Willow and Hearth

Disability-related complaints made up 54.59% of all fair housing complaints filed nationwide in 2024 (17,645 cases), more than any other category tracked, according to the National Fair Housing Alliance’s 2025 Fair Housing Trends Report. Renters with documented emotional support animals are a recurring piece of that total, and fair housing attorneys say the math behind the denials is simple: most tenants never sue, so the odds favor the landlord who says no.

Key Points

• Disability complaints are the single largest category of fair housing filings, ahead of race, family status, or any other protected class, per NFHA’s 2025 report.
• On May 22, 2026, HUD’s Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity office issued a memo canceling its 2013 and 2020 guidance that protected untrained emotional support animals, according to the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund.
• The new HUD standard leans on the Americans with Disabilities Act’s stricter service-animal definition, an animal “individually trained to do work or perform tasks,” rather than the comfort-based standard ESAs have always operated under.
• HUD also told staff to pause and re-review complaints already filed by tenants with untrained ESAs, effectively freezing federal enforcement for that group while the review continues.

DREDF is blunt about what the shift means in practice, arguing HUD “has simply decided to stop doing its job for disabled people who use ESAs,” even though Congress never amended the underlying Fair Housing Act and no court has ruled ESAs fall outside its protection. The group notes that renters still retain the right to sue landlords privately and that state-level protections, where they exist, are untouched by the federal memo. But a private lawsuit costs money and time most renters don’t have, which is exactly the gap attorneys say some landlords are now willing to bet on.

Federal fair housing settlements show what’s actually at stake when a denial does end up in court. In one case resolved by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, a Manhattan cooperative that tried to evict a resident over her emotional support parrots (after city inspectors found zero code violations across 15 separate visits) ultimately paid $165,000 in damages and offered $585,000 to buy back her shares, on top of adopting new reasonable-accommodation policies. That case took HUD finding probable cause in 2021 and years of litigation before it resolved, a timeline that illustrates why enforcement speed, not just the underlying law, determines whether a documented accommodation actually protects a tenant.

With federal enforcement now paused for untrained ESAs specifically, fair housing attorneys note the practical burden shifts further onto renters and the private bar. Documentation that once triggered a HUD complaint may now only trigger one if the tenant can afford to file it themselves.