How to Verify Tenant Income and Spot a Fake Pay Stub

The first income document a tenant sends you usually arrives as a phone photograph of a pay stub, slightly rotated, the bottom third cropped off. Gross pay for the period, $2,400. Social Security withheld, $148.80. Medicare, $34.80.

Multiply $2,400 by 0.062 and you get $148.80 exactly. Multiply by 0.0145 and you get $34.80 exactly. Two lines, two multiplications, and the document has just confirmed a piece of itself.

Now the other kind. Same $2,400 gross, Social Security $148.80, Medicare $36.00. The first line is right; the second is off by a dollar twenty, because $36.00 is 1.5 percent of the gross and the rate is 1.45. No payroll system rounds like that. Somebody typed it.

That is the useful thing about income documents that almost no screening guide says out loud. You cannot authenticate a piece of paper. You can test it against numbers that are published, flat, and not up to the person who made the paper.

Everything below was read on 6 September 2026: the federal rates at the IRS, the Fair Credit Reporting Act at Cornell's Legal Information Institute, the voucher regulations in the eCFR, and the California and Washington statutes at their own legislatures. Colorado's revisor refused the request that day, so its section is quoted from a commercial publisher and flagged where it appears. I am not a lawyer and this is a description of documents and procedure, not advice about your applicant.

The two multiplications, and the third check that catches the rest

IRS Topic no. 751, last reviewed 20 January 2026, gives you the constants. Social Security: 6.2 percent from the employee. Medicare: 1.45 percent from the employee, with no wage base at all. An Additional Medicare tax of 0.9 percent, which the employer must begin withholding once it has paid that person more than $200,000 in the calendar year, regardless of filing status. The Social Security wage base for 2026 is $184,500.

So the checks, in order of how much they catch:

Gross times 0.0145 equals the Medicare line. No exceptions, no cap, no filing status. This is the single most reliable line on the document, and it is the one forgers get wrong most often because it looks like a rounding-friendly number and is not.

Gross times 0.062 equals the Social Security line. True until year-to-date gross passes $184,500, after which the line legitimately stops. If your applicant is nowhere near that and the line does not match, it is not the wage base.

Year-to-date gross divided by gross per period equals the number of periods elapsed. Semi-monthly pay on 6 September is roughly seventeen periods in. A stub claiming $2,400 per period and $52,000 year-to-date is claiming about twenty-two, which is a different year.

Net equals gross minus the sum of the deductions. Add the column. Generated stubs frequently miss by a few dollars because the net was chosen first and the deductions reverse-engineered.

One line that will not check: federal income tax withholding. It comes out of the W-4 and the withholding tables, not a percentage, so it varies with allowances, other income and the pay frequency. A stub where federal withholding is exactly 10.00 or 15.00 percent of gross is not proof of anything, but it is worth a question. State tax is the same story with one extra tell — a state income tax line on a stub from an employer in a state that levies none, or a missing line where the state levies one.

No stub at all is not evidence of anything

Here is where the arithmetic stops helping and a lot of landlords guess wrong.

There is no federal requirement that an employer hand anyone a pay stub. The Department of Labor's own Fair Labor Standards Act Advisor puts it in two sentences: the FLSA requires employers to keep accurate records of hours worked and wages paid, and "the FLSA does not require an employer to provide employees pay stubs." What exists instead is a patchwork of state wage-statement laws, and a handful of states impose no furnishing requirement at all.

Where a state does legislate it, the statute doubles as a checklist of what a genuine stub from that state contains. California Labor Code § 226(a) requires an accurate itemized written statement showing nine things: gross wages earned, total hours worked, piece-rate units and rate where applicable, all deductions, net wages earned, the inclusive dates of the pay period, the employee's name with only the last four digits of the Social Security number or another employee identification number, the name and address of the legal entity that is the employer, and all applicable hourly rates with the hours worked at each.

Read that list against a California stub and the fakes tend to fail on items six through nine rather than on the money. Wrong or missing pay-period dates. A full Social Security number printed out, which a compliant California employer would not do. An employer name with no address behind it. Hourly rates absent from a stub that claims hourly work.

Calling the employer: the number you use is the whole test

The phone number printed on the stub is the applicant's number until proven otherwise. Fraud that goes to the trouble of a document usually goes to the trouble of a friend who answers "Human Resources."

Find the employer independently. The state business entity search at the Secretary of State's office is free everywhere and tells you whether the company exists as a registered entity, when it registered, and who the registered agent is. A company incorporated five weeks ago with an address that matches the applicant's is its own answer. Then use the number on the employer's own site or in the registry, and never the one on the stub.

Keep the questions closed, and identical for every applicant, which is the same discipline that governs everything else on your written criteria page. Is this person currently employed here. What was the start date. Is the position full-time, part-time, seasonal or contract. Many employers will confirm dates and title and refuse to state pay, and that refusal is normal rather than suspicious. Write down who you spoke to, at what number, on what date, and keep it in the file. Half the value of the call is that the note exists later.

If you hand the calling to a service, the legal picture changes underneath you. The FTC's Using Consumer Reports: What Landlords Need to Know lists, among the reports covered by the FCRA, "a report from a reference checking service that contacts previous landlords, employers, or other parties listed on the rental application on behalf of the rental property owner." Vendor calls produce a consumer report; your own call does not, because 15 U.S.C. § 1681a(f) defines a consumer reporting agency as one that assembles information for the purpose of furnishing reports to third parties. Subsection (e) of the same section adds a further tier, the "investigative consumer report," where information on character, general reputation, personal characteristics or mode of living is gathered through personal interviews. Those carry their own disclosure requirements. The distinction is worth knowing before you outsource a phone call to save twenty minutes.

Bank statements read behaviour, not income

The instinct is to treat the bank statement as the strongest document in the stack, because it looks the hardest to fake. That instinct is backwards.

You cannot verify it. Your applicant's bank will not confirm anything to you, and there is no landlord-facing equivalent of the arithmetic check that works on a stub. What a statement gives you instead is twelve weeks or twelve months of behaviour, and behaviour is what you were actually trying to learn.

Read it for four things. A rent-sized debit leaving on or near the first of the month, every month, to the same payee. Deposits whose size and timing match the stubs you were handed. Overdraft and returned-item fees, which are the cheapest early warning in the whole application. And the gap between what comes in and what goes out, which is a better predictor than any multiple of the rent.

Ask for complete statements, every page, including the ones with nothing on them. Doctored statements are usually assembled a page at a time and the page numbering stops agreeing with itself. Ask for them as the bank's own file rather than a photograph of a screen.

And ask for less than you are tempted to. A full transaction history tells you where somebody worships, what they treat, who they support. Take the period your criteria page says you need, say in writing what you will do with it and when you will destroy it, and then do that.

The self-employed applicant and the transcript the IRS will not send you

Contractors, drivers, stylists, anybody paid on a 1099: there is no stub, and a profit-and-loss spreadsheet the applicant typed is not a document.

The one they cannot type is an IRS transcript. The IRS page Transcript types and ways to order them, reviewed 10 March 2026, describes the wage and income transcript as showing data from information returns the IRS receives, "such as Forms W-2, 1098, 1099, and 5498." Read the limit on that same page before you lean on it: the transcript displays only the information returns actually filed with the IRS, which "may not reflect all the information return documents issued to you." Because most transcripts now mask the taxpayer identification number, About tax transcripts, reviewed 6 September 2026, describes an optional Customer File Number field: up to ten digits, and it cannot be a taxpayer identification number such as a Social Security number. The applicant enters the number you give them when they request the transcript, and it prints on the document, which is how you match the transcript in your hand to the person in front of you.

Two limits. The IRS does not fax transcripts and does not mail them to third parties when Form 4506-T is submitted, so the applicant orders it and hands it to you. And the Income Verification Express Service is not a door you can use: the IRS describes it as letting a taxpayer "authorize banks and lenders to access your tax records," and it runs through participants who have completed an application process and file Form 4506-C. A two-unit owner is not one of them. You are on the applicant-supplied path, which is fine, because the Customer File Number is what makes that path checkable.

Remember what the transcript is: last year, or the year before if they filed late. Pair it with three months of bank statements and you have both the trend and the present.

Where "three times the rent" comes from, and where it is capped

No federal statute sets it. Its most likely ancestry is the affordability standard the federal housing programs actually use — 24 CFR § 5.628(a) fixes total tenant payment at the highest of several figures, the first being 30 percent of the family's monthly adjusted income. Thirty percent of income going to rent implies income of about 3.33 times rent, and somewhere on the way into general practice the adjustments dropped off and the number rounded down to three.

Two states have written a ceiling over it.

Colorado is the blunt one. C.R.S. § 38-12-904(1)(d) provides that where an applicant is renting without a subsidy, a landlord using financial information may not consider or inquire about the amount of income "except for the purpose of determining that the prospective tenant's annual amount of income equals or exceeds two hundred percent of the annual cost of rent," and then adds a flat sentence: "A landlord shall not require a prospective tenant to have an annual amount of income that exceeds two hundred percent of the annual cost of rent." Two hundred percent is twice the rent. A three-times rule is above the ceiling. Colorado's own revisor returned a 403 to every request on 6 September 2026, so that text comes from Public.Law's edition, which states it is current through Fall 2025 and cites the revisor's 2024 Title 38 PDF; open the official version before you rely on the figure.

Washington reaches the same territory from the subsidy side, below.

Everywhere else the ratio is yours to pick, which means it is yours to justify. Pick it against the rent you actually set rather than a number remembered from a forum, write it on the criteria page before the listing goes up, and apply it to every file the same way. A ratio you can explain in one sentence is worth more than a high one you cannot.

Vouchers: the affordability test has already been run

If your applicant holds a Housing Choice Voucher, a public housing agency has been through their income in more depth than you are about to. 24 CFR § 982.516(a) requires the PHA to reexamine family income and composition at least annually and to obtain and document third-party verification of reported annual income, asset values and the expenses behind the deductions, or to document why third-party verification was unavailable. 24 CFR § 982.508 adds that where the unit's gross rent exceeds the applicable payment standard, the family share at initial occupancy must not exceed 40 percent of adjusted monthly income, on verification no older than 60 days before the voucher issued.

Your job in that arrangement is defined too, and it is not income. 24 CFR § 982.307(a) makes the owner responsible for screening and selection, and lists what an owner may consider: payment of rent and utility bills, care of a unit and premises, respect for other residents' peaceful enjoyment, drug-related or other criminal activity threatening health or safety, and compliance with other essential conditions of tenancy. Tenancy history. Not a multiple of a rent the tenant is not paying.

Three states put that into enforceable terms, and the mechanics differ.

Washington. RCW 59.18.255(3) is arithmetic rather than principle: "If a landlord requires that a prospective tenant or current tenant have a certain threshold level of income, any source of income in the form of a rent voucher or subsidy must be subtracted from the total of the monthly rent prior to calculating if the income criteria have been met." Subsection (4) prices a violation at up to four and one-half times the monthly rent, plus court costs and reasonable attorneys' fees. On a $1,600 unit that is $7,200 before anyone's lawyer bills.

California. Government Code § 12955(o)(1)(A), as amended by Stats. 2023 ch. 776 and effective 1 January 2024, makes it unlawful, where there is a government rent subsidy, to use "a financial or income standard in assessing eligibility for the rental of housing that is not based on the portion of the rent to be paid by the tenant." Subdivision (o)(1)(B) goes further: you may not use credit history in that situation without offering the applicant the option of supplying "lawful, verifiable alternative evidence of the applicant's reasonable ability to pay the portion of the rent to be paid by the tenant, including, but not limited to, government benefit payments, pay records, and bank statements," with reasonable time to respond and reasonable consideration of what arrives. Subdivision (o)(2) preserves your ability to request documentation to verify employment, request landlord references and verify identity.

Subdivision (n) of the same section catches a different mistake and applies to everyone, subsidy or not. An income standard must account for "the aggregate income of persons residing together or proposing to reside together on the same basis as the aggregate income of married persons." Two roommates at $2,700 each are the same file as a married couple at $2,700 each.

Colorado. Section 38-12-904(1)(c), on that same published text, applies the 200 percent test to the tenant's own portion of the rent where a subsidy is involved, and bars considering a credit score, an adverse credit event or the absence of a credit score unless federal law requires it.

Short income, a co-signer, and the notice most owners skip

The common ending to a verification is not a denial. It is a yes with a condition: a co-signer, a bigger deposit, a slightly higher rent.

That is where the FCRA is most often tripped, because the notice duty reaches well past rejections. Each of those three conditions is named as an adverse action in the FTC's landlord guidance, which also counts a deposit "that would not be required for another applicant" and, of course, turning the application down. Approving somebody on tougher terms is still a decision made about them. If a consumer report contributed even partly to it, a notice is owed: the reporting agency's name, address and phone number, a statement that the agency itself decided nothing, and the applicant's right to a free copy of the report and to dispute what it says.

Then there is a second statute waiting on the deposit itself. A conditional approval that raises the deposit still has to sit inside your state's cap, holding rules and interest obligations, which are indifferent to why you raised it. In several states the cap makes the condition impossible, which means the honest choice is approve or decline rather than a number that will not survive the move-out accounting.

What the folder holds when you are done

For a wage earner: two or three consecutive stubs whose Medicare lines multiply out, one page of notes from a call placed to a number you found yourself, and three months of statements you asked for in writing and will delete on a date you named. For somebody self-employed: a wage and income transcript with your Customer File Number printed on it, plus the same three months.

Under all of it, one sentence written before the listing went up, saying what ratio you use and what it is measured against.

None of that proves an applicant will pay. It proves you checked the same things, in the same order, for everyone who applied, and that each figure you relied on came from somewhere a stranger could go and look. On the day this matters, that is the difference between a file and a memory.