Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters in Des Moines, IA

35,599 renting households, and one agency down the road

Des Moines is Iowa’s largest city (213,096 people on the 2024 Census estimate), and 35,599 of its 90,105 occupied homes are rented: 39.5 percent on the 2020-2024 American Community Survey, against 28.3 percent for the state. One in five renting households in Iowa is inside this municipality.

Median gross rent here is $1,090, above the $972 statewide figure and below three suburbs on the same commute: Waukee at $1,383, Johnston at $1,338, Ankeny at $1,319. Des Moines is not the expensive part of its own metro, but it is the part with the agency in it. The Iowa Office of Civil Rights sits at 6200 Park Avenue, and publishes the form this page is about.

The statute that lists what the letter says

Iowa is one of a small number of states where the contents of an assistance animal letter are set out in legislation rather than left to custom. Iowa Code § 216.8C(1) says a licensee “shall make a written finding that includes all of the following,” and then gives eight paragraphs:

a. Whether the patient or client has a disability. b. Whether the patient has a disability-related need for an assistance animal. c. The particular assistance provided by the assistance animal, if any. d. Certification whether the provider-patient relationship has existed, in person or via telehealth, for at least thirty days between the licensee and the patient or client. e. Certification whether the licensee is familiar with the person and the disability prior to providing the written finding. f. The date the finding was issued by the licensee and the date the finding will expire. g. The license number and type of license held by the licensee. h. Whether the licensee received a separate or additional fee or other form of compensation solely in exchange for making the written finding required under this section.

Take that as a checklist and it does two jobs at once. Held against a document you have already paid for, it tells you whether the document is complete. Held against a landlord asking for more, it marks the boundary: the legislature wrote eight items, and a ninth is not on the list.

Two of the eight are disclosures, not tests

Paragraphs (d) and (h) are built differently from the rest, and the difference is the whole ballgame for anyone who has just moved to Des Moines or has never seen a therapist.

Both begin with a word that is not “that”. Paragraph (d) requires certification whether the relationship has run thirty days. Paragraph (h) requires a statement of whether a separate fee was received. Neither paragraph sets a condition. They require a fact to appear on the page so the reader can weigh it: a short relationship is disclosed, a fee is disclosed, and the finding stands or falls on paragraphs (a) to (c).

This reading is not a stretch and the drafting history shows it. Until the 2024 rewrite, § 216.8C contained no thirty-day rule at all; what it had was a cap limiting the form to “only two questions” answerable “yes” or “no”, with no room for “additional detail”. The 2024 Act replaced that cap with the eight-item list, and it chose “whether” twice.

The field the state’s own form forgot

Under § 216.8C(4) the agency “shall create a form in compliance with this section and provide the form to the public on the agency’s website,” and it has. The document is headed Finding of Disability and Need for Assistance Animal and says of itself that it “is used to make the required finding pursuant to Iowa Code section 216.8C”. The copy linked from the agency’s resources page was created in July 2024.

Read its bottom half against paragraph (g). The form collects the provider’s printed name, a signature and a date. There is no field for a licence number and none for a licence type, and paragraph (g) requires both.

The form also states the thirty days in the older, stricter way, asking the provider to certify they “have had a relationship with the patient/client for at least thirty (30) days,” which is the 2024 phrasing rather than the current statutory one.

None of this makes the form a bad thing to use. It is the state’s own document, landlords recognise it, and it is free. The practical move is smaller than the problem sounds: use the form, and have the clinician write the licence number and type on it.

What the letter is not required to contain

The list is a ceiling as much as a floor, and reading it that way answers most of the requests Des Moines renters get.

There is no paragraph about a diagnosis, and § 216.8B(6)(a) says so directly: a landlord “shall not request information under this section that discloses a diagnosis or severity of a person’s disability or any medical records relating to the disability.” The same paragraph preserves your option to volunteer that information: a door you can open, never one that can be opened for you.

There is no paragraph about the animal’s breed, weight, age or training, and nothing anywhere about registration. § 216.8B(4) has already dealt with that, declaring a registration of any kind “not sufficient information to reliably establish” disability or need.

Supporting information may be asked for at all only where the disability or the need “is not readily apparent”, § 216.8B(3), and what may then be requested is “documentation identified in section 216.8C, subsection 1”.

Dates: the two clocks inside the document

Paragraph (f) requires the finding to carry the date it was issued and the date it expires, so the letter should tell you its own answer. Section 216.8C(2) supplies the rule those dates follow: the finding “must be made within twelve months of the start of a rental agreement and is valid for a period of twelve months or the term of the rental agreement, whichever is greater.” Two rules rather than one: freshness measured from the start of the lease, and a validity period running to the longer of the two figures, so a twenty-four-month lease does not send you back in month thirteen.

If the answer is no, or is nothing at all

Iowa gives a Des Moines renter something most states do not: a statutory right to an answer on paper. Section 216.8B(6)(e) requires the landlord to “provide a written determination,” and § 216.8B(2) requires a response “within a reasonable amount of time.” If weeks pass, a short dated note citing both is worth more than a phone call. It converts silence into either a decision or a documented refusal to make one.

Two doors take a complaint, and this city has both. The Des Moines Civil and Human Rights Commission is the local one, on (515) 283-4284; Iowa Code § 216.19(2) requires a city of twenty-nine thousand or more to maintain a commission, and Des Moines is the largest of the sixteen Iowa cities above that line. The Iowa Office of Civil Rights takes housing complaints statewide from 6200 Park Avenue on 515-281-4121. Section 216.19(3) requires the two bodies to coordinate and “eliminate needless duplication”, so this is not a choice between rivals.

The dates matter more than the door: three hundred days to the agency under § 216.15(13), two years to the district court under § 216.16A(2)(a), the latter available whether or not any agency complaint was ever filed.

Getting the eight elements onto a page

The list is only useful if someone qualified fills it in. Section 216.8C(1) names six licence chapters: 148, 148C, 152, 154B, 154C and 154D, which are medicine and surgery, physician assistants, nursing, psychology, social work and behavioural science, and then adds “a licensee of another state who is licensed under a similar law and who is in good standing with that state.” Telehealth appears in paragraph (d) by name.

Start with a clinician you already see. They are the cheapest option, they already satisfy paragraph (e) comfortably, and asking costs nothing beyond an appointment, though many providers have never written a § 216.8C finding and will want the form put in front of them. A community mental health centre does the same work at low cost through an intake designed around ongoing treatment rather than a single written finding, which usually means a longer wait than a lease question allows.

If neither fits, a licensed evaluation is the route built for this: screening questions, a clinician licensed to make the finding, and a letter only where the findings support one: written to the eight paragraphs, with the licence number and licence type on it, which is the one thing the state’s own form will not prompt anybody to add.