Without an SSN: what banks, carriers and landlords actually require

What this page is. Most advice about arriving in the U.S. without an SSN is written once and never touched again, so it quietly goes stale. This is the index of what we maintain: which options exist, how each one was checked, and when. The specific numbers — fees, deposits, thresholds, which tier costs what — live in the product, because they move and we would rather hand you a dated answer than a blog post from two years ago.

What "checked" means here. Three kinds, never blurred together: official page (we read the provider's own page and cite it), we did it ourselves (a real person on our side opened the account or the line), and open data (OpenStreetMap/Foursquare — locations, not terms). How we verify spells out the rules.

The thing we will not paper over. Almost no rental listing says anything about an SSN. We looked across the whole current listing set and the word essentially never appears. So we do not claim to tell you, apartment by apartment, whether a landlord will ask for one — nobody honestly can. What we do instead is pull out the requirements a landlord did put in writing, and hand you the question to ask before you pay an application fee.

Why retired entries stay on this page. 1 of the options above are marked retired. We leave them in rather than deleting them, because "this one used to work and no longer does" is exactly the sentence someone arriving today needs — and exactly the sentence that disappears from the internet when pages get quietly rewritten.