ESA housing rights, as they stand today

The one-paragraph version

The Fair Housing Act still requires housing providers to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. Congress did not touch it. What changed is that HUD, the agency that enforces it, will now only pursue complaints where the animal is individually trained to do work or tasks for the disability. Untrained emotional support animals lost their automatic federal backstop. Your right to sue privately survived, and state and local law was not affected at all.

Start here

• What HUD changed in May 2026
• How to write the request
• No-pet policies
• Pet rent, deposits and fees
• If your landlord says no
• College dorms and campus housing
• HOAs and condo associations
• Your state’s rules

Who has to consider your request

Most housing is covered: apartment buildings, most single-family rentals, condos, co-ops, campus housing, and homeowners associations acting as housing providers.

Some housing is exempt from the federal act. The two main exemptions are owner-occupied buildings with four or fewer units, and single-family homes rented by an owner with three or fewer such homes and no real estate agent. State law often closes those gaps — California, Massachusetts and New York among others extend protections past the federal exemption.

What a landlord can still legitimately refuse

• An animal that poses a direct threat to others' health or safety, based on that specific animal's actual conduct — not its breed.
• An animal that would cause substantial physical damage to property.
• A request that would impose an undue financial or administrative burden, or fundamentally alter the nature of the housing.
• A request they genuinely cannot verify, where the disability and the need are not obvious and you have declined to provide any documentation.

After May 2026, a landlord in a state without independent ESA protection also has more room to argue that an untrained animal is simply not the kind of accommodation the statute requires. That argument would have gone nowhere in 2024. Today it goes somewhere in some states.

What they still cannot do

• Demand your medical records or your specific diagnosis
• Require proof of training, certification or registration for an emotional support animal
• Charge a fee for reviewing your request
• Apply a breed or weight restriction as an automatic bar without assessing the individual animal
• Retaliate against you for asking — retaliation is separately unlawful under the FHA and under most state laws

The order to do things in

1. Get a letter from a clinician licensed in your state.
2. Write a short, dated, written accommodation request. Email creates a record.
3. Give a reasonable deadline — ten business days is normal.
4. Keep every reply. Follow up verbal conversations in writing: "Confirming what we discussed today..."
5. If refused or ignored, check your state page for the agency that takes complaints, and consider a fair housing lawyer. Many take these cases on contingency.