In early June 2025, videos shared on (archived) TikTok (archived) alleged that U.S. President Donald Trump was introducing a 300% penalty tax on landlords who raise rents excessively.
The TikTok videos were captioned "TRUMP'S 300% PENALTY: THE END OF RENT PROFITEERING?" One of the videos had received more than 86,000 likes and over 38,000 shares at the time of this writing.
@.wonderful.story6 TRUMP'S 300% PENALTY: THE END OF RENT PROFITEERING? #fyp #fypage #fypシ゚viral #foryoupage ♬ original sound - wonderful story666
The voice-over on the videos said:
Breaking news: Trump just declared war on America's rent crisis. Landlords are now in full panic. The Trump administration is introducing the most brutal landlord profit tax in U.S. history. If landlords raise rents above government-set limits, the excess will face a 300% penalty tax. Raise rent by $10,000? The IRS will take $30,000. The higher they go, the harder they fall. Profits vanish instantly.
For years, rent has skyrocketed 35%. Today, 40% of renters hand over more than half their income to landlords. Even worse, Wall Street funds are buying entire apartment complexes, creating artificial shortages and trapping young people in permanent rent prisons. At a White House press conference, Trump pointed straight at the financial giants and declared, "Housing is not an ATM. Ordinary people are not crops to be harvested forever."
For decades, no president dared to hit real estate capital this hard. If this bill passes, will landlords survive?
The claim about Trump's alleged landlord tax also circulated on X (archived).
However, there was no record of Trump introducing a policy that would impose a 300% penalty tax on landlords who raise rents excessively, and the White House itself disputed the claim. Therefore, we've rated it false.
When Snopes asked the White House whether the claims about a landlord tax were legitimate, a spokesperson sent the following response via email: "Fake."
Searches of the White House website also returned no results for such a proposal.
Furthermore, if Trump had publicly said that "housing is not an ATM" and "ordinary people are not crops to be harvested forever" during a White House news conference, as the viral videos claim, major news outlets likely would have reported on the comments. But searches on Google (archived), Yahoo (archived), Bing (archived) and DuckDuckGo (archived) found no reports from credible media outlets about Trump making these comments. Instead, those searches displayed another fact check debunking the false claims about Trump's alleged landlord tax.
For further reading, we also investigated a rumor that claimed Trump was sending $5,000 stimulus checks to Americans.