SPRINGFIELD — Sharon Gardner was paying her rent. But her Hanover Park apartment owner continued to pile up charges against her.

With eviction threats mounting, Gardner was told she owed more than $3,300 in unexpected fees — a $50 monthly charge for cable internet she never received, $5 a month for pest control, a $300 move-in fee she hadn’t been told about, and a $200 monthly charge for a month-to-month lease even though management never sent her a new lease agreement despite her repeated requests.

“I was afraid every month that the sheriff was going to knock down my door and throw me out. I was still paying my rent,” Gardner said. “I wrote email after email. Can you send me an updated ledger? Can you tell me what’s going on? Why are you evicting me?”

After an eviction attempt, Gardner eventually received $10,000 for settling a case that largely centered on how arbitrary the month-to-month fees were. But she said all the charges and the way her management company treated her and other tenants were “not fair.”

Her experience may soon become illegal in Illinois.

Democratic lawmakers passed legislation this spring to ban many of these hidden rental charges — often called “junk fees” — while requiring other mandatory fees to be disclosed on the first page of a leasing agreement. The bill awaits Gov. JB Pritzker’s signature, who did not respond to requests for comment.

“What people need to understand is junk fees are fees not for landlords’ actual costs. They are fees for the sole purpose of making the tenant pay more money for nothing,” said Esther Patt, director of the Champaign-Urbana Tenant Union.

Beginning in 2027, the measure would prohibit landlords from charging fees for renewing or updating leases, filing after-hours maintenance requests, contacting property owners or managers, travel required to fulfill maintenance requests, routine maintenance, no-fault pest abatement, filing eviction notices or maintaining hotline services.

Rental application fees, including background checks, would be capped at $50 unless the actual cost is higher, and the landlord would pay the upfront cost before billing the tenant.

The push for greater transparency in rental costs comes as Chicago-area rents are surging. Median rent in Chicago climbed 1.5% to $2,030 per month between May 2025 and May 2026, according to Zillow. Housing advocates say renters with few affordable alternatives are especially vulnerable to fees that arrive without warning.

“Challenging these fees is not something that’s without risk,” said Bob Palmer, policy director of Housing Action Illinois. “If it’s something that’s so important, as you know, your housing, are you going to put that at risk for a fee?”

Nationally, renters pay hundreds of millions of dollars per year in junk fees, according to a 2025 National Consumer Law Center report.

But landlord groups say the legislation goes too far.

Paul Arena, Northern Illinois Landlord Association’s government and public affairs director, said it would be “somewhat unusual” to charge tenants for most of the proposed fee bans, but defended charges for after-hours maintenance requests and lease updates.

If a landlord has to pay someone to help a tenant who locked themselves out of their apartment after hours but cannot charge the tenant for it, Arena — a landlord for more than 35 years and a Republican Winnebago County Board member — said it will force the landlord to absorb the costs. While large corporate landlords could afford those costs, Arena said smaller mom-and-pop landlords cannot.

Both Arena and Jane Garvey, president of the Chicago Creative Investors Association, said proposed changes around rental application fees are especially problematic. Garvey, a former Illinois rental property owner, said requiring upfront payment for background checks filters out applicants unlikely to pass one. If landlords must wait until after the screening to collect, she said, some applicants who fail could simply ghost them and leave the bill unpaid.

“The nitpicky regulation of every aspect of the business is driving people out of the business or out of doing business in Illinois,” Garvey said.

The bill passed largely along party lines, with Democratic Reps. Rick Ryan of Evergreen Park, Dave Vella of Loves Park, near Rockford, and Maurice West of Rockford joining Republicans in opposition. The measure initially cleared the House in 2025 but stalled in the Senate for nearly a year while sponsors negotiated changes, including an exemption for landlords in owner-occupied buildings with fewer than seven units and the removal of a provision barring landlords from charging both a security deposit and a move-in or move-out fee.

Sen. Mike Simmons, a Chicago Democrat and the bill’s main Senate sponsor, said the changes were reasonable concessions aimed at protecting tenants from corporate landlords rather than small property owners.

“These are reasonable changes that we’ve made,” Simmons said. “And so this is really meant to target the corporate landlords that are buying up entire blocks of Chicagoland, not just the city but the suburbs also, and flipping the tenants and increasing the rent to 200%, 300% in one lease.”

Illinois would join Colorado and Massachusetts in prohibiting certain junk fees and requiring landlords to clearly disclose mandatory charges.

Ashley Bishel, staff attorney for the Chicago-based Law Center for Better Housing, said she is seeing junk fees appear in more eviction cases, where a few hundred dollars can be the “difference between whether somebody is OK for a month or whether they fall behind.”

“It’s not going to single-handedly fix that massive issue, but it’s an important first step in making sure that renters are at least able to be fully informed of how much they should be paying for their rent month to month, so that they can make the correct budgeting decision for them and their families,” Bishel said.