Who this reaches, precisely

Mobile-home and manufactured-home communities are squarely covered, because § 70-33-110 sits in the Mobile Home Lot Rental Act. Park operators can and should rebuild their request forms to demand the practitioner's license number, license type and effective date; must respond in writing; and may not ask for a diagnosis.

Homeowner and condominium associations are not the addressee. These are landlord-tenant sections. An association handling a reasonable-accommodation request for an assistance animal in a common-interest community answers to the federal Fair Housing Act and to Title 49, chapter 2, MCA — the Montana Human Rights Act — not to SB 149. The statute says so itself: subsection (9) provides that nothing in it restricts the Fair Housing Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, or Title 49, chapter 2.²

What associations can expect instead is drift. This standard will become the practical benchmark Montana managers and counsel apply, because most manage both rentals and associations, and because the “an online certificate is not enough by itself” rule is intuitive and quotable. An association that adopts it wholesale as its own accommodation policy has adopted a landlord-tenant statute that does not govern it, and is exposed under the two frameworks that do.

Definitions worth having exactly right

Subsection (10)(a) defines “emotional support animal” as “an animal that a health care practitioner has determined provides emotional, cognitive, or other similar support to an individual with a disability and does not need to be trained or certified.” Subsection (8) excludes service animals as defined in § 49-4-203, MCA — a different category, with different rules.

Separately, Senate Bill 300 of 2025, Chapter 568, effective October 1, 2025, amended §§ 27-1-715 and 7-23-2109, MCA, adding service animals and creating new service-animal offences. Note the bill-number collision: SB 300 of 2019 is the statute that created § 70-17-901's more-onerous-use-restriction protection. Two different SB 300s, six years apart, both relevant to Montana associations for entirely different reasons.

One drafting detail we could not resolve

The enrolled bill's strike-through rendering leaves genuine ambiguity about whether the alternative route — “information from any other source that the landlord determines to be reliable in accordance with the federal Fair Housing Act and Title 49, chapter 2” — survived, and whether the two routes are joined by “and” or “or” in the final text.

That is not a pedantic point. If it is “or,” a landlord must accept a reliable non-practitioner source, and the practitioner-license requirements are one route rather than the only one. Anyone relying on this statute should read the codified § 70-24-114 before acting, not the bill as printed. We are flagging it as unverified rather than guessing.

The federal change pushing the other way

There is a second, larger development in this area, and it runs in the same direction as SB 149 but reaches associations. On May 22, 2026 HUD's Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity permanently rescinded the 2020 assistance-animal notice that boards and managers have applied for six years, and directed FHEO to use the ADA's training-based service-animal definition when assessing Fair Housing Act animal accommodation complaints.

We cover that separately, because the temptation it creates is the significant risk here: it binds HUD's own staff, not housing providers, and it changes neither the Fair Housing Act nor the Montana Human Rights Act. A Montana board reading either development as “we can deny emotional support animals now” is taking on exposure in private suits and under state law.