Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters in Denver, CO

A city where renting is the majority position

Denver has 335,428 occupied homes and 171,873 of them are rented. That is 51.2% against a statewide figure of 33.8%, on the 2020-2024 American Community Survey five-year estimate, and it means the tenant asking about an animal in Denver is not the exception in their building. They are the building.

Scale changes how these requests get handled. A landlord with one property reads an accommodation request as an unfamiliar problem. A Denver management company has a form for it, a portal to upload into, and a policy written before your request arrived. That is mostly good (the process exists), but it also means the answer you get is often the policy talking rather than the statute.

From August 12, 2026 the statute talks back.

What changes on August 12

House Bill 26-1045 takes effect that day. It adds a definition of assistance animal to C.R.S. § 24-34-301(2.5) that expressly covers an emotional support animal, and then adds a presumption to C.R.S. § 24-34-502.2(2)(b)(II)(A): permitting an assistance animal in housing is presumed to be a reasonable accommodation, provided the housing provider has been given an opportunity to engage in an interactive accommodation process.

The companion provision, C.R.S. § 24-34-502.2(2)(b)(II)(B), says a complete prohibition of assistance animals in housing is presumed to be discriminatory. Denver’s larger buildings tend not to run absolute bans. They run pet policies with breed schedules, weight ceilings and per-animal limits. Those are rules, and a reasonable accommodation is defined by C.R.S. § 24-34-501(3.5) as an exception or adjustment to a rule, policy, practice or service. The pet policy is the thing the accommodation carves into.

The condition attached to the presumption

Read the presumption’s proviso before relying on it. It applies where the landlord “has been given an opportunity to engage in an interactive accommodation process.” In a large Denver building that opportunity is usually a written request through the leasing office or the resident portal, and the paper trail it generates is the point.

Moving an animal in first and raising the law afterwards forfeits the presumption and hands the building a procedural argument it did not have to work for. Ask before the animal arrives.

Being asked for paperwork is not being discriminated against

Denver renters hear confident advice that a landlord may not ask for anything. Colorado has written the opposite into the statute.

Under C.R.S. § 24-34-502.2(2)(b)(II)(C), a building that asks for reasonable documentation of your disability, or of why you need the animal, has not discriminated by asking. Nor has one that opens a good faith interactive process. The exception runs the other way: where the disability or the need is already obvious, that request loses its cover.

The limits sit in the wording. Two subjects are on the table: the disability, and the need for the animal. Breed, weight, obedience training and any online listing are outside it, and no Colorado agency issues anything that would satisfy such a request anyway.

Who Colorado lets write the letter

Colorado regulates the professional, not just the tenant. Under C.R.S. § 12-245-229(3)(a), a mental health licensee (a psychologist, counsellor, social worker, or marriage and family therapist) may not make a finding about disability or disability-related need unless they have met the patient in person, are sufficiently familiar with the patient and the disability, and are legally and professionally qualified. Physicians get a slightly wider rule at C.R.S. § 12-240-144(3)(a), which allows in person or by telemedicine.

Whichever it is, the licensee must produce a written finding on disability and a separate written finding on whether the need for the animal relates to it. In a city where much of the mental health care is delivered by therapists rather than physicians, the in-person requirement is the one most Denver renters are actually under.

Money the building may and may not ask for

Colorado capped pet charges in C.R.S. § 38-12-106, in force since January 1, 2024. An additional pet deposit may not exceed three hundred dollars and must be refundable. Pet rent may not exceed thirty-five dollars a month or one and one-half percent of the monthly rent, whichever is greater, and since Denver rents commonly sit above the point where 1.5% overtakes thirty-five dollars, it is often the percentage that governs here rather than the flat figure.

Those are the ceilings for a pet. An approved assistance animal is not a pet, and waiving the charge is exactly the kind of exception to a policy that C.R.S. § 24-34-501(3.5) describes.

Breed restrictions deserve their own note, because the justification Denver tenants hear most is insurance. C.R.S. § 10-4-110.8(16) bars an insurer from refusing a homeowner’s or dwelling fire policy, or raising the premium, over a dog’s breed or mixture of breeds, and bars the insurer from asking about breed at all except whether the dog has been declared dangerous. A management company that says its carrier forbids the animal is describing something the carrier is not allowed to do.

What happens to the deposit when you leave

C.R.S. § 38-12-103, rewritten with effect from January 1, 2026, is where a Denver tenancy with an animal most often ends up. You should have the money back inside thirty days, sixty only if your lease claims the longer window. Four things can be taken out of it: rent you did not pay, utilities you did not pay, another charge the lease actually names, and repair of damage worse than normal wear and tear that was not there the day you arrived.

Three provisions are worth knowing before the move-out inspection. The landlord, not you, carries the burden of proving both that the withholding was not wrongful and what the actual damages were. Keeping one hundred twenty-five percent or more of the actual damages is presumed unreasonable. And carpet cannot be treated as substantially and irreparably damaged if it was not replaced with new carpet in the ten years before your tenancy ended, which matters in a city with a large stock of older apartment carpet that has already outlived its replacement cycle.

Either side may ask for a walk-through inspection before the tenancy ends under C.R.S. § 38-12-103(1.5). On a written request the landlord has fourteen days to produce the photographs, invoices, estimates or inspection reports behind any charge. Wrongful retention costs treble damages, attorney fees and court costs, after seven days’ written notice of intent to sue.

Misrepresentation, and the document that answers it

C.R.S. § 18-13-107.3 makes it an offence to intentionally misrepresent entitlement to an assistance animal in order to obtain a housing accommodation. Three things must be true at once, and the last is easy to miss: the person knows the claim is false, is making it to win the accommodation, and has already been warned, in writing or out loud, that doing so breaks the law. Since March 1, 2022 it has been a class 2 civil infraction, running twenty-five dollars, then fifty to two hundred, then one hundred to five hundred.

The statute names its own answer. A written finding made under C.R.S. § 12-240-144(1)(a) or § 12-245-229(1)(a) is an affirmative defence, and the absence of one is expressly not proof of the offence. A real assessment by a licensed professional is the document Colorado law points at.

If the answer is no

Complaints go to the Colorado Civil Rights Division, and C.R.S. § 24-34-504(1) allows one year from the unfair housing practice before the claim is barred. The Division states that it has no power to extend that deadline for any reason.

The procedural trap catches Denver renters as often as anyone: submitting intake through the Division’s CaseConnect system is not the same as filing a charge. The charge is drafted and signed afterwards, so starting intake in the last few weeks of the year preserves nothing. Expect two case numbers once the charge exists, one state and one federal: the Division carries HUD certification as a Fair Housing Assistance Program agency, so housing complaints are usually dual-filed.

For free help, Colorado Legal Services keeps its Denver office at 1560 Broadway, Suite 1100, on 303-837-1313, covering Adams, Arapahoe, Broomfield, Denver, Douglas, Elbert, Gilpin and Jefferson counties. It also runs an in-person eviction clinic in Room 179 of the City and County Building on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, but the Denver clinic is open only to tenants in public housing, project-based Section 8, or with a housing choice voucher, which is a narrower door than the clinics in neighbouring counties. The Denver Metro Fair Housing Center takes fair housing questions from across the metro area.

Colorado has been enforcing a state fair housing law since 1959, the first in the country and nine years ahead of the federal Act. The presumptions arriving on August 12, 2026 are the newest layer on a system that has been running in Denver for longer than almost anywhere else.