Minutes from downtown shops, equine trails and golf courses, "the Cottage" in a quiet upscale neighborhood in Walnut Creek, California was advertised as a newly built, sunlit one-bedroom, one-bathroom detached unit with high-end finishes and a private patio on a half-acre.
The catch in the fine print?
In addition to the $3,250-a-month rent which included a gardener, internet and utilities, remote workers were on the hook for an additional $200 monthly work-from-home fee.
The rental listing quickly went viral, sparking a torrent of outrage in the Bay Area where tenants already pay the nation’s highest rent bills– "insane," "absurd," – and then spread. One person on the social media platform X said he walked away from a rental in North Carolina when
the landlord told him there would be a $300-a-month home office fee.
"The Cottage" listing is no longer active and the landlords of the property did not respond to a request for comment from USA TODAY.
Will landlords start charging for work from home?
With more people working from home since the pandemic, landlords are paying closer attention to utility costs. Some charge remote workers more each month to cover the increased cost of electricity, water and heating and air conditioning but it’s rare, housing experts say.
More commonly, individual meters or a specialized billing system are used to split a building’s utility bill among tenants based on apartment size, number of rooms or people living in each unit, according to Alexandra Alvarado, director of marketing and education at the American Apartment Owners Association.
Walnut Creek is in the pricey San Francisco Bay Area market which leads the nation in annual rent growth. According to Zumper, one-bedroom rent has risen 23% to $4,180 and two-bedroom rent has gone up 26% to $6,020.
"In a competitive market, some landlords may feel they have more flexibility to test what tenants are willing to pay," Alvarado told USA TODAY. "A hot rental market may give an owner the confidence to try an unusual fee but it doesn’t make the fee a common or a best practice."
Work from home is latest add-on fee
With rents at sizzling highs, a growing share of renters are barely able to cover their costs. About half of renters are now considered "cost-burdened" – meaning they spent more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.
The rising tide of hidden add-on fees can increase housing costs by hundreds of dollars a month. Increasingly, tenants are challenging these fees in lawsuits.
"The negative reaction to this particular listing shows that renters increasingly expect transparent, predictable pricing. That same concern is driving greater scrutiny and regulation of so-called junk fees," Alvarado said.
'Landlords should offer work-from-home rent discounts'
Even as employers crack down on how many days a week people can work from home, studies show that about 28% of paid workdays in the Bay Area are still from home, down only slightly from 32% in 2024.
Before remote work became so widespread, leases sometimes restricted tenants from operating a business out of a rental property, but those restrictions were to address concerns such as noise or employees or customers coming to the property, not "quiet-computer based work," Alvarado said.
Charging tenants simply for working from home "would be difficult to justify" given how common remote and hybrid work arrangements are, she said.
Stanford University economics professor Nick Bloom, who studies remote work, said landlords shouldn’t charge tenants who work from home. They should seek them out.
"I would argue working from home means tenants have a job and care about the property as it’s their office," Bloom said. "You could argue that landlords should offer work-from-home rent discounts."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The rent was already high. Then came the $200 work-from-home fee
