between tenancies is normally the owner's cost. Charging becomes plausible when the paint failed for a reason other than time: crayon over a wall, an unapproved colour change, smoke staining. Even then, several states limit you to repairing the damaged portion rather than the whole surface.

How do I calculate depreciation on a damaged carpet?

Take the replacement cost, multiply by the years of useful life remaining, divide by total useful life. A $1,400 carpet with a 5-year life destroyed after 3 years of service supports a charge of no more than $560. If the item is already past its assumed life, the supportable charge is zero. No state statute I read requires that subtraction, so treat it as a convention rather than a rule — its value is that every input is written down and can be checked. For the life figures themselves, the IRS puts carpets and appliances in a five-year class in Publication 527.

What if I deduct for something I never documented at move-in?

It depends on the state, and in some it is fatal to the deduction. Washington bars withholding for repair or replacement of fixtures, equipment, appliances and furnishings whose condition was not reasonably documented in the written move-in checklist. California requires move-in, move-out and post-repair photographs to accompany any repair or cleaning deduction. Massachusetts requires a sworn itemized list plus estimates, bills, invoices or receipts within 30 days.

Wear and Tear vs Damage: Room by Room

A dime-sized burn in a carpet that was already four years old. That is the whole argument compressed into one object.

Nobody disputes that a burn is damage. What people get wrong is the second half — the carpet was nearly finished anyway, so the amount you can defensibly charge sits much closer to zero than to the $1,400 a replacement costs. Two separate questions, and most landlords answer only the first before writing a number on the itemization.

Four states have bothered to define the words, and I read all four on 18 August 2026 at the legislatures' own sites instead of trusting a summary. Where a summary and a statute disagree about what wear means, the statute is the one the other side will be holding. Two houses, no licence, no law degree — the statutes are doing the work here, not me.

Two questions, and they run in this order

Is this beyond ordinary use? If no, it never becomes a deduction, no matter how annoyed you are or what the repair cost.

If yes, how much of the item's value was still yours to lose? A three-year-old appliance and a fifteen-year-old appliance destroyed in the same way produce very different chargeable numbers.

Skip the second question and you get the failure mode that fills small claims dockets: a landlord who was factually right about the damage and still loses, because the amount claimed was the replacement cost of something that had almost no life left in it.

The statutes define the words, and they define them narrowly

Texas is the tightest of the definitions worth reading. Property Code § 92.001(4) defines normal wear and tear as "deterioration that results from the intended use of a dwelling, including... breakage or malfunction due to age or deteriorated condition," excluding deterioration caused by "negligence, carelessness, accident, or abuse." Then § 92.104(b) says it flatly: you may not retain any portion of a deposit to cover it.

Read that inclusion clause twice. Breakage due to age is wear, not damage. A disposal that seizes in year eleven is your problem, even though it failed on this tenant's watch.

Washington lands in the same place without ever using the phrase. Its defined term is "wear resulting from ordinary use of the premises": deterioration from the intended use of a dwelling unit, breakage and malfunction due to age included, with deterioration from "negligence, carelessness, accident, or abuse" carved back out (RCW 59.18.030 — subsection (39) in the text in force now, renumbered (45) in the version effective 1 January 2027, so check the number before you quote it). Notice what "accident" is doing in that list. A genuinely accidental spill that ruins a floor is still chargeable there. Carelessness is not the threshold; intended use is.

California comes at it from the other direction. Civil Code § 1950.5(b)(2) authorises using the deposit for "the repair of damages to the premises, exclusive of ordinary wear and tear," and subdivision (b)(3) caps cleaning deductions at returning the unit "to the same level of cleanliness it was in at the inception of the tenancy." Not to spotless. To the level you rented it at.

Massachusetts wraps the same rule in procedure: deductions limited to a reasonable amount to repair damage caused by the tenant, "reasonable wear and tear excluded," with the itemized list sworn under pains and penalties of perjury and estimates, bills, invoices or receipts attached (G.L. c. 186 § 15B).

Room by room, and what actually decides each line

This table is a starting point, not your state's rule. The right-hand column is the one you will end up arguing from.

Item	Usually ordinary use	Usually chargeable	What actually decides it
Interior paint	Fading, minor scuffs, small picture-hanging holes	Crayon or marker across a wall, unapproved colour change, smoke staining, holes torn through drywall	Whether the surface failed from time or from an event
Carpet	Traffic-lane wear, flattened pile, mild general soiling	Burns, pet urine soaked into the pad, tears, permanent staining	The carpet's age at move-out, before anything else
Hard floors	Scratches from ordinary furniture use, finish worn at doorways	Gouges, water damage from an overflow left unreported, missing planks	Whether the tenant reported the leak when it started
Kitchen appliances	Worn seals, a failed compressor, enamel chipped through use	Missing shelves, a grate cracked by being used as a trivet, grease baked on since move-in	Age against assumed useful life, then the move-in record
Bathroom	Grout discolouration, caulk shrinkage, a worn toilet seat	Broken tile, a cracked basin, mould traced to a fan the tenant disabled	Whether you were told about the ventilation problem
Blinds, screens, doors	Sun-brittle slats, a door sticking in a humid month	Bent slats, torn screens, a door with a fist through it	Whether the failure needed a person to cause it
Yard and exterior	Grass length in a bad month, weathered deck stain	Shrubs dead after a lease watering duty was ignored, a fence panel driven into	What the lease actually assigned to the tenant
Cleaning	Settled dust, light kitchen film	Unit left below its move-in cleanliness, appliances not emptied, rubbish left behind	Your move-in photographs, and nothing else

Washington settles one row of that table by statute instead of by argument. RCW 59.18.280(1)(c)(ii) bars withholding for carpet cleaning at all unless you document wear to the carpet beyond ordinary use. Routine end-of-tenancy carpet cleaning is not a deduction there. It is a cost of owning carpet.

California has now done something similar to the cleaning row. AB 2801 (Stats. 2024, ch. 280) put a sentence into § 1950.5(e)(2)(C): a landlord "shall not require a tenant to pay for, or assert a claim against the tenant or the security for, professional carpet cleaning or other professional cleaning services, unless reasonably necessary to return the premises to the condition it was in at the inception of tenancy, exclusive of ordinary wear and tear." A move-out clean is no longer something a lease clause can convert into a standing charge in that state. Where a legislature has taken a row off the table like this, the right-hand column stops being a judgment call and becomes a citation, which is worth checking before you spend an afternoon arguing about the item itself.

The step almost nobody does: subtract the years already used

Once an item is chargeable, the number is not the invoice. It is the invoice reduced by the life the item had already spent.

Chargeable amount = replacement cost × (remaining useful life ÷ total useful life)

None of the four statutes sets out that calculation, and most states publish no useful-life table either. So the proration is a convention, not a rule — which is the whole reason to use it. A figure reached by a stated method with its inputs written down is something the tenant can check and a judge can follow. A figure reached by handing over an invoice is something to argue about, and the argument starts from the number you least want to defend.

Where do the life numbers come from? Nobody has to accept yours, so cite something. The most defensible neutral reference for a private landlord is the IRS's own schedule: Publication 527, Table 2-1, puts carpets, appliances and rental furniture in the 5-year class under GDS, and the building itself at 27.5 years. It is a tax rule rather than a deposit rule, and I say so in writing when I use it. But it is public, current and hard to wave away.

Back to that burn. Carpet four years into an assumed five-year life, $1,400 to replace:

Remaining life: 1 year of 5
Chargeable: $1,400 × 1/5 = $280
What an unadjusted itemization would have claimed: $1,400
In a state with treble damages and fee-shifting, the gap between those two numbers costs considerably more than $1,120

Interior paint is the one place I would not put a number in print. Assumptions of three to five years float around the industry, some rent-regulated cities publish their own schedules, and plenty of states publish nothing. Check whether yours does before you assert a useful life for paint on an itemization.

Documentation is what turns a judgment call into a deduction

The line between wear and damage is a comparison, and a comparison needs two states of the same room. Three jurisdictions have now written that into the statute rather than leaving it to evidence.

Washington bars withholding for repair or replacement of fixtures, equipment, appliances and furnishings "if their condition was not reasonably documented in the written checklist required under RCW 59.18.260." No checklist entry, no deduction, however obvious the damage.

California, since AB 2801, requires photographs by statute. Under § 1950.5(g), tenancies beginning on or after 1 July 2025 need photographs taken immediately before or at inception. Separately, from 1 April 2025 every landlord must photograph the unit after possession returns but before any repair or cleaning that will be deducted, and photograph it again once the work is done. Those photographs go to the tenant with the itemized statement whenever a repair or cleaning deduction is made — § 1950.5(h)(2)(D) even allows delivery by email, flash drive or a viewing link. One narrow carve-out sits at § 1950.5(h)(4): the documentation requirements fall away where the repair and cleaning deductions together do not exceed $125, or where the tenant has signed a waiver of them — and a waiver only counts if it was signed at or after the notice ending the tenancy, not buried in the lease at move-in.

Massachusetts wants the sworn list with written evidence of actual or estimated cost inside 30 days.

The pattern across all three is the same. Your photographs are not decoration on the itemization. In two of these states they are the deduction's legal basis.

How much record is enough? Washington is the one state that answers that in the statute rather than in hindsight. RCW 59.18.260 requires the move-in checklist to describe "the condition and cleanliness of or existing damages to the premises, fixtures, equipment, appliances, and furnishings," naming walls and wall paint, carpets and other flooring, furniture and appliances; it must be signed and dated by both parties, the tenant gets a copy, and the tenant may later request one free replacement copy. Collect a deposit without providing that checklist at the commencement of the tenancy and the landlord "is liable to the tenant for the amount of the deposit," with court costs and attorneys' fees to the prevailing party. What no statute here specifies is a number of photographs — California's text says photographs and leaves the count alone — so the working standard is whatever makes every line of the checklist identifiable again next to its move-out condition.

Partial damage, and the rule that stops you charging for a whole floor

One scratched plank in a room of eighty. One burnt ring on a countertop. The instinct is to price replacement of the whole surface, because that is what the contractor quotes.

Washington closes that door in one sentence: no deposit may be withheld "in excess of the cost of repair or replacement of the damaged portion" where the damage does not encompass the item's entirety (RCW 59.18.280(1)(c)(iv)). Other states arrive somewhere similar through the word "reasonable" instead of a sentence, which means you get there by argument rather than by citation.

So get two figures before you decide anything. Spot repair, and full replacement. If a credible spot repair exists, that is your ceiling, and the fact that you would rather have a new floor is a preference you are paying for yourself.

The dispute I lost turned on a number, not a scratch

Across three turnovers I have lost one deposit dispute, and what beat me was not whether the damage was real. It was that I could not show how I had arrived at the amount.

So the itemization line I write now has four parts instead of one: what the item is, what happened to it, what it cost to put right, and how old it was when it happened. "Carpet: $1,400" is a claim. "Bedroom carpet, cigarette burn through to the pad, installed March 2022, five-year assumed life, replacement invoice attached, charged at 1/5 = $280" is a record. The second takes ninety seconds longer to write and is very hard to argue with.

That arithmetic now has to travel with the statement in Washington instead of waiting for a dispute to summon it. Under RCW 59.18.280(1)(b) the 30-day statement carries copies of estimates received or invoices paid, and where the work is the landlord's own, a bill or receipt for materials plus "a statement of the time spent performing repairs and the reasonable hourly rate charged." Miss the statement or the documentation and subsection (2) makes the landlord liable for the full deposit and bars any claim or defence for retaining it, with up to twice the deposit available where the refusal was intentional. The forum for all of this is deliberately small — RCW 12.40.010 caps small claims at $10,000 for a natural person and $5,000 in all other cases — which is why a $1,400 carpet line is worth ninety seconds of writing rather than a filing fee and an afternoon.

Before your next move-out, do one boring thing. Open your move-in file and check that every item you might ever charge for actually appears in it, dated and photographed. Deductions are decided at move-in. Move-out is only where you find out what you recorded.

Then read your own state's deposit section end to end. The definition, the deduction limits and the penalty clause are one machine, and reading a third of it is how a landlord ends up surprised by the other two thirds. The collection end of that same statute — the caps, the accounts, the notice you owe the day the money arrives — sits in deposit caps, separate accounts, and interest by state. If you would rather watch the subtraction run against your own figures first, the security deposit settlement calculator does it in the browser.

No licence here and no standing to advise anyone: what is above is four statutes plus arithmetic. Texas, Washington and California were read at the legislatures' own sites on 18 August 2026; malegislature.gov would not load for me that day, so treat § 15B as a section number to open yourself rather than a same-day quotation. Deposit rules move, and the text your own legislature publishes is the one that decides your itemization.