What this site answers
State Law Lookup covers two questions that come up in everyday disputes: how much a person can sue for in small claims court, and what a state's law says about a residential security deposit (the most a landlord can collect and how long the landlord has to return it). Each answer is the figure the state's statute, court rule or official court page sets, quoted word for word, with the section and a link, and the date the page was read. Nothing is estimated: where an official source could not be read, the state is shown as not verified.
Highest and lowest small claims limits
Delaware ($25,000), Tennessee ($25,000), Minnesota ($20,000) sit at the top of the verified list; Virginia ($5,000), Mississippi ($3,500), Kentucky ($2,500) at the bottom. A claim of $10,000, the median limit, fits in 28 of the 51.
Fastest and slowest deposit deadlines
Alaska (14 days), Hawaii (14 days), Nebraska (14 days) give landlords the least time to return a deposit; Alabama (60 days), Arkansas (60 days), West Virginia (60 days) the most. The lookup above turns the deadline into a calendar date from the day the tenancy ended, skipping weekends where the statute counts business days.
How the figures are checked
Each record in the data files carries the source name, the URL and the date it was read; the tables, charts and state pages are all generated from those files, so a correction made once shows up everywhere. The methodology page lists every source and every state that could not be verified. The guides explain filing a small claims case, demand letters, serving papers and what the deposit deadlines mean, using the same data.