Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters in Colorado Springs, CO

A city that publishes its own fair housing page

Most Colorado cities hand this subject straight to the state. Colorado Springs keeps a fair housing page of its own, and one thing it records is a piece of state history worth knowing: Colorado barred housing discrimination in 1959, the first state in the nation to do it, nine years before the federal Fair Housing Act.

Treat that page as orientation, not a filing window. A Colorado Springs tenant refused an assistance animal still brings the complaint to the Colorado Civil Rights Division, under the same statute and the same clock as any other Colorado tenant. The local explanation helps. It does not move the enforcement.

Four renters in ten

Colorado Springs has 202,515 occupied housing units and 79,251 of them are rented, a 39.1% renter share on the 2020-2024 American Community Survey five-year estimates. Against the statewide 33.8% that is close to typical; against Denver’s 51.2% it is a different city. Owning remains the majority position here.

If that means your landlord is one person rather than a leasing department, the size of the operation changes nothing. Federal fair housing law steps around owner-occupied buildings of four units or fewer. Colorado’s law has no such gap where disability is concerned. The only small-building carve-out in the statute, at C.R.S. § 24-34-502(1.5)(a) for three units or fewer, belongs to the source-of-income rules and reaches nothing else.

What Colorado Springs renters get on August 12, 2026

House Bill 26-1045 was signed on May 19, 2026 and takes effect on August 12, 2026. Its legislative declaration is unusually direct about the reason: federal guidance on assistance animals was rescinded, and this bill restores it by writing it into Colorado law.

Three provisions carry most of the weight. C.R.S. § 24-34-301(2.5) defines an assistance animal as one that does work, performs tasks, assists, or provides therapeutic emotional support to a person with a disability, and states that the term includes an emotional support animal as well as a service animal, so the line a landlord may try to draw between the two does not exist in housing. C.R.S. § 24-34-502.2(2)(b)(II)(B) presumes a complete prohibition of assistance animals in housing to be discriminatory. And C.R.S. § 24-34-502(1)(a)(III) provides that the mere presence of the animal is neither a direct threat to health or safety nor presumed to cause substantial physical damage to anyone’s property; only documented, specific conduct can support that argument.

The presumption you have to earn

C.R.S. § 24-34-502.2(2)(b)(II)(A) is the sentence to memorise: permitting an assistance animal in housing is presumed to be a reasonable accommodation. Then read the condition attached to it. The presumption holds so long as the housing provider has been given an opportunity to engage in an interactive accommodation process.

An opportunity means a request the landlord can answer. Put it in writing, date it, and send it before the animal moves in. Arriving with the animal and producing the statute afterwards hands the other side an argument the legislature never meant to give.

A reasonable accommodation, defined at C.R.S. § 24-34-501(3.5), is an exception or adjustment to a rule, policy, practice or service, and that definition expressly reaches public and common-use spaces. A rule keeping animals out of a shared lobby, laundry room or courtyard belongs to the same conversation as the rule keeping them out of the unit.

What a landlord may ask you for

Being asked for paperwork is not being refused. C.R.S. § 24-34-502.2(2)(b)(II)(C) provides that a housing provider does not discriminate solely by requesting reasonable documentation of the disability or of the disability-related need, or by running a good faith interactive process. The exception is where the disability or the need is obvious, at which point the asking should stop.

Two things fall outside that request. The animal is the first: breed, weight, training, behaviour on a video clip. Registration is the second. No federal registry of emotional support animals exists and Colorado runs none, so a certificate, an ID card or a paid online listing answers no question the statute asks.

Whose signature Colorado accepts

Colorado puts this rule in the licensing statutes rather than the housing ones, and it differs by profession. Under C.R.S. § 12-245-229(3)(a), a mental health licensee (psychologist, licensed counsellor, social worker, or marriage and family therapist) may not make a finding unless they have met the patient in person. Under C.R.S. § 12-240-144(3)(a) a physician may meet the patient in person or by telemedicine. Do not carry the physician’s rule across to a therapist; it does not travel.

Either professional must be sufficiently familiar with you and legally and professionally qualified, and must produce two separate written findings: one that a disability exists, and one on whether the need for the animal relates to it.

That paperwork does more than persuade a landlord. C.R.S. § 18-13-107.3 makes it a class 2 civil infraction, since March 1, 2022, to intentionally misrepresent an entitlement to an assistance animal in order to obtain a housing accommodation, but only where a written or verbal warning came first. Fines start at twenty-five dollars and reach one hundred to five hundred dollars by a third infraction. A written finding made under § 12-240-144(1)(a) or § 12-245-229(1)(a) is an affirmative defence, and the statute says plainly that lacking one is not proof of the offence.

Pet charges and the animal they do not cover

Since January 1, 2024, C.R.S. § 38-12-106 has capped what a Colorado landlord may add for a pet. The deposit stops at three hundred dollars and must be refundable. Pet rent stops at thirty-five dollars a month or one and one-half percent of the monthly rent, whichever is greater. Note which way that test runs: it takes the higher figure, so thirty-five dollars is a floor, not a ceiling.

None of it reaches an approved assistance animal, because an assistance animal is not a pet. Dropping the charge is the plain example of an exception to a policy under C.R.S. § 24-34-501(3.5).

Breed limits usually arrive wrapped in an insurance explanation, and that explanation has been hollow since January 1, 2024. C.R.S. § 10-4-110.8(16) stops an insurer refusing or surcharging a homeowner’s or dwelling fire policy over a dog’s breed, and stops the insurer asking about breed at all beyond whether the dog has been declared dangerous. A landlord citing the carrier is describing a decision the carrier may no longer make.

Leaving a Colorado Springs rental

C.R.S. § 38-12-103, rewritten with effect from January 1, 2026, decides most arguments that follow an animal out the door. The deposit comes back within thirty days, or up to sixty where the lease says so. What may be subtracted is a closed list: rent left unpaid, utilities left unpaid, other lawful charges the lease itself names, and the cost of repairing damage that exceeds normal wear and tear and did not exist at move-in.

The burden sits with the landlord, on both whether the withholding was wrongful and what the real damages were. Keeping one hundred twenty-five percent or more of actual damages is presumed unreasonable. A whole-unit carpet charge needs substantial and irreparable damage, and the carpet cannot qualify unless new carpet went in during the last ten years; C.R.S. § 38-12-102(4) now counts uncleanliness as normal wear and tear unless the unit is substantially less clean than when you took it.

Either side may request a walk-through inspection under C.R.S. § 38-12-103(1.5). A written request obliges the landlord to hand over photographs, inspection reports, receipts, invoices or estimates within fourteen days. Wrongful retention costs treble damages plus attorney fees and costs, after seven days’ written notice of intent to sue.

Where a Colorado Springs complaint actually goes

To the Colorado Civil Rights Division, on 303-894-2997, with a Spanish line on 720-432-4294. C.R.S. § 24-34-504(1) gives you one year from the unfair housing practice, and the Division states it cannot extend that deadline even for good cause. Watch the step people miss: submitting intake through CaseConnect is not filing a charge. The charge is drafted and signed after that, so intake begun late preserves nothing.

Because the Division is a HUD-certified Fair Housing Assistance Program agency, most housing matters are dual-filed under a state and a federal case number. A respondent has ten days to answer and you have ten to rebut, within a 450-day administrative process; where probable cause is found and conciliation fails, housing cases go automatically to hearing.

Free help is close by. Colorado Legal Services runs its Colorado Springs office at 102 South Tejon Street, Suite 430, on 719-471-0380, covering El Paso, Lincoln, Teller and Fremont counties. Its El Paso County eviction clinic sits further along the same street, at 270 South Tejon Street, Room W-165, Tuesday and Thursday from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m., and helps only on your court date. Colorado Housing Connects, the statewide renter helpline run by Brothers Redevelopment since 2014, takes bilingual calls on 844-926-6632.