Cortland publishes its pet rules on each community’s own FAQ page, using what appears to be a common template across its portfolio. It is more specific than most operators — and one sentence in it is the reason this page is worth reading before you ask for anything.
Everything below is quoted from a Cortland community FAQ page, read on July 27, 2026. Fee amounts in particular are set per community, so treat the figures as an example and check your own community’s page. This is general information, not legal advice.
What Cortland publishes
- Two pets. “We welcome two cats or dogs per apartment home”.
- An 80-pound cap. “weight limit of 80 pounds per pet”.
- A named breed list. “certain aggressive breeds/mixes are not accepted, including but not limited to: Rottweiler, Chow, Presa Canario, Doberman, Akita, Pit Bull (also known as American Staffordshire Terrier, Staffordshire Bull Terrier, or Pit Bull Terrier), Cane Corso, or any Mastiff breed”.
- Registration. “We require cats and dogs to be registered with our community”.
- Fees at the community we read. A $400 pet fee per pet and a $20 monthly pet charge per pet.
- Other animals. Generally “animals you’d find at your local pet store”, kept caged or tanked, limited to two per unit, with no fees. Tanks over 50 gallons and non-domestic, venomous and exotic animals are prohibited.
- And this one. “Service animals are welcome in our community and are not limited by a weight restriction”.
The wording gap, and why it matters
That last sentence is more helpful than most operators publish — and it is also precisely worded in a way that does not obviously include you.
It says service animals. A service animal, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, is a dog individually trained to do work or perform tasks for a person with a disability. An emotional support animal is not required to be task-trained, and its protection in housing does not come from the ADA at all — it comes from the Fair Housing Act, which uses the broader category of assistance animal.
So if you read that sentence, conclude that the 80-pound cap does not apply to your 90-pound ESA, and move in on that basis, you have relied on a policy written about a different category of animal. That is a genuinely bad position to discover you are in after the lease is signed.
The correct move is not to abandon the point. It is to make the right request. Weight limits, like breed lists, are pet rules, and they have generally not been applied to an approved assistance animal the way they are to a pet. But that protection comes from the Fair Housing Act accommodation process, not from Cortland’s service-animal sentence — so ask for it as a reasonable accommodation, in writing, with documentation.
The two Cortland rules most likely to block an ESA
The 80-pound weight cap
Eighty pounds is not a small allowance, but it excludes a lot of ordinary dogs — most Labradors and Golden Retrievers sit near or over it once fully grown, and plenty of shepherd and mastiff mixes clear it easily. If your dog is over the line, this is the rule your accommodation request is aimed at, and it is worth naming directly in the request.
The breed list
Cortland’s list is explicit and ends with “or any Mastiff breed”, and it is prefaced with “including but not limited to” — so it is not exhaustive. Combined with “mixes”, it catches a large share of shelter dogs whose ancestry nobody can document.
Breed restrictions belong to the pet route. Through the accommodation route, the analysis has generally turned on the individual animal rather than on its breed as a category. That does not make approval automatic: a housing provider may ask for reliable documentation of a disability and a disability-related need, and may deny a request that does not meet that standard or where the specific animal has actually behaved dangerously. But a breed name on a list is not, by itself, the end of your request.
What Cortland does not publish
The FAQ pages we read do not describe how a reasonable-accommodation request for an assistance animal is made or reviewed. Communities in Cortland’s portfolio do appear on the PetScreening platform — PetScreening runs branded per-community portals with addresses like yourcommunityname.petscreening.com, and Cortland-named portals are publicly visible — but Cortland does not publish a company-wide statement about which reviewer is used or how the process works.
So ask. If your community routes accommodation requests to a portal, read how PetScreening’s review works before you submit anything — the review team may contact the professional who signed your letter, and that is the step most requests fail on.
How to ask at a Cortland community
- Do not rely on the service-animal sentence. Ask, in email, how the community takes a reasonable-accommodation request for an assistance animal under the Fair Housing Act.
- Name the barrier. If it is the 80-pound cap, say so. If it is the breed list, say so. A request that identifies the specific rule is easier to act on.
- Lead with the need, not the dog. Documentation of a disability and a disability-related need for the animal is what is being assessed. Breed and weight are their questions to raise.
- Check the fee schedule on your own community’s FAQ page, since Cortland publishes amounts per community. Then ask in writing what they intend to charge for an approved assistance animal.
- Keep the paper trail. Dates and written replies matter far more than what was said at the leasing desk.
What an approval does not do
Registration and vaccination requirements applied to every animal in the building are reasonable and generally still apply. So does damage liability, keeping the animal under control, and not being a nuisance to neighbors. An accommodation changes which pet-specific rules apply to your animal; it does not make you a lower-responsibility resident.
On fees, be precise rather than confident. An approved assistance animal has long been treated as not a pet, which is why pet fees and pet rent have generally not applied. HUD withdrew its assistance-animal guidance notices in September 2025 and issued narrower enforcement guidance in May 2026, so the federal enforcement picture is thinner than it was, while the Fair Housing Act, its reasonable-accommodation regulations, private lawsuits and state assistance-animal laws are unchanged. See what HUD’s 2026 guidance actually means.
If you need documentation first
We connect you with a licensed mental-health professional in your state who evaluates whether an emotional support animal is appropriate for you, and issues a housing letter if it is. See how the evaluation works, or start from the property-manager policy hub. If you want the underlying framework, the housing laws that apply to emotional support animals covers it.
Sources
Quotations are from a Cortland community FAQ page, Cortland 3131, read July 27, 2026; Cortland publishes the same FAQ structure across its community sites and fee amounts vary by community. We are not affiliated with Cortland and this page is not endorsed by them; where Cortland’s published material has changed since, theirs is current and this is not.