North Dakota's assistance-animal documentation bill drew one vote
North Dakota's assistance-animal documentation bill drew one vote
2026-09-15 · North Dakota · Legislation · Did not pass
The single most contested question a North Dakota board faces — what documentation may it ask for when an owner says an animal is an assistance animal — was put to the legislature in 2025 and defeated 44 to 1.1
Senate Bill 2222 concerned assistance-animal certification and disability documentation in a rental dwelling. It failed on the Senate floor, yeas 1, nays 44. It never reached the House.
What the defeat leaves behind
North Dakota has no statute telling a board, a landlord or an owner what documentation is sufficient, what a provider must attest to, or what may be asked. The framework is entirely federal: the Fair Housing Act's reasonable accommodation requirement, 42 U.S.C. § 3604(f), and HUD's implementing regulations.
Within a community association, the pet restriction itself is a creature of the declaration. Our North Dakota pet restrictions page covers how those are usually written and what the accommodation duty does to them.
And then the federal framework got thinner
On April 6, 2026 HUD published notice that its Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity had withdrawn a list of guidance documents effective September 17, 2025. Two of them are the ones every board and manager in the country has been working from:2
- FHEO 2020-01, Assessing a Person's Request to Have an Animal as a Reasonable Accommodation Under the Fair Housing Act, issued January 28, 2020
- FHEO Notice 2013-01, Service Animals and Assistance Animals for People with Disabilities in Housing and HUD-funded Programs, issued April 25, 2013
HUD's notice is blunt about their status: “These documents have been removed from active use and should not be relied upon as authoritative. … All these guidance documents have been removed from the HUD.gov website and should not be relied upon by internal or external parties.”
The sentence that decides where a board stands
From the same withdrawal notice:
“Any actions that do not comply with the text of the Fair Housing Act continue to be subject to enforcement by the Department. … Notwithstanding an enforcement determination by HUD, the Fair Housing Act provides that complainants may file a civil action in an appropriate Federal district court or state court within two years after the occurrence or termination of the alleged discriminatory housing practice. Nothing in this memo affects the rights of parties to seek redress in the proper court.”
The statute is untouched. The regulations are untouched. What vanished is the interpretive scaffolding — the framework for “unique” animals, for what documentation from a health-care professional should establish, and for how to treat an internet-purchased letter.
So a North Dakota board now sits in the worst of both positions: no state statute, because SB 2222 failed 44-1, and no current federal guidance, because HUD pulled it. The liability is unchanged and the map is gone.
A board reading “guidance withdrawn” as “I can now say no” has it exactly backwards. HUD is still enforcing the Act, and a private plaintiff has two years regardless of what HUD does. HUD even invited remedial action: it “encourages parties whose prior conduct may have been violative of the Fair Housing Act, while in conformance with the previous guidance and during the period in which that guidance was in effect, to take immediate actions to address any such potential violation.”
What this means for a North Dakota board
Do not change your practice because the guidance was withdrawn. If your process worked under FHEO 2020-01, keep it. It was built around the statutory standard, and the statutory standard is what remains. Abandoning a defensible process because the document describing it was rescinded is the fastest route to a complaint.
Write the process down, if it is not already. Who receives a request, in what form, who decides, in what time, and what is asked for. An undocumented, ad hoc process is where discrimination claims are won.
Apply it identically to every request. Consistency is the defence that survives any change in guidance.
Keep the request out of general circulation. Disability-related information about an owner is not board gossip and should not appear in minutes distributed to the membership.
Decide, and decide in writing, within a stated period. An unanswered accommodation request functions as a denial and looks worse than a reasoned one.
Remember the animal is not the only accommodation question. Assigned parking, access routes, and modifications to common elements come up alongside it, and the same analysis applies.
The wider withdrawal, and what else it hit
The same FHEO notice withdrew guidance on digital advertising of housing, source-of-income testing, the implementation of Executive Order 13988, and the application of fair housing standards to criminal records. A second notice on July 17, 2026 withdrew a further set from HUD's Office of General Counsel, including the 2016 criminal-records guidance and the 2016 joint HUD/DOJ statement on state and local land use law and the Fair Housing Act.
Separately, HUD has proposed removing its disparate-impact regulations entirely, with a supplemental proposal published August 10, 2026 and comments due October 9, 2026. That is a proposal. The discriminatory-effects rule at 24 CFR 100.500 remains in force today.
One thing did not change: HUD's 2016 harassment rule, covering quid pro quo and hostile environment harassment and an association's direct and vicarious liability, was not amended. An association's exposure for failing to take prompt action to correct owner-on-owner harassment it knew or should have known about is exactly where it was.
What to watch next
Watch for HUD to reissue assistance-animal guidance — its own notice says guidance “determined to be necessary will be reissued” — and watch the disparate-impact comment period close on October 9, 2026. On the state side, watch whether an assistance-animal documentation bill returns for the 70th Legislative Assembly, which convenes January 5, 2027 with prefiling closing December 18, 2026. A 44-1 defeat is not usually a bill that comes back unchanged.
Related North Dakota HOA Topics
- SB 2222 bill overview and action history, 69th Legislative Assembly ↩
- Notification of Withdrawal of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity Guidance Documents, 91 FR 17291 (Apr. 6, 2026) ↩
- HUD's Implementation of the Fair Housing Act's Disparate Impact Standard, supplemental proposed rule, 91 FR 51416 (Aug. 10, 2026) ↩
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