To fill out the Zillow rental application, open a participating rental listing on the Zillow app or website, tap the apply button, and work through the form’s sections on personal details, residence history, employment and income, and pets and vehicles. You upload supporting documents as you go, pay a $35 screening fee at the end, and Zillow pairs your submission with credit and background reports it sends to the landlord. The same application stays active for 30 days, so you can submit it to other participating listings without paying again.
Most of the effort is front-loaded into that first submission. If you have your documents ready before you start, the form itself moves quickly.
What to Have Ready Before You Start
Gather these items first. A half-finished application sitting in a landlord’s inbox looks neglected, and going back to hunt for a pay stub mid-form is how that happens.
- Government-issued photo ID that shows your date of birth: driver’s license, passport, or state ID.
- Your Social Security number. Zillow uses it to pull your credit report and run the criminal background check, and there is no way around this step.
- Proof of income. At minimum, your two most recent pay stubs. Starting a new job? An offer letter or employment verification letter works instead. Self-employed applicants should have recent tax returns or bank statements showing steady income over the past year.
- Rental history: addresses for your last two or three residences and contact information for each landlord or property manager.
- An emergency contact — name and phone number for someone outside your household.
- Co-signer details if you’ll need one. Many landlords expect a co-signer whose earnings are three to four times the monthly rent, compared to the roughly two-and-a-half to three times required of primary tenants. Have the co-signer’s full name and contact information ready.
- Pet information if applicable: breed, weight, and vaccination records. Some landlords also ask for a pet resume describing training and temperament.
If you have a prior bankruptcy or liens on your record, be prepared to disclose them. Neither automatically disqualifies you, and landlords will see them in the credit report anyway, so honesty up front reads better than a surprise.
Filling Out the Form Section by Section
Start from either the Zillow website or the mobile app. Find the listing you want, tap or click apply on that listing page, and Zillow walks you through the form.
Personal and Residence Details
The first screens ask for your legal name, date of birth, Social Security number, and current address. Enter the SSN carefully. A single wrong digit means the screening report pulls the wrong person’s file or fails entirely, and you’ll have wasted your $35.
You’ll enter your residential history in this section too: prior addresses and landlord contact details. Landlords use these references to check whether you paid on time and left the place in reasonable shape. If you’re applying with roommates, each person submits a separate application, but you can link them to the same household listing so the landlord sees the full picture.
Employment and Income
List your current employer, job title, and how long you’ve held the position. Zillow also asks for your gross monthly income. Landlords commonly look for income at two-and-a-half to three times the monthly rent, so a $1,800 unit generally calls for roughly $4,500 to $5,400 in gross monthly earnings. Upload your pay stubs, offer letter, or tax documents to back up the number you enter. A vague or unsupported income section is one of the fastest ways to get passed over.
Pets, Vehicles, and Anything Else the Listing Asks For
The remaining fields cover pets, vehicles, and any additional information the landlord’s listing requests. Fill in breed, weight, and count for each pet. Some buildings have strict breed or size restrictions, and leaving this blank when you have a 90-pound dog only delays the inevitable.
The $35 Fee and the Refund Policy
After you’ve completed every section, Zillow sends you to a payment screen. The $35 fee is charged once and covers the tenant screening reports — a credit check through Experian and a criminal background check through CIC — for the next 30 days. You pay by credit or debit card, and the charge processes immediately so the screening reports generate without delay.
The refund policy is narrow. You won’t get your money back if the listing becomes unavailable after you apply, if the landlord never responds, or if the landlord asks you to reapply through a different system. If you accidentally pay twice because you used two different Zillow accounts, contact Zillow’s support team at rentalapplications@zillow.com to sort out the duplicate charge.
One common worry at this step: the credit pull Zillow uses is classified as a soft inquiry, which doesn’t affect your credit score and isn’t visible to other landlords or lenders. If a landlord separately runs a hard inquiry outside of Zillow, that could cause a small, temporary dip. Ask which type of pull is being used before authorizing anything beyond the standard Zillow screening.
Reusing the Application for 30 Days
The real value of the $35 is portability. Once your application is active, you can submit it to an unlimited number of participating landlords on Zillow for 30 days without paying another screening fee. The credit and background reports are pulled once and shared with each landlord you apply to during that window. In a competitive market, front-loading your applications into a single 30-day period keeps costs down.
Apply directly from any participating rental listing, or share your application where the Zillow application is accepted. After the 30-day window expires, you’ll pay another $35 to reactivate and generate fresh screening reports.
What the Landlord Sees
When you submit to a listing, the landlord’s dashboard receives your application alongside two screening reports. Knowing what’s in them helps you anticipate questions or address weak spots up front.
Credit Report
Experian supplies the credit data, scored on the VantageScore 4.0 model with a range of 300 to 850. The report shows open and closed accounts with balances, payment history including on-time and late payments, collections with creditor names and amounts, credit inquiries, and public records such as bankruptcies. A Chapter 7 bankruptcy stays on the report for 10 years; Chapter 13 drops off after seven.
Background and Housing Court Report
CIC runs the criminal and housing court searches. The background report draws from a national criminal database with over 1.4 billion records, a sex offender registry, and nationwide housing court records covering more than 35 million entries. Only convictions appear. Arrests that didn’t lead to a conviction are excluded, as are traffic and parking infractions. The report doesn’t include federal court searches or in-court county and state records.
Prior eviction filings will likely surface through the housing court data even if you don’t mention them. If you have an old case that was resolved or dismissed, be ready to explain the circumstances rather than hoping it goes unnoticed.
Editing or Withdrawing After You Submit
Once you hit submit, the application is locked. You can’t edit individual fields on a live submission. If your income changes, you start a new job, or you spot an error, the workaround is to withdraw the application from your Renter Application Dashboard, make your changes, and resubmit to the same listing. As long as you’re still within the 30-day window from your original payment, there’s no additional charge for resubmitting.
You can also withdraw from your dashboard if you’re no longer interested in a property, which keeps your active submissions tidy and tells the landlord you’ve moved on.
If a Landlord Denies Your Application
A landlord who turns you down based on information in the screening report is required by federal law to send you an adverse action notice. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, that notice must include the name, address, and phone number of the screening company that supplied the report, a statement that the screening company didn’t make the decision to deny you, and notice of your right to get a free copy of the report within 60 days and dispute anything inaccurate in it.
Adverse action isn’t limited to outright denial. If a landlord requires a co-signer, charges a higher deposit, or sets your rent above what other applicants pay based on your screening report, those actions also trigger the notice requirement.
If you spot errors in the report, such as a conviction that isn’t yours, a debt you already paid, or an eviction filing that was dismissed, you can dispute the inaccuracy directly with the screening company. The company is required to investigate and correct verified errors. Better still is getting ahead of report errors before you apply: pull your own Experian report and check your criminal background through the same channels landlords use, so nothing surprises you mid-search.