What it binds, and this is the whole point

It binds HUD's own enforcement staff. It is not a rule. It did not amend the Fair Housing Act. It did not go through notice and comment — which is one of its own criticisms of the guidance it rescinded.

Untouched by it, and all still available to a complainant:

• Private Fair Housing Act lawsuits. A plaintiff does not need HUD to sue, and courts are not bound by an internal enforcement memorandum.
• HUD-certified substantially equivalent state agencies, which process FHA complaints under their own state law.
• The Montana Human Rights Act, Title 49, chapter 2, MCA — which has its own disability-discrimination and reasonable-accommodation framework and was not changed by anything HUD did.

So the accurate statement of what changed is narrow: HUD will no longer pursue a housing provider for declining to waive a pet policy or a pet fee for an untrained emotional support animal. That is a change in federal enforcement risk. It is not permission.

The genuinely open question for Montana

Whether the Montana Human Rights Bureau will follow HUD's posture is unresolved, and as far as we can establish it is unaddressed. That is the most useful thing on this page, because it is the question that decides a Montana board's actual exposure and nobody has answered it.

Until it is answered, a Montana association operates under two frameworks that may now say different things about the same request. The federal enforcement posture has moved; the state framework has not been shown to have moved with it.

What a board can actually do

The wrong move is the obvious one. An association that reads this memorandum as authority to start denying emotional support animal requests is trading a reduced HUD risk for an unquantified risk in private litigation and under state law — and doing it on the strength of a document that governs neither.

The proportionate response:

• Have counsel revisit the accommodation procedure, in light of both this memorandum and the Montana Human Rights Act. Not rewrite the pet rules — revisit the procedure for handling a request.
• Keep the process the same until advised otherwise. Receive the request, do not ask for a diagnosis or medical records, respond in writing, document the basis of the decision. None of that got riskier.
• Do not send members a notice announcing the change. Every Montana association with a pet restriction, weight or breed limit, pet fee or no-pets rule is affected by how this is communicated, and a board letter overstating it creates a dispute the board then has to defend.
• Watch the Montana Human Rights Bureau, not HUD, for the development that would actually change the analysis here.

Sourcing notes

The memorandum has no FHEO notice number of its own — cite it by signer, date and subject. A separate HUD action of September 17, 2025 withdrawing fair-housing guidance documents, reported as covering both FHEO-2013-01 and FHEO-2020-01, is unverified; we did not open it.

Montana's own 2025 statute on this subject, Senate Bill 149, tightened emotional support animal documentation — but it amended the Residential Landlord and Tenant Act and the Mobile Home Lot Rental Act, so it reaches lot-rental communities and not associations. We cover it separately. There is no Montana appellate decision on assistance animals in a condominium or HOA in 2025 or 2026.²