Ohio's deposit law is one short statute — Revised Code §5321.16 — with no cap, a strict clock, and a penalty structure that turns procedural mistakes into double-damages judgments. It applies identically statewide, from a Columbus duplex to a Cleveland portfolio.
How much can a landlord charge?
No statutory cap — one to two months' rent is market standard. But Ohio has a rule almost nobody follows: any deposit exceeding $50 or one month's rent must earn 5% annual interest if the tenant stays six months or more, paid on the excess portion. Landlords holding oversized deposits are quietly accruing a liability; tenants holding old leases may be owed money they've never heard of.
The 30-day clock
The landlord must return the deposit — or a written itemized statement of deductions plus any balance — within 30 days of the tenancy ending and the tenant delivering possession. The tenant's trigger duty: provide a forwarding address in writing. Without it, the tenant loses the statutory damages-and-fees remedy (though the deposit itself is still owed).
Deductions and the penalty
Unpaid rent, unpaid utilities the tenant owed under the lease, and damage beyond normal wear and tear — each itemized. Wrongful withholding costs the landlord the amount withheld plus damages equal to that amount — double, in effect — plus reasonable attorney's fees. Ohio courts award this routinely; the fee provision makes small deposits worth litigating.
Why Ohio deposit disputes are documentation disputes
With no cap and a bare-bones statute, everything in an Ohio dispute reduces to the wear-and-tear line — and the statute gives no checklist, no inspection procedure, no photo mandate to lean on. The evidence vacuum is yours to fill, and whoever fills it wins.
SealMove fills it with proof that can't be argued with. Every photo and video is cryptographically sealed the instant it's captured, independently timestamped, and locked with Face ID into a tamper-evident archive. At move-out, your walkthrough lines up room-by-room against the sealed baseline — and either party can send the other a report to review and acknowledge, no app required.