Rental Bonds in Queensland

Two numbers do most of the work here. A bond on a general tenancy can't be more than 4 weeks rent, and whoever takes the money has 10 days to lodge it with the RTA. Breaking either one is an offence.

The 4 week cap has applied since 30 September 2024, and the RTA states it flat, with no rent threshold attached. Section 112 of the Residential Tenancies and Rooming Accommodation Act 2008 sets the same figure in statute. It covers every bond, whatever it gets called. A pet bond counts toward the same 4 weeks, and so does a second bond taken on the same tenancy.

Some pages still tell landlords they can negotiate a bigger bond once the weekly rent passes a certain figure. That condition is absent from the RTA's current guidance and from the Act in force. Work from the cap the way the RTA writes it today.

The second number is the lodgement clock. Take bond money and you have to give the tenant a receipt and get the money to the RTA within 10 days. Section 116 puts a maximum penalty of 40 penalty units on missing that. Requiring or accepting more than the maximum bond carries a maximum penalty of 20 penalty units under section 146.

And a bond isn't compulsory at all. The Act doesn't require one. Most lessors and agents take one anyway, as security on the property.

On 10 August 2026 the RTA published an updated compliance and enforcement action plan. It sets out the regulator's priorities, approach and enforcement actions for 2026-27, and it names the first target. From July to September 2026, the RTA will proactively investigate cases where evidence wasn't provided for a bond claim.

That's a shift in posture. Acting on a tenant's complaint is one thing. Going looking is another.

The proactive program rotates through four focus areas, a different one each quarter. Only the first carries a quarter in the announcement, so treat the rest as coming without a date.

The duty behind it is short. Claim on a bond, or dispute a tenant's bond refund request, and you have 14 days to give that tenant the evidence supporting it. If nothing arrives inside the 14 days, the tenant can ask the RTA to investigate, and a property manager or owner found not to have complied faces a maximum penalty of 20 penalty units.

It reaches every bond now. Bonds lodged on or after 30 September 2024 were covered from the start. Bonds lodged before that date got a 12 month transitional period, which the RTA's fact sheet puts at 30 September 2024 to 30 September 2025. That end date has passed, so an older bond is covered too.

A bond claim runs on deadlines. Whoever misses one loses ground.

Where everyone agrees on the split, the parties fill in the Refund of rental bond together. All of them sign it, and the RTA pays the bond as directed. Where they disagree, any party to the bond can fill in that form and lodge it without the other signatures. The RTA then refunds any undisputed amount from the first form processed and sends the other parties a Notice of claim.

That first form matters more than landlords expect. If the other side gets a Notice of claim and does nothing, the bond is refunded exactly as the first form asked. Fourteen days of silence, then the money goes out 2 to 3 business days later. It works that way whichever side stays quiet.

A dispute changes the route. The refund goes on hold and the matter is referred to the RTA's dispute resolution service, which the RTA describes as a free and confidential conciliation service. If conciliation ends without agreement, the RTA issues a Notice of unresolved dispute. That document is what lets a party apply to QCAT, and the window after it is tight.

By the time you're claiming, it's too late to build the file. The Act gives its own examples of what evidence looks like: receipts, quotes to repair damage, and records of unpaid rent. Paperwork that existed before the argument did.

That's why the entry condition report carries the weight it does. Our landlord services describe an entry report completed before the tenant moves in, with photo documentation of every room and fixture, then an exit report compared against it when the tenant leaves. The gap between those two reports is the evidence. Everything else is argument.

There's a hard limit on what the RTA will do with it. The RTA can only investigate whether supporting evidence was provided inside the 14 days. Once it has been provided, the RTA can't assess whether it was any good. Only QCAT can rule on that. So providing evidence and winning on it are two separate tests, and passing the first doesn't decide the second.

One carve out is written into the duty. It doesn't apply where the manager or owner has been unable to contact the tenant after making reasonable efforts. Section 136AA(5) of the Act lists what those efforts look like.

Addresses matter here too. The RTA sends a Notice of claim to the tenant's last known address, which may well be the property they've just moved out of. Tenants are told to keep the RTA updated with a forwarding address, and it costs a landlord nothing to ask for one at the exit inspection.

QCAT can make any order about payment of the bond it considers appropriate. Section 136D tells it what to weigh: the tenant's efforts to meet their obligations, how far the lessor and the tenant complied with the Act, and the evidence supporting any claim on the bond. Your own compliance is in the frame alongside theirs.

One limit sits in the same section. A tribunal order must not have the effect of penalising a tenant for damage caused by an act of domestic violence committed against them.

An application that goes away no longer leaves the money stranded. If QCAT dismisses a bond dispute or the application is withdrawn, the RTA releases the bond according to the original refund request. That came from a change to the Act on 6 June 2024.

Before the change, dismissed cases could leave a bond sitting with nobody able to release it. From 1 August 2024 the RTA began processing 230 of them, returning more than $181,000 to Queenslanders. Those 230 were the cases stranded before the law changed, cleared in one batch.

A few mid-tenancy moves cause landlords more grief than the end of the tenancy does.

Increases are the common one. A bond can go up during a tenancy, usually after a rent increase, but only once at least 11 months have passed since the last increase or since the tenancy started. The written notice has to state the date the increase is due, and that date must be at least one month after the tenant receives it.

Renewals push the other way. Say a tenancy is renewed after 30 September 2024, and the bond being held is worth more than 4 weeks of the current rent. The tenant can claim that excess back. The RTA has to refund it once the tenant submits the Excess bond refund for tenants (Form 4b), signed by every bond contributor. That refund can't be disputed.

Moving a bond to a different property is a narrow mechanism. It works where the property manager or owner agrees, and only if the bond amount and the manager both stay the same. Handing your property to a different agency is a separate thing entirely and doesn't run through that form, so the switching page covers it instead of this section.

This page is Queensland wide. FAA Property manages residential investment property across the Sunshine Coast from a single office in Maroochydore, and there's no branch anywhere else. FAA Property Pty Ltd is a licensed Queensland real estate agency, Office of Fair Trading licence 4220395, expiring 5 June 2027.

Read our live listing store at street address level on 25 August 2026 and it holds 16 distinct current properties across 14 suburbs. Thirteen of those suburbs carry a rental we manage. Six of the thirteen sit on the Sunshine Coast: Maroochydore, Sippy Downs, Nirimba, Peregian Springs, Caloundra West and Meridan Plains. The other seven are further out, at Gympie, Scarness, Griffin, Lawnton, Kallangur, Jimboomba and Logan Reserve.

Our landlord services describe RTA bond lodgement and management, plus entry and exit condition reports with photo documentation. The condition reports are the part that decides a bond claim, which is why they're photographed room by room instead of ticked off a checklist.

The property management team is four named people: Kayla Dale, Kylah Jaggs, Jo-Anne Jerome and Kimberley Stevens. The business carries 61 Google reviews (read 2026-08-15). We quote our management fee inside a rental appraisal, priced against your actual property, rather than publishing a headline rate for everybody. If your property is already managed somewhere else, you can switch to better property management and receive 3 months with no management fees.