Can Landlords Charge ESA Pet Rent or Deposits? 2026 Rules

It depends on your state. Federal law still lets an ESA owner ask a landlord to waive pet rent, pet deposits and pet fees as a reasonable accommodation, but HUD’s guidance treating those charges as off-limits was withdrawn in September 2025. Kentucky, Virginia, Illinois, Maine and Minnesota bar them by statute; elsewhere the waiver is a request the landlord weighs. Every request starts with an ESA letter from a clinician licensed in your state — $99 flat at PetESALetter.

Key takeaways

• Pet rent (monthly), a pet deposit (refundable) and a pet fee (one-time, non-refundable) are three different charges. A waiver request should name each one with its dollar amount.
• The federal duty is unchanged: 42 U.S.C. § 3604(f)(3)(B) makes it discrimination to refuse a reasonable accommodation that may be necessary for a tenant with a disability. What went away is HUD’s 2013 and 2020 guidance, withdrawn effective September 17, 2025 — the place the familiar “no pet fees for ESAs” rule lived.
• Since May 22, 2026, HUD’s fair-housing office recommends charges only for animals trained to do disability tasks. A tenant can still sue privately within two years, and state agencies are not bound by that memo.
• Nine states put an ESA fee limit in statute (KY, VA, IL, ME, MN, HI, WI, UT, FL). Alaska and North Carolina expressly allow pet charges, and Iowa repealed its waiver in 2024.
• The ordinary security deposit and any real damage the animal causes are still yours. An ESA letter changes pet charges, not liability.

Three charges usually sit in a pet addendum, and it pays to separate them before asking for anything. Pet rent is a monthly add-on to the rent. A pet deposit is a refundable sum held against damage and returned at move-out. A pet fee is a one-time charge that does not come back. Take a lease with $40 a month in pet rent and a $400 pet deposit: over 12 months, $880 is tied to the animal before it has scratched anything.

Under federal law none of the three is automatically off the table for an emotional support animal, and none is automatically allowed. The Fair Housing Act makes it discrimination to refuse “reasonable accommodations in rules, policies, practices, or services, when such accommodations may be necessary” for a person with a disability to have equal use of a home (42 U.S.C. § 3604(f)(3)(B); HUD’s own regulation, 24 C.F.R. § 100.204, says the same). Waiving a pet policy, and the charges attached to it, is one of those accommodations. The tenant asks; an ESA housing letter shows the disability and the disability-related need for the animal; the housing provider decides whether the waiver is necessary and reasonable.

From 2020 to 2025 that decision was close to a formality on fees, because HUD’s 2020 notice told landlords that pet fees could not be assessed for assistance animals. That notice has been withdrawn, so in 2026 the answer comes from three places at once: the federal statute, which still supports the request; your state’s law, which in some states settles the question outright; and the facts of your case. In Kentucky, Virginia, Illinois, Maine and Minnesota a statute bars the charges. In most other states you ask in writing, with the letter, and the landlord weighs it.

Three separate events, often blurred together online — including by most of the pages that rank for this question, which still describe the pre-2025 rules as current federal law.

September 17, 2025: the guidance was withdrawn. HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO) withdrew FHEO-2013-01 and FHEO-2020-01, the two notices that told landlords how to handle assistance animals, effective that day. The withdrawal was published at 91 FR 17291 on April 6, 2026. Those notices were guidance, not law, and the Federal Register notice itself says that actions which do not comply with the text of the Fair Housing Act remain subject to enforcement.

July 16, 2025: a federal court upheld one animal fee. In Henderson v. Five Properties, LLC (E.D. La., No. 2:24-cv-00750), a tenant with an ESA asked her landlord to waive a $400 non-refundable animal fee charged to every resident with an animal. The landlord offered a payment plan she conceded she could afford, and Judge Sarah S. Vance granted the landlord summary judgment: on those facts the waiver had not been shown to be necessary or reasonable. The court called HUD’s 2020 notice “unpersuasive” on fees, and also wrote that it was “not holding that animal fees can always be enforced against someone with an ESA.” It is one district-court ruling and binds no other court.

May 22, 2026: HUD narrowed its own enforcement. A memorandum signed by Assistant Secretary Craig W. Trainor says FHEO will find reasonable cause and recommend charges only in cases involving animals individually trained to do disability-related work or tasks, and that requests to waive pet policies for untrained ESAs are no longer treated as presumptively reasonable. The memo is framed as a decision about HUD’s own enforcement resources: it covers Fair Housing Act complaints only, sends open ESA cases for case-by-case review, and says nothing in it affects a tenant’s right to sue in court within two years.

Put together: the statute and 24 C.F.R. § 100.204 still support a fee-waiver request for an untrained ESA, a complaint to HUD about pet rent for an ESA is now unlikely to produce a charge, and state law, state civil-rights agencies and private lawsuits carry the weight. It also cuts the other way: as of August 2026 the United States was still litigating an ESA accommodation case in federal court (United States v. Five Properties, E.D. La., No. 2:25-cv-01213), so “ESAs lost their housing rights” is not an accurate summary either.

Since the federal guidance went away, a state statute is the strongest position a renter can have, because it does not depend on HUD. These nine states write a limit on assistance-animal charges into their own code, and each defines the protected animal to include untrained emotional support animals. Who can write the letter, complaint deadlines and local agencies are on each state’s page.

A second group says “no ESA fees” in agency guidance rather than statute: California’s Civil Rights Department FAQ, and the fair-housing agencies of Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Washington. Guidance tells you how the state agency will treat a complaint, but a landlord can argue with it. Massachusetts is its own case: G.L. c. 186 § 15B limits what any landlord may take at the start of a tenancy, so an up-front pet deposit is off the table there for every tenant, animal or not.

A third group points the other way. Alaska’s landlord-tenant act allows an extra pet deposit of up to one month’s rent for any animal that is not a trained service animal (AS 34.03.070(h)). North Carolina lets a landlord charge “a reasonable, nonrefundable fee for pets” (G.S. 42-53). Delaware’s deposit exemption covers only trained support animals (25 Del. C. § 5514(i)(3)). Iowa struck its express pet-fee waiver in 2024 (SF 2268). In those states the federal accommodation request is still available; it simply has no state statute behind it. See Alaska, North Carolina, Delaware and Iowa.

An ESA letter supports a request about the pet policy. It does not rewrite the rest of the lease, and several of the statutes above say so in terms.

The ordinary security deposit. Whatever every tenant pays, the ESA owner pays too, within the state’s deposit cap.

Real damage. A tenant is liable for damage the animal causes. Utah’s statute lets the landlord “recover a reasonable cost to repair damage,” and Montana’s makes the tenant liable for damage caused by the ESA (Mont. Code Ann. § 70-24-114(6)). In practice it comes out of the ordinary deposit at move-out, itemised like any other deduction.

Charges every tenant pays. Rent, application fees, parking and utilities are not pet charges and are not part of an ESA request.

Rules about behaviour. Noise, waste and leash rules in common areas apply to an ESA as they do to anything else in the unit. A landlord who bills for a specific repair is not charging pet rent.

The request is a short email or letter with the ESA letter attached. Four steps keep it from turning into an argument.

1. Get the ESA letter before you sign the pet addendum. A request made at application or renewal is simpler than unwinding charges already agreed. The letter should come from a mental health professional licensed in your state who evaluated you; in California, Arkansas, Louisiana and Montana the law also requires a client relationship of at least 30 days before the letter (see who can write an ESA letter).
2. Name each charge. “I am requesting a reasonable accommodation for my emotional support animal: waiver of the $40 monthly pet rent, the $400 pet deposit and the $250 pet fee in the pet addendum.” In a statute state, add the section from the table above. A specific request is easier to grant and easier to show later.
3. Send the letter, not your medical history. The ESA letter confirms a disability and the animal’s connection to it; it does not name the diagnosis. Florida and Montana bar a landlord from demanding the diagnosis, its severity or medical records (Fla. Stat. § 760.27(3)(a); Mont. Code Ann. § 70-24-114(4)(a)).
4. Ask for the answer in writing, with a date. Montana requires a written determination; everywhere else it is simply good practice. If the landlord offers a payment plan instead of a waiver, that is a reply to weigh rather than a refusal — it is what the landlord did in Henderson.

Landlords may verify a letter — license number, license type, state and date — and that is normal. PetESALetter’s $99 flat includes landlord verification: the clinician confirms the letter directly when a housing provider asks, and in the 30-day states the follow-up contact the law requires is included too. ESA letter pricing lists what the fee covers, and how to verify an ESA letter shows what a landlord checks.

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A common version: the pet deposit went in on the 3rd and the ESA letter arrived on the 4th. No statute makes a letter reach backwards on its own, but an accommodation request can be made at any point in a tenancy. Three practical routes:

Ask for pet rent to stop from the next due date. Pet rent is monthly, so a waiver granted now saves every remaining month of the lease — at $40 a month with nine months left, $360.

Ask for the pet deposit back, or folded into the ordinary deposit. A refundable pet deposit comes back at move-out under state deposit law anyway, less itemised damage. Asking for it now is a request; in Kentucky, Virginia, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota or Utah, cite the section. A non-refundable pet fee already paid is the hardest charge to recover outside those states.

In Minnesota, check the lease. Since January 1, 2025, a Minnesota lease with a pet policy has had to disclose the ban on fees and deposits for service and support animals. If it did not, a tenant who shows they would have requested an accommodation and would likely have received it can sue to recover fees, charges and deposits already paid (Minn. Stat. § 504B.113, subd. 3).

The animal’s legal category decides how strong the fee request is. An emotional support animal needs no training and its role is presence; a psychiatric service dog is individually trained to do tasks for the disability, which is exactly the line HUD’s 2026 memo now draws.

For most renters the animal already at home becomes an ESA now, and a trained dog is a separate decision for later. The PSD letter page covers the document a trained dog’s handler uses for housing, and service dog vs therapy dog vs ESA covers the wider distinctions. Calling an ESA a service animal to avoid a pet fee is not a shortcut: North Carolina, for one, makes it unlawful to disguise an animal as a service animal (G.S. 168-4.5).

Start by asking for the reason in writing. Then the options, roughly in order of speed:

A state or local civil-rights agency. Most states run one, and deadlines are short: 180 days at New Jersey’s Division on Civil Rights, 300 days at the Maine Human Rights Commission. These agencies apply state law and are not bound by HUD’s May 2026 memo; the Maine commission published its own statement on the memo on August 4, 2026.

A private lawsuit. The Fair Housing Act lets a tenant sue in federal or state court within two years of the discriminatory practice, and both HUD’s withdrawal notice and its memo say that right is unaffected. A fair-housing attorney or a local legal-aid office can say whether the facts justify it.

A HUD complaint. Still possible, but since May 22, 2026 HUD finds cause only for trained animals and sends open ESA cases for individual review. For an untrained ESA and a pet-rent dispute, the state agency is usually the faster route.

One thing never helps: an online “ESA registration” or certificate. No law recognises one, and Montana’s statute says a registration is not by itself enough to show a disability-related need (ESA registration myths). This page is general information, not legal advice; every statute cited was checked on official state code sites in September 2026.

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