HUD 2020 Guidelines: Your ESA Housing Rights After the 2026 Changes

Living with an emotional support animal (ESA) under a no-pets lease can feel like an uphill battle. Property managers ask for paperwork, charge pet deposits or point to breed rules. For five years, the go-to reference in those conversations was a single document from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD): Notice FHEO-2020-01, often called the HUD 2020 guidelines.

That notice set out, step by step, how landlords should handle a request to keep an assistance animal. It has now been withdrawn, and HUD’s approach to emotional support animals has changed. Understanding both what the notice said and what replaced it will help you make a strong request today. If you are just starting out, our step-by-step guide on how to get an ESA letter covers the documentation side.

HUD issued FHEO-2020-01, Assessing a Person’s Request to Have an Animal as a Reasonable Accommodation Under the Fair Housing Act, on January 28, 2020. It replaced HUD’s earlier assistance animal notice, FHEO-2013-01, and gave landlords, housing providers and tenants a step-by-step framework for these requests under the Fair Housing Act (FHA).

It had two aims: to protect people with physical or mental disabilities from housing discrimination, and to set out what reliable documentation looks like at a time when certificates sold online were becoming common. It sorted assistance animals into two groups:

• Service animals: dogs individually trained to do work or perform tasks for a person with a disability, the same definition the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) uses.
• Support animals: other trained or untrained animals that do work, perform tasks, provide assistance or provide therapeutic emotional support for a person with a disability. Emotional support animals fell into this group.

The notice treated both groups as assistance animals rather than pets, which is why pet rules and pet fees did not apply once a request was approved.

When a tenant had a qualifying disability and reliable documentation, the 2020 framework pointed toward four practical protections. The right-hand column shows how each one looks after HUD’s 2026 changes.

Verification is where most disputes start. The 2020 notice drew clear lines between reasonable questions and invasions of privacy. Those lines came from a withdrawn document, so treat them as a picture of good practice rather than binding rules; state laws and courts may draw them differently. The notice set no expiration date for letters, and neither does the Fair Housing Act.

Outside the notice, a landlord can always check that the clinician who signed your letter holds an active license, using the state licensing board’s public lookup, and can contact the clinician’s office to confirm the letter is genuine. If your leasing office wants to see a standard layout, our sample ESA letter and accommodation request template shows what a complete request looks like without revealing private health details.

The 2020 notice was blunt about websites that sell certificates, registrations and licensing documents to anyone who answers a few questions and pays a fee: in HUD’s experience, that kind of documentation was not, by itself, enough to establish a disability or a need for the animal. At the same time, it recognized that many legitimate, licensed health care professionals deliver services remotely, and that a note from a professional with personal knowledge of the person was reliable documentation, whether or not the care happened online.

That standard has only become more important. With federal enforcement for ESAs narrowed, landlords and state agencies look closely at whether a letter reflects a real evaluation. A reliable letter comes from a licensed professional working within their scope of practice who knows about your condition, is licensed in your state, and puts their license details on the letter so they can be checked. Several states, including California, now set their own requirements. Read more about who can write an ESA letter.

Withdrawing guidance does not change the law itself. Here is where things stand as of September 30, 2026:

• The Fair Housing Act is unchanged. Housing providers must still make reasonable exceptions to their rules and policies when a person with a disability needs one for an equal opportunity to use and enjoy a dwelling, and HUD’s regulation on reasonable accommodations remains in place.
• HUD’s enforcement has narrowed. Under the May 22, 2026 guidance, HUD will find reasonable cause in animal cases only where the animal has been individually trained to perform work or tasks directly related to the person’s disability. Requests for trained animals are presumptively reasonable; requests to waive pet policies for untrained ESAs are not. HUD has also said it intends to start formal rulemaking to bring its assistance animal rules closer to the ADA’s service animal model.
• Other routes remain open. The guidance does not bind courts, and tenants can still bring a private fair housing lawsuit within two years. State and local fair housing laws and agencies are unaffected, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act still applies to federally funded housing.
• Landlords can still say yes. Nothing stops a housing provider from approving an emotional support animal, and many continue to do so, especially where state law protects support animals.

Knowing the rules is half the job; the rest is making a request that is easy to say yes to and keeping good records while you live there.

• Check your state’s law first. Since HUD’s change, state and local law often decides whether an ESA must be accommodated. Start with our state ESA housing guides.
• Respect community rules. An approved animal is exempt from pet fees, not from the lease. You remain responsible for your animal’s behavior, noise, waste cleanup and any damage.
• Keep your documentation current when asked. No federal rule makes an ESA letter expire, but a landlord can ask for current information if your letter is old or your situation has changed, and a few states, such as Arkansas for emotional support dogs, require a yearly review. Plan ahead with our guide to ESA letter renewal.
• Make verification simple. Give your landlord the clinician’s name, license number and issuing state so the license can be checked on the state board’s public lookup, and keep copies of everything you send and receive.
• If the answer is no, follow our step-by-step guide on what to do when a landlord denies your ESA.