Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters & Laws in Michigan

A duty written about rules, not about animals

The Persons with Disabilities Civil Rights Act runs from MCL 37.1101 to 37.1607, and across all of it the word “animal” appears exactly zero times. The same is true of the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act next door in the statute book. Michigan has never passed a law about emotional support animals.

What it has instead is a sentence about rules. MCL 37.1506a(1)(b) makes it unlawful, in a real estate transaction, to “[r]efuse to make reasonable accommodations in rules, policies, practices, or services, when the accommodations may be necessary to afford the person with a disability equal opportunity to use and enjoy residential real property.”

A no-pet policy is a rule. That is the whole mechanism. Behind it sits MCL 37.1102(2), which requires accommodation in housing “unless the person demonstrates that the accommodation would impose an undue hardship”, note who has to do the demonstrating. The federal regulation, 24 C.F.R. § 100.204(a), says almost the same thing in almost the same words, and its first worked example is a no-pets building and a tenant with an assistance dog.

The state agency that enforces the Michigan act is not coy about how this applies. On its fair housing page, the Michigan Department of Civil Rights lists what state and federal law require of a housing provider and gives as its first example: “Allowing a service or support animal in a no-pet complex.”

The case Michigan actually has

Most states have no court decision on any of this. Michigan has two, and they are the reason a Michigan tenant should understand their own letter better than a tenant anywhere else.

Riverbrook v Fabode began in a mobile home community that banned certain dog breeds. A resident’s brother acquired a dog, was told to remove it, and produced a letter from a limited-license professional counsellor. She testified that she had reached her conclusion after a single telephone call, having read no medical records, run no testing and provided no counselling.

In a published opinion issued 17 September 2020, the Court of Appeals held that the courts below “abandoned their roles as the gatekeepers of evidence under MRE 702” by accepting that letter and refusing to let the landlord test it. The statute, the panel wrote, “does not provide that a tenant may automatically establish a handicap and a need for an ESA with a simple letter.”

Read alone, that opinion sounds like Michigan set a very high bar. It did not, and the correction came from the top. On 29 November 2022 the Michigan Supreme Court vacated the decision in part, “to the extent that it can be read to stand for the proposition that expert-witness testimony must be provided in all cases in which a person is seeking a reasonable accommodation under 42 USC 3604(f)(3)(B) of the Fair Housing Act (FHA), or MCL 37.1506a(1)(b) of the Persons with Disabilities Civil Rights Act. The statutes contain no such requirement.”

Both halves are the law here. A Michigan court may look behind your letter. It may not demand that you hire an expert witness to defend it.

What the tenant’s letter was missing

What failed is fixable, and it tells you what to ask your own clinician for. The letter named a “differential illness”, which the Court of Appeals read as a statement that a diagnosis had not been reached rather than a diagnosis. It described no symptoms. It never said what the dog did. The panel put the gap as questions nobody could answer from the record: anxiety or depression, does the dog calm him, does it sense an episode coming.

The Supreme Court’s order made the same point from the other side. The district court “erred by treating Anne Venet’s letter as automatically satisfying the requirements of the FHA and denying the writ of eviction without allowing the record to be developed.”

The Michigan lesson is not that letters do not work. It is that a letter has to survive a question: written by someone licensed who has evaluated you, naming a condition rather than a placeholder, and explaining what the animal does about it.

Money, and the cap most Michigan tenants have never used

Michigan has no pet-fee statute. What it has is a deposit statute that reaches further than people expect. MCL 554.602 says a security deposit “shall not exceed 1 1/2 months’ rent”, and MCL 554.601(d) defines the term to include “any other amount of money or property returnable to the tenant on condition of return of the rental unit by the tenant in condition as required by the rental agreement.” A refundable pet deposit is exactly that: not a separate bucket outside the cap, but part of the same one and a half months, for every tenant in the state. MCL 554.606 adds that the act’s requirements “may not be waived by the parties to a rental agreement”.

Two limits, so nobody oversells it. Michigan does not cap monthly pet rent, the cap is on deposits. And a genuinely non-refundable fee is not “returnable”, so it sits outside the definition. Against both, the argument for an assistance animal is the accommodation duty and MCL 37.1502(1)(b), which bars discrimination in the “terms, conditions, or privileges” of a real estate transaction because of disability.

The lease clause that is prohibited by name

Michigan is one of the few states where the legislature wrote directly about the lease itself. Under the Truth in Renting Act, a rental agreement “shall not include a provision that” “[e]xcludes or discriminates against a person in violation of the Elliott-Larsen civil rights act … or the persons with disabilities civil rights act”: MCL 554.633(1)(c).

The remedy at MCL 554.636(1) is real but sequenced, and the sequence is the part people drop. The tenant gives written notice of the provision. The landlord has 20 days to cure it. Only then may the tenant sue: to void the agreement and end the tenancy, to stop the landlord using the clause again, and to recover “$250.00 per action, or actual damages, whichever is greater.” That is a separate claim from the refused accommodation, which runs through the Department of Civil Rights or the courts.

Michigan has a state registry, and it is not for you

This is the part of Michigan law most often sold back to renters at a price. Under MCL 37.303 the Department of Civil Rights really does issue a service animal identification card and patch. It is voluntary, it is free, and it is for trained service animals, not emotional support animals.

The department’s own disclaimers are blunter than anything we could write. The patch and card “are meant for visual identification only and do not provide the animal or their handler any legal privileges or protections.” Registration “may not be required as a barrier to entry.” Neither MDCR nor the U.S. Department of Justice recognises service animal identification, from that programme “or any other program”, as proof of anything.

And then the sentence to keep: anyone “required to obtain service animal identification or register a service animal by a landlord” is told, by the state, to file a discrimination complaint.

The statutes that say “service animal” and are not about housing

Three Michigan provisions look relevant and are not. MCL 752.62 makes it an offence to falsely represent possession of a service animal “in any public place” — restaurants, shops, transport, not a conversation with a leasing office. MCL 37.307 punishes a false affidavit inside the state ID programme. MCL 287.291 exempts a service animal from dog licensing fees.

All three run on one definition: “service animal” as defined in 28 C.F.R. § 36.104, which requires an animal individually trained to do work or perform tasks. An emotional support animal is not inside it. That is why an ESA request in Michigan housing is an accommodation claim and never a service-animal claim, and why the misrepresentation offence has nothing to say about asking a landlord for an exception to a pet rule.

180 days, three years, one year

Michigan’s own filing window is the short one. The Department of Civil Rights states that complaints “must be filed with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights within 180 days following the alleged act of discrimination”, and that complaints older than that which do not also fall under federal jurisdiction “may be filed in State Court within three years”. The federal route runs on its own clock: 24 C.F.R. § 103.35 says “you must notify us within one year that you are a victim of discrimination.”

MDCR takes complaints on 1-800-482-3604, through its online portal, or by Zoom appointment through Virtual Intake. Its housing jurisdiction carries one carve-out worth knowing, owner-occupied one- or two-family dwellings, the agency’s rendering of MCL 37.1503. A resident owner of a four-unit building is not inside it.

No Michigan statute gives a landlord a deadline to answer an accommodation request. Nothing stops your 180 days while you wait for one.

Where you file, and who is actually behind the door

Detroit is the exception: its Civil Rights, Inclusion & Opportunity Department is a charter-created city agency that investigates discrimination complaints, on (313) 224-4950. Ann Arbor has a Human Rights Commission and a broad non-discrimination ordinance covering disability and source of income alike, but its commissioners are volunteers who mediate, refer or dismiss, and the city says filing there does not extend any state or federal deadline. Grand Rapids has a human rights ordinance and an advisory Community Relations Commission. Lansing’s Human Relations and Community Services department lists a housing ombudsman and publishes no procedure for it.

Across most of the state the private enforcers matter more. Four fair housing centres divide Michigan between them: metropolitan Detroit takes Wayne, Oakland, Macomb and St. Clair; the Southeast and Mid Michigan centre covers Washtenaw, Ingham and eight more; West Michigan covers Kent and eleven others; Southwest Michigan covers Kalamazoo and eight more. They investigate, they test, and they take cases.

Statewide, 26.8 percent of occupied homes are rented: 1,092,179 of 4,076,369 on the 2020-2024 American Community Survey. Whichever door you choose, the 180 days closes first.