My complex charges $10 if you use a credit card, but the payment is free if you use a digital check (i.e. direct transfer). It’s doable right on their webpage so it takes me literally less than a minute to log in, hit “pay rent”, confirm, and go.
It depends on whether it’s a debt or not. If I go to the supermarket, put my gallon of milk on the conveyor belt, and then try to pay with a $100 bill, the store is within their rights to say “No, sorry, we won’t take that”. No transaction has yet taken place: If I have no other form of payment that the store will accept, they can just put the milk right back in the dairy case. If, however, I’m paying my electric bill, I’ve already used the electricity I’m paying for, and can’t just “put it back on the shelf”: It’s a debt, and so the electric company would have to accept the cash. Rent could go either way, depending on how the lease is set up.
My apartment complex’s online system charges $30 or something like that.
Lucky mine is relatively close to the office (with the nice free dropbox). There’s also the free e-check option mentioned in another post.
Except that getting paid by check may *not *be costing them money and they may be offering the online payments only because the customers want it. Sure, getting checks takes up some staff time- but it could be that one person spends a total of one day a month processing the rent checks.Unless they have a part-time person come in for the equivalent of one day a month specifically to process the checks *, the company won’t be saving money. That person will have more time to perform other duties, or talk on the phone or shop online but having that person work 20 days in March instead of 21 is not going to be practical.
- and my kids grade school did just that- the person who handled tuition payments worked 2 half-days a month.If they had accepted on-line payments, they could have saved her wages.
My landlord just passes along the 3% or so that PayPal charges them. Like Inner Stickler, I can launch a billpay payment for free, but if it’s 4:30 on the fifth of the month and you forgot to pay, that 3% may be cheaper than a late fee.
Not to mention it also says “In God we Trust.” I hope there are no atheists in that apartment complex office.
Landlords may stipulate in the rental agreement or lease, what kinds of payment they will take. They very commonly won’t accept cash. All the places I’ve lived refused to accept payments in cash, and it was always written into the rental agreement.
So just don’t pay on time. Then it’s a debt and they have to take cash. 
It’s a safety thing too. This is a big complex, and if the office took cash there might be tens of thousands of dollars coming into the office on the day the rent is due. The risk of a hold-up isn’t worth it.
There is no distinction in the Treasury rules between a debt and a transaction. If Ford decides they don’t want to take cash for your loan payment, it is within their rights to do so (notwithstanding any language to the contrary in the loan contract). Trying to determine what is a debt would lead to much confusion. Using your example, what if I drank the gallon of milk while still in the store, but prior to paying? That would then constitute a debt, I owe the store for the product I consumed. Now must they accept my cash? No.
“legal tender for all debt public and private” only means that US currency can be used, if agreeable to all parties, as a means for settling any legal transaction in the United States without further contractual verbiage or value setting between the parties. It is not mandatory for any party.
I pay by direct transfer to my mortgage company. But they recently decided to start charging $7.50 a month to take my mortgage payment out of my bank account. I called them about it and wound up accepting “paperless” billing to avoid the fee. We will see how that works out. In the meantime they have already mailed me 2 different things in the past 2 weeks, once is a confirmation of the paperless billing and the other is a new payment coupon book and envelopes. 