North Carolina's cleaning fee disclosure requirements

The disclosure rule is two sentences long, and together they do more work than most fee policies manage. The first is the fee itself: § 42A-17(d) — cleaning fee authorized — a vacation rental agreement may include a cleaning fee, the amount of which must be provided in the agreement, and the fee must be reasonably calculated to cover the costs of cleaning the residential property upon termination of the tenancy. The second is the agreement's own flag: § 42A-11 required agreement notice — every vacation rental agreement under the Act must carry on its face, set out in a clear and conspicuous manner, the notice THIS IS A VACATION RENTAL AGREEMENT UNDER THE NORTH CAROLINA VACATION RENTAL ACT.

What 'provided in the agreement' requires: the amount, stated, in the document the guest signs — before signature, not at checkout. A fee that lives only in a listing's fine print, or that appears as a surprise line on a final statement, has failed the disclosure the statute names. The agreement is the instrument; whatever is not in it is not disclosed in the way Chapter 42A means.

What 'reasonably calculated' requires: a defensible relationship between the fee and what cleaning that property actually costs. The clause exists to separate a cleaning fee from a second rent charge — a fee inflated far past any plausible cost of the turn begins to look like compensation for occupancy wearing a cleaner's name. The fee that matches the costed work is the one the statute describes, and it is the only kind we quote.

What the conspicuous notice does: it tells every party, before anything goes wrong, which body of law governs the agreement being signed. The cleaning fee's rule, the trust rules, the refund rules, the eviction procedure — a guest who reads the caps-lock sentence knows all of it was written for the relationship they are entering. An owner who omits the notice has missed more than a formality; they have blurred which statute their own agreement invokes.

The platform-era practice point: the listing, the agreement and the checkout page should tell one story about the fee — same amount, same description, same terms. Each of the three is a place a guest can read what they are paying, and inconsistencies between them are where disputes start. The statute requires disclosure in the agreement; a well-run operation makes the disclosure consistent everywhere else too.

The taxes are disclosed on their own lines: the stay carries the 6% Dare County occupancy tax to the county and the 4.75% NC general sales tax rate to the state, and those are not fee lines — blurring fee into tax, or tax into fee, on a receipt is how an otherwise compliant booking acquires a dispute. Clean disclosure separates all three.

Amount in the agreement, amount tied to the work, notice on the face of it — those two statutory sentences are the entire disclosure regime, and they fit on an index card. The rentals that get fee disputes are the ones that could not manage the card.