OurPetPolicy publishes something most screening platforms do not: an explicit checklist of what an assistance-animal letter has to contain. If your property has sent you there, that checklist is effectively the specification your documentation is being measured against, which makes it worth reading before you upload anything.
Everything below is quoted or closely paraphrased from OurPetPolicy’s own published resident material, read on July 27, 2026. This is general information, not legal advice.
Two different submissions
As with every platform of this kind, the pet route and the accommodation route are separate, and starting in the wrong one is the most common self-inflicted delay.
For a household pet, OurPetPolicy’s resident FAQ lists what you supply: an animal photo, basic animal info, a current vet record, and a signature on the property’s animal addendum. It gives a turnaround of 1–2 business days when the submitted documents comply.
An assistance animal is a different submission, with a different standard and a different timeline — and, critically, a different set of rules about what your property can charge you for.
The documentation checklist, in their words
OurPetPolicy’s published guidance on assistance-animal documentation is specific. Documentation must come from “a licensed health professional who has personal and professional knowledge of the patient”, and their stated best practice is that it should include:
- The patient’s name.
- Confirmation of the professional relationship, described as involving “the provision of health care or disability-related services”.
- The type of animal “for which the reasonable accommodation is sought”.
- A statement of disability-related need — the documentation must state that the individual has “a disability-related need for the assistance animal”.
Its resident FAQ describes the acceptable document the same way: “Documentation from a licensed healthcare provider (HP) confirming the disability-related need for a service animal or emotional support animal (ESA).”
Read that list against whatever letter you are holding. The failure most letters have is the third and fourth items: they establish that you have a condition, but never name the animal or connect it to the need. A template that could be handed to any tenant, unchanged, is a template that does not do those two jobs.
The phrase that matters most: “personal and professional knowledge”
“A licensed health professional who has personal and professional knowledge of the patient” is not decoration. It is the criterion that separates a real evaluation from a document you bought.
An instant certificate, a registry entry, or a letter from a service that never spoke to you fails on its face here, because nobody involved has personal knowledge of you. Several states have written a version of the same requirement into law — California, Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana and Montana all set minimum client–provider relationship periods before an ESA letter may be issued. Our state-by-state requirements guide covers which apply to you.
What they say they will not ask
OurPetPolicy states that it will never ask for your specific diagnosis during the verification process, and that housing providers cannot request one.
That cuts both ways, and it is genuinely useful to understand which way. You do not have to disclose a condition to anyone at your property or to the platform. But it also means naming a condition in your letter does not do the work — the letter still has to make the disability-related need explicit. A one-line note saying you have been diagnosed with something is not the thing being asked for.
Timing, and the step you do not control
OurPetPolicy’s resident FAQ says assistance animal timing “depends on various factors”, including how long you take to upload documents and “the duration required for your health practitioner to verify the accuracy of your documentation”.
That second factor is the one that stalls requests. The clock is running on someone who is not you and not the platform. Two things help:
- Tell your provider in advance that a verification request is coming and roughly when, so it does not sit unopened in a clinic inbox.
- Start before your move-in date or lease renewal, not on it.
Who signs off
Here is a difference worth knowing about. PetScreening states outright that its role is to recommend and that the community retains full authority to approve or deny. OurPetPolicy’s resident-facing material does not identify who holds the final decision.
We are not going to guess at what that means internally. What it means for you is practical: ask your leasing office, in writing, who makes the approval decision and who to appeal to if the answer is no. Getting that on record early is much easier than reconstructing it during a dispute.
What an approval does and does not change
An approved assistance animal is not being kept as a pet, so the pet-specific rules — pet rent, pet fees, breed and weight limits, species restrictions — are generally not the rules that apply to it. An approval does not exempt you from anything that applies to every resident: damage, control of the animal, and nuisance to neighbors are all still yours.
On fees specifically, 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 picture is less settled than it was — while the Fair Housing Act itself, its reasonable-accommodation regulations, private lawsuits and state assistance-animal laws all remain in place. We break the change down in what HUD’s 2026 guidance actually means. Ask your property in writing what they intend to charge, and get the answer in writing.
If your letter does not meet the checklist
We connect you with a licensed mental-health professional in your state who evaluates you and, where an emotional support animal is appropriate, issues a housing letter written to do the job this checklist describes. See how the evaluation works.
Related reading: the property-manager policy hub, what a housing letter has to say, and when a landlord can deny an ESA.
Sources
Quotations are from OurPetPolicy’s resident FAQ and its resident knowledge-base article on criteria for assistance animal documentation, both read July 27, 2026. We are not affiliated with OurPetPolicy and this page is not endorsed by them; where their published material has changed since, theirs is current and this is not.