Latest · Rules & compliance

Your Pet Fee Line Item Just Became a Legal Document

September 2, 2026

"Pet friendly, fees vary" used to be the safest sentence in the listing. Keep the number vague, get the tour booked, let your leasing consultant sell the deposit once the prospect already loves the unit. That workflow is now the thing that gets an operator a complaint, in a growing number of states.

The federal push here is real but general. The FTC's junk fees rule, finalized in late 2024, targets hidden mandatory fees across industries including short-term lodging and live-event ticketing. The goal is total price visible before checkout, not buried in fine print. Multifamily wasn't the headline target. But the direction is unmistakable: regulators want the full cost disclosed before someone commits, not after.

Where multifamily gets hit directly is at the state level, and it varies enough that you cannot run one national listing template anymore. Several states and cities now require rental listings and applications to disclose mandatory fees, including pet fees and deposits, before a prospect signs anything, sometimes before they even apply. The mechanics differ. Some require disclosure in the listing itself. Some require it at application. Some route through broader "junk fee" or rental application transparency statutes rather than a pet-specific law. If you operate in more than one state, assume your compliance requirement is not uniform. Because it isn't.

Here's what that means for your listing copy specifically. The number needs to be in the ad, not behind a phone call. If your property charges a $300 pet fee, $35 a month in pet rent, and a refundable deposit, all three belong on the listing page next to the rent, not in a PDF the prospect has to request. This holds regardless of your state's exact statute, because a prospect who has to call to find out the real monthly cost is a prospect who's already irritated by the time your leasing consultant picks up.

The concrete move: audit every syndicated listing this month. Confirm pet fees, pet rent, and deposits appear as actual numbers next to the unit price, not as a linked policy document. Your ILS feed, your website, and your ILS partner listings all need to match. If your PMS pushes pet fee data as a free-text field that gets truncated on some sites, that's a data mapping problem, not a copy problem. Worth an hour with your PMS rep now, before it becomes three sites showing three different numbers for the same unit.

What you shouldn't do is bury the fee structure in a "breed and weight restrictions may apply, contact leasing for details" line and call it compliant. That sentence exists to protect ambiguity, and ambiguity is exactly what these disclosure rules are written to remove. If restrictions genuinely vary by unit type or building, say so specifically. Don't use vagueness as a stalling tactic. Regulators and prospects read that sentence the same way: something's being hidden.

One more thing to separate out. Assisted animal and service animal accommodations under the Fair Housing Act and HUD guidance are not pet fees. No operator should be charging pet rent or a pet deposit against a legitimate assistance animal. If your listing copy or your leasing script treats those as the same bucket as a dog deposit, that's a separate and older problem than fee transparency, and it's the bigger one.

Get your legal and compliance team to confirm which specific statutes apply in each state you operate in before you rewrite anything. The exact disclosure trigger, and what counts as a "mandatory fee," differs by jurisdiction and is still being clarified in some places. This isn't legal advice, just a marketing read on where the rules are heading. Have counsel sign off on the actual listing language before it goes live.

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