The second Trump administration has made sweeping changes to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), including policy changes affecting the interpretation and enforcement of the federal Fair Housing Act (FHA) and its regulations (see below). These changes, along with HUD staff reductions and proposed budget cuts, may signal weaker enforcement of the FHA. In fact, as of mid-May, HUD had not filed a single housing discrimination charge since President Trump took office, and had halted or closed entirely at least 115 federal fair housing cases, according to an article published in ProPublica.

But that doesn’t mean landlords can relax their fair housing compliance efforts. Victims of housing discrimination don’t have to take their claims to HUD; they can file claims in federal and state courts. And many state and local governments not only have their own fair housing laws—many of which go beyond the minimum FHA requirements—they also employ their own enforcement agencies.

That’s why this month’s lesson focuses on avoiding liability for discrimination under state and local laws (which we’ll refer to collectively as “state” laws unless the context requires otherwise). We’ll give you a Table of State Fair Housing Protections so that no matter which state(s) you operate in, you’ll know which classes are protected from discrimination. Then, we’ll give you 10 questions to pose to avoid discriminating against the groups those laws protect. At the end of the lesson, you can take the Coach’s Quiz to see how well you’ve learned the material.

Potential Trump Administration Policy Impacts on Fair Housing Enforcement

• February: HUD abruptly terminates $30 million in HUD Fair Housing Initiatives Program (FHIP) funding grants, a longstanding source of support for organizations fighting housing discrimination. 

• April: HUD unveils a new website boasting “a 90% reduction in content from the previous website.” Among the content cut is the page dedicated to the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO).
• April: President Trump issues an executive order eliminating “the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible,” despite a 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing FHA complaints to be brought based on disparate impact.
• April: HUD  repeals the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule (read more here). 
• June: HUD announces that it’s also seeking to repeal the Affirmative Fair Housing Marketing (AFHM) regulations (read more here).

WHAT DOES THE LAW SAY?

The FHA makes it illegal to refuse to rent or deny a person housing because of their race, color, religion, sex, handicap (disability), familial status, or national origin. In addition to these seven core protected classes, most state fair housing laws protect additional groups. While Congress hasn’t added protected classes to the FHA in over three decades, the list of classes protected by state fair housing laws expands each year. These expansions may be the product of legislative amendments or court cases interpreting certain listed classes as including additional groups not expressly listed in the state fair housing statute, such as the ban against “sex” discrimination as also extending to sexual orientation and gender identity. 

As shown by the table below this article (as PDF download), the most common groups listed as protected classes under state but not federal fair housing laws are: ancestry, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, marital status, age, source of income, military status, creed, and status as a survivor of domestic violence. 

ASK YOURSELF 10 QUESTIONS TO ENSURE COMPLIANCE WITH 

STATE & LOCAL FAIR HOUSING LAWS

The same practices that are illegal under the FHA—deliberately excluding, providing less favorable rental terms, steering, etc.—are equally illegal under state and local fair housing laws. Similarly, the thing you must do to comply with the FHA—that is, apply the same nondiscriminatory standards on a consistent basis to all regardless of race, etc.—is what you must do to comply with state and local laws. The principal challenge with state and local fair housing compliance is to apply these principles to persons beyond the core seven protected classes of the FHA. While laws vary geographically, there are 10 questions you should ask about common protected classes to ensure your rental processes, policies, and practices don’t violate your state and local laws.

Q #1: Does My State Ban Discrimination Based on Ancestry?

Arguably, ancestry is already covered by the FHA ban on “national origin” discrimination. “National origin” means the geographic area in which a person was born or from which his or her ancestors came, according to HUD’s 2016 guidance on fair housing protections for Persons with Limited English Proficiency. Although language discrimination is not necessarily national origin discrimination, HUD says that national origin discrimination includes discrimination because an individual has the physical, cultural, or linguistic characteristics of persons from a foreign geographic area.

The problem is that the federal law doesn’t provide a definition of “national origin.” That leaves room to argue that the federal protection applies only to the country where applicants were born, rather than where their families came from. This may explain why 31 states add ancestry to their list of protected characteristics.

Compliance Strategy: Don’t exclude or treat applicants and tenants unfavorably just because their families come from a foreign country. Also avoid policies and practices based on a person’s language, accent, physical appearance, cultural customs, or dress.

Q #2: Does My State Ban Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity?

Sexual orientation and gender identity are the second most common forms of housing discrimination banned by state laws and not the FHA—although HUD has interpreted the FHA’s ban on sex discrimination as applying to sexual orientation. While there’s a tendency to lump sexual orientation and gender identity together, they actually refer to discrimination targeting three particular groups in the LGBT continuum:

• Sexual orientation discrimination, which is banned in 23 states and the District of Columbia, generally refers to an individual’s actual or perceived orientation as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual;
• Gender identity discrimination, which is banned in all but five of the states that ban sexual orientation discrimination, refers to an individual’s personal sense of being a male, female,  blend, or neither; and
• Gender expression discrimination, which is covered in some but not all gender identity states, refers to outward appearance of gender identity, typically expressed through clothing, behavior, voice, or hairstyle.        

In addition, there are eight states (Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania) that don’t expressly ban sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination but still recognize such complaints in courts or administrative proceedings.

Compliance Strategy: Avoid these common pitfalls:

• Refusing to rent to an otherwise qualified gay couple because you believe that homosexuality is a sin;
• Taking actions based on stereotypes of how you believe people of a particular gender should behave, such as asking a transgender tenant who was assigned male gender characteristics at birth not to dress in women’s clothing in the common areas of the building;
• Refusing to rent to a gay male because you fear he has AIDS; and
• Asking rental applicants or tenants questions about their gender expression (such as asking a female applicant why she has a crew cut), relationships between household members (such as asking if those members are in a sexual relationship), and marital status.

COACH’s Tip: For more guidance on this topic, see our June 2025 lesson, LGBTQ+ Discrimination & the 9 Things to Do to Prevent It.

Q #3: Does My State Ban Discrimination Based on Marital Status?

The ban on family status discrimination contained in the FHA makes it illegal to exclude or otherwise adversely treat applicants and renters because they have children. Nearly half the states and many municipalities take it a step further by banning discrimination based on marital status—that is, whether a person is single, married, divorced, or widowed. 

Compliance Strategy: Avoid these common pitfalls:

• Refusing to rent to unmarried couples for religious or moral reasons;
• Making unmarried households pay higher rent or meet higher income thresholds than married households, or vice-versa;
• Expressing a preference for or against married couples in your advertising;
• Setting curfews or overnight guest restrictions for single residents;
• Requiring unmarried couples to document that they have joint bank accounts; or
• Evicting tenants because their spouses move out, even though the tenant is qualified to remain in the unit.

Marital status discrimination may also occur when you calculate the income of unmarried applicants who want to share an apartment. Rule: If you let married households combine their incomes to qualify, you must let unmarried households do the same.

Example: A California landlord learned that a prospect to whom he had already offered a lease planned to share the apartment with his boyfriend. So, he withdrew the offer and told the prospect that both he and his partner had to individually satisfy a $90,000 yearly income standard. The applicant asked if he could aggregate his income with the partner’s, but the landlord said no because they weren’t married. The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued the landlord for marital status discrimination. In July 2018, the landlord shelled out $7,500 to settle the case [DFEH v. Sarfield]. 

Landlords have challenged state law bans on marital status discrimination as a violation of a landlord’s right to reject unmarried couples on religious principles. Most of these cases have failed in court. However, one of the states where marital status discrimination is banned, North Dakota, stipulates that the law doesn’t prevent “a person from refusing to rent a dwelling to two unrelated individuals of opposite gender who are not married to each other.”

COACH’s Tip: For eight rules for avoiding marital status discrimination in parts of the country where it’s illegal, see Avoiding Discrimination Against Unmarried Couples.

Q #4: Does My State Ban Age Discrimination?

The fair housing laws of 20 states and the District of Columbia currently include age as a protected class. However, all age discrimination laws aren’t the same. How the law actually applies depends on how it defines “age.” There are two basic approaches:

• All Adults: In the many states that define “age” as 18 and older, it’s illegal to discriminate against adult applicants because you consider them as being either too young or too old to live in a particular community or area of a community.
• Older Adults: A few age discrimination states limit protection to older adults, typically individuals 40 and over.

Compliance Strategy: Recognize that even where state and local laws don’t expressly ban age discrimination, using age-based criteria to make rental decisions may constitute illegal family status discrimination when it excludes children under age 18 (assuming the property doesn’t qualify for a senior housing community exemption).

Example: In January 2019, a local North Carolina chapter of the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) received a complaint that a 165-unit community was advertising itself as “a multi-professional adult living community” where occupants must be “30 years or older.” Although North Carolina doesn’t ban age-based housing discrimination, in 2020, the owner of the community forked over $97,000—$70,000 to the NFHA and $27,000 in grants to provide housing assistance to local low-income families—to settle charges of family status discrimination under the federal FHA [Independence Place of Charlotte, Inc.].

Q #5: Does My State Ban Discrimination Based on Source of Income?

There are currently 17 states (and the District of Columbia) where you can’t discriminate against rental applicants or tenants who have enough legal income to afford the rent because of where that income happens to come from. For example, denying applicants because they’re unemployed and don’t earn wage income would be illegal if those applicants can use retirement benefits, child support, public assistance, and other legal sources of income to pay the rent. 

Compliance Strategy: The most common form of source of income discrimination is excluding otherwise qualified applicants or tenants because they receive Section 8 vouchers or other housing subsidies.

Example: In July 2020, the NFHA reached a settlement agreement with a Washington, D.C., community that allegedly used its website to discourage Section 8 rentals. According to the complaint, the website required prospects to identify whether they intended to use a Section 8 voucher to pay rent and prevented them from scheduling an apartment viewing if they answered “yes.” NFHA also claimed that when its testers called the company to ask about viewing an apartment, the owners consistently indicated that they didn’t accept vouchers. Under the settlement, the company agreed to end its alleged source-of-income discriminatory practices, require all staff to complete fair housing training practices, and run ads and post signs in both English and Spanish stating that the company accepts housing vouchers [National Fair Housing Alliance v. Evolve LLC].

Q #6: Does My State Ban Discrimination Based on Military Status?

California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington ban housing discrimination on the basis of a person’s military or veteran status. In part designed to prevent the kind of backlash experienced by veterans returning from the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s, these laws generally protect active-duty members and veterans of the armed forces, reserves, and state National Guard. Some states base fair housing protections for veterans on the nature of their discharge. For example:

• Illinois bans discrimination based on both military status and “unfavorable discharge from military service”;
• Military status protection in Washington covers only honorably discharged veterans; and
• Rhode Island bans discrimination based on “military status as a veteran with an honorable discharge or an honorable or general administrative discharge,” or “servicemember in the armed forces.”  

Compliance Strategy: As is true with any other protected class, the duty to refrain from military status discrimination doesn’t mean you have to offer preferential treatment. However, regulatory guidance in some states and localities suggest that military discounts or other forms of preferential treatment aren’t illegal. For example, guidelines from the New York City Commission on Human Rights explain that the municipal bylaw banning military status discrimination doesn’t ban “housing providers and business owners from offering privileges or preferences because of a person’s military service. For example, a movie theater may provide a discount to former or active military service members.”

Q #7: Does My State Prohibit Discrimination Based on Creed?

Nine states make creed a protected class. Creed refers to a set of moral or ethical beliefs and the practices and observances associated with those beliefs. Creed often is, but doesn’t necessarily have to be, based on a church or religious group (although some states limit protection to “religious creed”). Companies, societies, and disciplines might also adopt a creed, as in a political creed, a national creed, or a management creed, that lays out a particular belief system or way of doing things.

In New York City, both state and local laws ban housing discrimination based on creed, including the perception of those beliefs by others, according to Fair Housing NYC, a joint website of the New York City Commission on Human Rights and Department of Housing Preservation and Development. You don’t need to support a belief to be discriminated against because of it. The negative perception of others may be based on your dress, jewelry, a book you carry, or a symbol on a tee shirt. 

Compliance Strategy: Avoid these potential creed discrimination pitfalls:

• A Craigslist advertisement states that the owner prefers “Christians”;
• A real estate agent tells a rental applicant whose last name is Rosenbaum or Goldberg that she’ll be happier in a nearby area where “all the Jews live”; or
• A landlord denies a tenant services after observing her with a bible published by a group he described as a “cult.”

Creed generally doesn’t protect a person based on his political or social views, such as rejecting a rental applicant because he’s a member of the Ku Klux Klan. 

Q #8: Does My State Ban Discrimination Based on Domestic Violence?

Five states, the District of Columbia, and numerous municipalities make it illegal to discriminate against victims of domestic violence or abuse. 

Compliance Strategy: Beware of the common tendency of adopting a “zero tolerance” policy that automatically excludes any and all applicants and tenants who are in any way involved in domestic violence regardless of how they were involved. While seeking to keep your community safe and secure is a legitimate and even imperative objective, zero tolerance is problematic under fair housing laws because it makes no distinction between domestic violence victims and victimizers. A common example is to reject applicants after learning they’ve been repeatedly assaulted by an intimate partner because you’re afraid the perpetrator will follow the victim to your own community.

In addition to running afoul of state and local domestic violence fair housing protections, such a policy may also be illegal under the federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which bans domestic violence discrimination in federally assisted housing. Punishing victims of domestic violence may also constitute disparate impact sex discrimination to the extent that victims are almost always women.  

Example: A landlord allegedly wouldn’t let a female prospect apply for a rental upon finding out that she had a domestic violence protection order against an individual. The Kentucky Human Rights Commission found probable cause to believe the landlord committed sex discrimination. Rather than risk an administrative trial, the landlord agreed to pay $5,000 and, more significantly, submit to three years of compliance monitoring to settle the case [Jones v. Feldman, April 2013].

Q #9: Does My State Ban Discrimination Based on Genetic Information or Other Characteristics?

A growing trend among states is to prevent employers from discriminating against current and prospective employees based on “genetic information.” But so far, only two states—California and Massachusetts—have added similar provisions to their fair housing laws.

Meanwhile, some states ban discrimination based on other characteristics, such as HIV status, lawful occupation, political beliefs or affiliation, student status, personal appearance, or arbitrary personal characteristics.

To learn more about these less common protected classes and how your state defines them, visit the website of the government agency that handles housing discrimination complaints in your state. Some states have a fair housing commission dedicated to handling housing discrimination claims. In others, there’s a state agency that’s responsible for all types of discrimination claims. And in some states, the attorney general’s office handles these types of claims. Depending on where you’re located, HUD’s website is one place to find out about state and local government agencies responsible for fair housing compliance.

Most of these agencies will list the protected classes under both federal and state law. Just make sure to focus on housing discrimination. In some states, the protected classes apply across the board, but in others, there’s a significant difference in what’s covered in the laws banning discrimination in public accommodations (such as hotels and restaurants), employment, and housing.

Q #10: What Do I Need to Know About Local Fair Housing Laws?

In addition to federal and state law, communities must comply with any applicable local laws banning housing discrimination. Many county and municipal governments have added additional protections not currently required under state or federal fair housing laws, and it’s incumbent upon you to know what laws apply to your community. 

For example, Georgia doesn’t include sexual orientation among its protected classes, but the city of Atlanta does. And New York City recently joined six other cities that have made it illegal to discriminate against a renter based on the person’s perceived weight and height.

Where can you find this information? Consulting an attorney knowledgeable of local laws in each state and municipality where you operate in is crucial. You can also contact your local apartment association to find out about state and local laws applicable to your community. 

Fair Housing Protections in the 5 Largest U.S. Cities

as of Aug. 1, 2025

New York: Age, immigration or citizenship status, color, disability, gender, gender identity, marital status and partnership status, national origin, pregnancy and lactation accommodations, race, religion/creed, height and weight, sexual orientation, status as a veteran or active military service member, criminal record, lawful occupation, lawful source of income, the presence of children, status as a victim of domestic violence, stalking, or sex offenses 

Los Angeles: Race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, ancestry, familial status, source of income, disability, genetic information

Chicago: Race, sex, color, age, religion, disability, national origin, ancestry, parental status, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, military status, source of income

Houston: Incorporates federal and Texas law

Phoenix: Race, color, religion, sex, disability, national origin, familial status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, source of income