North Dakota Pet and ESA Laws: The Landlord and Tenant Guide

Animals in a North Dakota rental fall into two very different legal buckets, and confusing them is where most landlord liability begins. An ordinary pet is governed by the lease and North Dakota law, so a landlord may set pet rules, charge a pet deposit within the statutory ceiling, and charge pet rent. A service animal or emotional support animal is not a pet under the federal Fair Housing Act, so the pet rules, fees, breed limits, and weight limits simply do not apply to it. North Dakota Century Code Section 47-16-07.1 lets a landlord add a pet security deposit up to the greater of two thousand five hundred dollars or two months’ rent on top of the one-month base cap, yet the same statute bars any pet deposit for a service or companion animal a tenant with a disability needs. This guide walks the whole framework so you can stay compliant.

Below you will find how North Dakota treats pet deposits, pet fees, and pet rent for an actual pet, the difference between a service animal and an emotional support animal, the single federal rule that an assistance animal is not a pet, the documentation you may and may not request, the North Dakota service-animal statutes in chapter 25-13, the fake-service-animal infraction, the fraudulent-documentation eviction remedy, when you may deny a specific animal, and a step-by-step compliant process for both landlords and tenants. Where the analysis touches deposits, the details ride on the North Dakota security deposit laws.

Because the housing analysis turns on one distinction, the safest posture for a landlord is to run two separate tracks: a written pet policy for actual pets, and a reasonable-accommodation process for every assistance-animal request. The strongest position for a tenant is to know that a service animal or emotional support animal cannot be charged a pet deposit, a pet fee, or pet rent, and cannot be met with a breed or weight limit. Treat every figure and rule here as a starting point and verify the current law before you charge, pay, or dispute anything.

Before the North Dakota-specific rules, a landlord must understand that assistance-animal law is primarily federal. Three statutes create overlapping obligations for every rental property owner in the country, and none of them can be overridden by a state statute, a city ordinance, an HOA covenant, or a lease clause. State law can add protection on top of federal law, but it cannot subtract from it.

The federal Fair Housing Act, Title 42 of the United States Code, Section 3601 and following, prohibits disability discrimination in housing, including a refusal to make a reasonable accommodation. It is the primary source of emotional-support-animal protection and applies to virtually all rental housing, from apartments and single-family rentals to condominiums. The Americans with Disabilities Act, Title 42 of the United States Code, Section 12101 and following, covers service animals in places of public accommodation, such as a rental office lobby or a pool open to the public, and does not govern emotional support animals; the ADA definition of a service animal excludes an emotional-support-only animal. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, Title 29 of the United States Code, Section 794, prohibits disability discrimination by programs that receive federal financial assistance, reaching public housing, voucher properties, and any housing that has received HUD funding.

HUD clarified its interpretation of the Fair Housing Act’s assistance-animal rules in Notice FHEO-2020-01, issued January 28, 2020. That document is the single most important landlord reference on this subject. It replaced the 2013 guidance and remains the controlling HUD position on how to evaluate an assistance-animal request, what documentation is and is not permissible, and how to handle a request for an animal that does not meet the ADA service-animal definition.

The Fair Housing Act’s reach is broad but not unlimited. It exempts an owner-occupied building of four or fewer units where the owner rents without an agent, the so-called Mrs. Murphy exemption, and a single-family home sold or rented by an owner without a broker, subject to conditions. These exemptions are narrower than most landlords assume, and they do not exempt housing from advertising-based claims or from state fair-housing law. In North Dakota, the North Dakota Housing Discrimination Act, North Dakota Century Code Chapter 14-02.5, operates alongside the federal Fair Housing Act and covers some housing that federal law does not.

Pet deposits, pet fees, and pet rent are the most common point of daily confusion between landlords and tenants, and the single most common reason a tenant files a fair-housing complaint. The rules break into two very different tracks depending on whether the animal is a pet or an assistance animal.

The Security Deposit Baseline in North Dakota

North Dakota’s deposit framework is set by North Dakota Century Code Section 47-16-07.1. The base security deposit a landlord may demand is capped at one month’s rent. The statute allows a higher base deposit of up to two months’ rent from a tenant who has been convicted of a felony, where the conviction relates to circumstances that would threaten other tenants or the property. That base cap is the number the live guide sometimes calls the North Dakota deposit ceiling, but it is only the starting figure, because the same section separately authorizes a pet deposit on top of it.

North Dakota Pet Deposit Rules

This is the detail North Dakota gets more specific about than most states, and the point earlier versions of this guide stated backward. Under North Dakota Century Code Section 47-16-07.1, a landlord may charge a separate, additional pet security deposit for keeping an animal, and that pet deposit may not exceed the greater of two thousand five hundred dollars or an amount equal to two months’ rent. It is the greater of the two figures, not the lesser, and it is added on top of the one-month base deposit rather than folded inside it. So when two months’ rent is more than two thousand five hundred dollars, the higher rent figure is the pet-deposit ceiling; when two months’ rent is less, two thousand five hundred dollars controls.

That ceiling is a legal maximum, not a market rate. In practice, the dollar figures North Dakota landlords actually charge track the local rental market rather than any statutory number. A typical North Dakota pet deposit runs from about two hundred to five hundred dollars per pet in smaller markets and can reach seven hundred fifty dollars or more in higher-rent metros. Some landlords charge a single pet deposit; others assess per-animal charges that scale with the number or size of the pets. Whichever structure a landlord chooses, the lease must clearly identify what the charge covers and whether it is refundable.

Pet Rent and Nonrefundable Pet Fees

Pet rent is a separate concept from a pet deposit. A pet deposit is a one-time sum held against future damage; pet rent is an ongoing monthly fee paid with rent. North Dakota law does not cap the amount of pet rent, so market-rate pet rent commonly runs about twenty-five to seventy-five dollars per month per pet, with higher-end urban properties sometimes charging more. Because pet rent is ongoing income rather than held money, it is treated separately from the deposit ceiling. Whether a landlord may collect a genuinely nonrefundable pet fee depends on how the charge is drafted; the safest structure is a refundable pet deposit within the statutory ceiling plus a modest, clearly disclosed cleaning fee tied to a specific end-of-tenancy purpose.

Breed restrictions are among the most litigated parts of a rental pet policy. Three legal layers interact: state preemption of municipal breed rules, private landlord pet policy, and the absolute overlay that a breed restriction cannot be applied to a verified assistance animal.

State Preemption and Private Landlord Breed Policies

North Dakota has no statewide breed preemption, and preemption in any event usually targets what cities and counties may ban, not what a private landlord may write into a lease. A private landlord in North Dakota may generally impose a breed restriction on an ordinary pet. Common restrictions target pit bull types, Rottweilers, Doberman Pinschers, German Shepherds, Akitas, Chows, and wolf hybrids, and landlords typically cite an insurance carrier’s exclusions as the rationale. An insurance-based breed policy is legitimate when the insurer actually excludes coverage for the breed.

The Assistance-Animal Exception Is Absolute

No breed restriction may be applied to a verified assistance animal. HUD has been clear and consistent: a landlord cannot categorically refuse a breed when the animal is serving as an emotional support animal or an ADA service animal, and Notice FHEO-2020-01 treats a blanket breed ban applied to an assistance animal as a violation. The only permitted basis for denying a specific assistance animal is individualized, objective evidence that this particular animal poses a direct threat to health or safety, or would cause substantial physical damage, not that the breed as a category is presumed dangerous. A documented prior attack tied to that animal can support denial; a newspaper article about a breed cannot.

Weight and Size Limits

A weight limit stands on the same footing as a breed limit. A landlord may cap the weight of an ordinary pet but cannot apply that cap to a verified assistance animal. A ninety-pound service dog stays regardless of the pet weight cap on the rest of the building, and many North Dakota landlords learn this when a qualifying tenant moves in with a large mobility-assistance dog.

The emotional-support-animal category is where landlord confusion is highest and where the gap between common belief and the actual rule is widest. An emotional support animal is an animal that alleviates one or more identified symptoms or effects of a person’s disability. It is not a task-trained service animal, it is not limited to dogs, and it is not required to wear a vest, carry an identification card, be registered, or be certified by any organization. No such registration exists under federal law, and a website that claims to register an emotional support animal is selling a document with no legal weight.

What Qualifies an Animal as an ESA

Three elements must be present. First, the person seeking the accommodation must have a disability within the meaning of the Fair Housing Act, a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities. Second, the person must have a disability-connected need for the animal, meaning the animal does something specific that reduces the impact of the disability. Third, the accommodation must be reasonable, meaning it does not impose an undue financial or administrative burden or fundamentally alter the landlord’s operations.

Under HUD’s Notice FHEO-2020-01, the disability and the disability-connected need must be documented by a reliable third party when the disability is not obvious. For most emotional support animals, that documentation is a letter from a licensed health provider — a therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist, physician, nurse practitioner, or licensed clinical social worker — stating that the tenant has a disability and that the animal assists with it. The letter does not need to name the diagnosis, and a landlord cannot demand a diagnosis. In North Dakota, the North Dakota Housing Discrimination Act, North Dakota Century Code Chapter 14-02.5, parallels the federal law and provides a state remedy for assistance-animal discrimination. For a deeper walkthrough of what a sound letter looks like, see our emotional support animal guide.

Species Considerations

The Fair Housing Act does not limit an emotional support animal to a dog. Cats, rabbits, small birds, and other domestic animals are routinely approved. HUD recognizes that the scope is not unlimited, though: an animal that poses a health risk, is prohibited by local law, or is not commonly kept in a household may be denied on species grounds. A unique animal, such as a snake, a primate, or livestock, faces a higher bar, because the tenant must show a disability-connected need specific to that species that a more conventional animal cannot meet. The bar is meaningfully higher for those animals than for a dog or a cat.

A service animal is a narrower category than an emotional support animal but carries broader rights of access. The ADA definition is deliberately tight, and North Dakota mirrors it: under North Dakota Century Code Section 25-13-01.1, a service animal is a dog individually trained to do work or perform a task for a person with a disability. North Dakota’s statutory definition is limited to dogs; separately, the ADA requires a place of public accommodation to make a reasonable modification for a miniature horse individually trained to work for a person with a disability, subject to an individualized assessment. No other species counts as a service animal, however well trained.

The phrase that matters is work or tasks. Guiding a person who is blind, alerting a person who is deaf, pulling a wheelchair, reminding a person to take medication, or interrupting a panic episode are all tasks. Providing comfort by presence alone is not a task, and that is the bright line between an ADA service animal and an emotional support animal. For a side-by-side comparison a landlord can rely on, see our guide to the difference between a service animal and an ESA for landlords.

The Two Permissible Questions

North Dakota’s Service-Animal Access and Protection Statutes

North Dakota’s own chapter on service animals adds a layer of state law. Under North Dakota Century Code Section 25-13-02, a person with a disability is entitled to be accompanied by a service animal in a place of public accommodation, a common carrier, and other places the public is invited, without being required to pay an extra charge for the animal. Section 25-13-04 makes it a class A misdemeanor to deny or interfere with those access rights, and Section 25-13-06 makes willfully injuring a service animal a class C felony and harassing or interfering with one a class A misdemeanor. In a rental setting the ADA governs the parts of the property open to the public, such as the leasing office and a public pool, while the Fair Housing Act governs the individual dwelling unit and protects both service animals and emotional support animals through the reasonable-accommodation framework.

Common Service-Animal Mistakes

• Asking what the person’s disability is. Always wrong; redirect to the two permitted questions.
• Demanding a vest or ID card. Never required; many legitimate service animals wear no gear.
• Requiring certification from an organization. No such federal credential exists; any site that sells one sells a product with no legal effect.
• Excluding a service animal from an amenity area. The gym, pool deck, and community room are covered when the animal is a service animal.
• Charging a pet fee for a service animal. Same rule as an emotional support animal: no pet deposit, pet fee, or pet rent.

Nearly every assistance-animal complaint traces back to a procedural failure in the accommodation process rather than a substantive one. A landlord who follows a clean process, even when the answer ends up being yes, rarely faces enforcement action. A landlord who shortcuts the process draws complaints even when the underlying decision would have been defensible.

What a landlord may ask for turns on whether the need is obvious. If the disability and the animal’s role are readily apparent, such as a guide dog harnessed to a tenant who is visibly blind, or the need is already known from a prior accommodation, no documentation may be requested, and asking for paperwork in that situation is itself a violation. If the disability is not obvious and not already known, a letter from a reliable third party is the appropriate form of documentation.

HUD treats three sources as reliable by default: a licensed health provider, a government agency that issues disability determinations, and another third party in a position to know of the tenant’s disability-connected need. The controlling standard from Notice FHEO-2020-01 asks whether the documentation is reliable rather than whether it takes a particular format. A one-click letter from a provider the tenant has never met, issued minutes after an online form, is facially less reliable than a letter from a provider who has treated the tenant. A landlord may ask a narrow, clarifying question about the treatment relationship when a letter has the hallmarks of a purely transactional purchase, but may not demand a diagnosis.

Landlord practice in North Dakota increasingly treats the documentation question as a compliance discipline rather than a detective exercise. The tenant has the burden of producing documentation; the landlord has the obligation to evaluate it without exceeding the permitted inquiry. Any question a landlord would be uncomfortable seeing quoted back in a HUD investigation is a question that should not be asked.

North Dakota has enacted specific statutes aimed at the fraudulent misrepresentation of a pet as a service or assistance animal. Earlier versions of this guide cited the wrong section number for that rule, so it is worth stating the current citations precisely.

These statutes are a narrow tool, not a license to interrogate a tenant’s good faith. Neither one lets a landlord refuse a reasonable-accommodation request based on a suspicion that the tenant is exaggerating or fabricating a disability. A landlord who denies an accommodation because of generalized skepticism walks into a potential Fair Housing Act complaint, and the state fraud statutes are no defense to that. The landlord’s financial remedy under Section 47-16-07.6 depends on an actual guilty plea or conviction, not on the landlord’s own conclusion that a claim is false.

What the fraud statutes do accomplish is cultural and evidentiary. They signal that misrepresenting a pet as a service animal has consequences, and they give a landlord a reference point when a vest-and-identification-card kit bought online is being used to slip a pet past a no-pets policy. But the defensible path remains a clean verification process, the interactive dialogue, and reasonable deference to documentation from a licensed provider, with the fraud statutes held in reserve for the rare case that a court actually resolves.

Reasonable accommodation is a strong obligation but not an absolute one. HUD recognizes a short list of grounds on which a landlord may lawfully deny an assistance-animal request, all narrow, all requiring individualized evidence, and all better documented than most landlords assume.

Direct Threat to Health or Safety

A landlord may deny when the specific animal poses a direct threat to the health or safety of others that cannot be reduced by another accommodation. The emphasis is on the specific animal, not the breed, species, or category. Evidence must be tied to this animal’s behavior: animal-control records showing a bite, multiple written complaints about aggression, or a documented altercation. A general statement that a breed is dangerous is not enough. The analysis is current, so a single incident years ago with a prior owner is not automatically a present threat; the landlord should ask what happened, what has changed, and what measures are in place, and document the conversation.

Substantial Physical Damage

A landlord may deny when the animal would cause substantial physical damage to the property of others that cannot be reduced by another accommodation. Again the standard is individualized. A statement that big dogs tend to scratch doors is not evidence. A record that this particular animal caused four thousand two hundred dollars in documented damage over six months at a prior residence is.

Undue Burden and Fundamental Alteration

An undue financial or administrative burden is rare in practice, because permitting a single assistance animal almost never creates one. An insurance-based argument is viable only when the landlord has actually verified with the carrier that coverage would be denied or materially increased specifically because of the accommodation; a gut feeling that the insurer will object is not evidence. A denial based on fundamental alteration of the landlord’s operations is essentially theoretical for a single animal in a residential unit.

Assistance-animal denials have been among the top categories of fair-housing complaints nationally for years, and the same errors show up in North Dakota. Each is avoidable with a disciplined process.

The Retaliation Trap

Retaliation is the hidden cost of a reluctantly granted accommodation. A landlord who approves an emotional-support-animal request and then suddenly enforces lease terms that had been ignored for years, schedules inconvenient inspections, or begins non-renewal talk is building a retaliation case against itself. Once the accommodation is granted, the relationship must continue on the same terms it would have absent the accommodation. Patterns a landlord views as coincidental often look obvious on a timeline.

Planned-community governance adds a second layer of animal rules on top of the landlord-tenant framework. For a landlord who owns a unit in an HOA-governed subdivision or condominium association, the interaction between the HOA rules and the Fair Housing Act is a frequent source of confusion, and a frequent source of complaints against the HOA itself.

The Fair Housing Act applies to a homeowners association, a condominium association, and a cooperative as housing providers. An HOA cannot adopt or enforce an animal rule that violates the Fair Housing Act. A breed ban in the covenants, a weight limit, a pet-quantity cap, and a nonrefundable pet fee all give way when the animal is a verified assistance animal for a resident with a disability. An HOA that refuses to modify its rules faces the same liability as a landlord, often a larger one because it governs many units.

A landlord who owns a unit in an HOA-governed community is caught between two obligations when a tenant requests an accommodation the HOA rules forbid. The answer is that the landlord grants the accommodation and then, if necessary, supports the tenant’s request to the HOA, providing whatever information the tenant authorizes and documenting the HOA’s response. The HOA’s obligation runs directly to the resident, whether that resident is the owner or the renter. If the HOA denies the accommodation, the exposure belongs to the HOA, not to the landlord who granted the request in good faith. A neutral rule of general application, such as a leash requirement or a waste-pickup rule, still applies to an assistance animal.

The hardest single conversation in an animal case under landlord-tenant law is the move-out accounting. Pet damage is real, often expensive, and shows up in categories that wear-and-tear law does not forgive. At the same time, North Dakota deposit-deduction rules are specific: a poorly documented pet-damage claim is one of the fastest ways a landlord loses a small-claims case it should have won.

Wear and Tear Versus Damage

A landlord may deduct for damage beyond ordinary wear and tear but not for wear and tear itself. Damage that almost always qualifies includes a urine-saturated subfloor, permanent odor requiring subfloor replacement, carpet shredded through the pad, chewed door frames, and scratched hardwood. Items courts often treat as wear and tear include light carpet matting in high-traffic rooms, faint hair in ventilation returns, and minor odor a standard cleaning neutralizes.

Itemization and Proof

North Dakota, like nearly every state, requires the landlord to give the tenant an itemized statement of deductions within a statutory deadline after move-out. The statement must separately identify each deduction, the condition it repairs, and the dollar amount. A lump-sum entry such as pet damage for twelve hundred dollars is routinely rejected in court. The landlord needs line items, for example replacing one hundred eighty square feet of carpet in the master bedroom due to pet-urine saturation for nine hundred forty-five dollars, replacing the pad for one hundred eighty-five dollars, and sealing the subfloor for one hundred thirty-five dollars, for a subtotal of one thousand two hundred sixty-five dollars. Dated move-in and move-out photos, third-party vendor estimates or invoices, and the vendor’s own before-and-after photos turn a disputed claim into a clear one.

Assistance Animals and Damage

An assistance animal is exempt from a pet deposit and a pet fee but not from liability for damage. A tenant whose emotional support animal saturates the carpet pad and subfloor owes for the damage, deducted from the ordinary security deposit, the same as any tenant. The accommodation eliminates the up-front pet-specific charge, not the tenant’s responsibility for what the animal actually breaks. When the damage exceeds the deposit, the landlord may pursue the balance in small-claims court, because the deposit caps the money a landlord may hold up front, not the tenant’s liability. The mechanics of a lawful deduction follow the North Dakota security deposit laws.

Evicting a tenant over an animal issue is possible but procedurally delicate, and the margin for error narrows sharply when the animal is, or is claimed to be, an assistance animal. Four categories commonly drive these evictions in North Dakota: an unauthorized pet, an animal introduced after an accommodation claim, aggression or nuisance by a permitted animal, and material damage.

An unauthorized pet with no accommodation request is the simplest case: the landlord serves the applicable notice to remove the animal, and if the tenant does not cure, files for eviction. When a tenant brings in an animal and claims assistance-animal status, the analysis changes entirely. The landlord cannot treat the animal as an unauthorized pet; it must run the reasonable-accommodation process first, and an eviction cannot advance while a good-faith accommodation request is pending. Only after a defensible denial and the tenant’s refusal to remove the animal can an eviction proceed, and even then it invites a retaliation counter-claim.

Aggression, nuisance, or material damage by a permitted animal can support eviction, but only on individualized evidence of the specific animal’s behavior: multiple complaints, animal-control reports, documented incidents with dates and witnesses. For an assistance animal, the direct-threat test controls, and the landlord must show that the specific animal poses a threat that cannot be mitigated by any reasonable accommodation. The procedural machinery of a North Dakota eviction — notice periods, filing courts, and tenant defenses — is the same for an animal case as for any other; for that framework, see the North Dakota eviction notice laws guide.

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