A Baltimore judge has ordered one of the region’s largest apartment operators to pay more than $6 million to tenants after finding it spent years charging late fees that broke Maryland law and twisting the way rent payments were recorded to make renters look delinquent. The ruling closes out a legal fight that started in 2017 and covers more than 17,000 renters across 17 apartment communities scattered around the state.
What the court found
The Circuit Court for Baltimore City determined that Westminster Management, which manages apartment communities across several states and has ties to the real estate firm Kushner Companies, routinely charged late fees above the 5% cap Maryland law sets for residential leases, according to reporting from the Maryland Daily Record. Rather than list those charges as fees, the company folded them into what leases labeled as “rent,” then applied incoming tenant payments in a way that made it look like renters still owed money even after they had paid in full. That paper trail, tenant attorneys argued, became grounds to threaten eviction over debts that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.
The case traces back to alleged violations starting in September 2014. It was initially dismissed by a different judge in 2020, only for the Maryland Appellate Court to revive the tenants’ claims in 2023 after the state’s highest court found Westminster’s late-fee structure illegal. A class of more than 17,000 tenants was certified in 2025, and this July, Judge Paul J. Cucuzzella ruled that damages were, in his words relayed through court filings, essentially “simple math” once the illegal fees were added up.
How the total climbed past six million
The court’s judgment totals $4.17 million in direct damages, according to a statement from Brown, Goldstein & Levy, the law firm that represented tenants alongside co-counsel. Add in more than $2 million in accrued interest and the total owed climbs past $6 million, spread across a class that includes renters who moved out years ago. Andrew Freeman, a partner at the firm, said in the statement that the trial court “saw through Westminster’s efforts to obfuscate and delay” once the underlying calculation was laid out. Co-counsel Chelsea Ortega added that the case was always about tenants who could least afford unlawful charges, and about stopping practices that touched tens of thousands of renters.
Coverage from The Baltimore Banner and the nonprofit legal group Public Justice both confirm the scope of the ruling and the years-long path it took to get there, including a separate $3.25 million settlement Westminster paid in 2022 over related consumer protection claims tied to how it advertised and charged for its units.
Why this matters beyond Maryland
Late-fee caps exist in most states specifically because they’re one of the easiest charges for a landlord to pad without a renter noticing until the numbers stop adding up. Maryland’s cap sits at 5% of the monthly rent, a threshold plenty of renters couldn’t recite off the top of their head, which is part of what made this case take nearly a decade to resolve. Tenants had to first prove the fees were miscategorized, then prove the misapplied payments were connected, then survive an appeal before a class could even be certified.
For a company operating at Westminster’s scale, a judgment in the single-digit millions may not force major structural change on its own. But the ruling gives renters elsewhere a concrete example to point to if their own lease agreements bury fees inside rent line items or if their ledger shows a balance they’re certain they paid off. Housing attorneys in Maryland have noted that misapplied-payment disputes are notoriously hard to untangle without a paper trail, which is why tenant advocates are encouraging renters to keep copies of every rent receipt and payment confirmation, not just for a month or two, but for as long as they hold the lease.
The case is expected to formally close once post-judgment motions are resolved, though attorneys for the tenants have indicated they don’t expect the outcome to change. For the more than 17,000 people covered by the class, checks or credits tied to the judgment would mark the end of a dispute that started when many of them were still years away from moving out.
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