How this works, and who decides

What happens to an assessment

1. 1

   You complete a clinical assessment

   Questions about your symptoms, how long they have been going on, what they stop you doing, and what role the animal plays. The form is validated against the same question definitions it renders, so a submission that skips a required answer is refused by the server as well as by the page.

   functions/lib/intake-validate.ts

2. 2

   A clinician licensed in your state reviews it

   Not any clinician. A reviewer can only take a case in a state they are licensed in, and the check is in the database write rather than in application code, so it cannot be bypassed by a race or a retry. A reviewer who is not licensed where you live is refused outright.

   functions/lib/clinician.ts

3. 3

   They decide, and the answer can be no

   The reviewer forms a professional judgement about whether you have a disability within the meaning of the Fair Housing Act and whether the animal alleviates a symptom or effect of it. Both halves have to hold. When a reviewer declines, the clinical fee is refunded.

   functions/api/therapist/decide.ts

4. 4

   The letter carries a licence that expires

   A letter cannot issue at all if the reviewer's licence expiration is not on file or has passed, and the licence type, number, issuing state and expiration are printed on the document so a housing provider can check them against the state board. The details are snapshotted at issue rather than joined live, so a letter keeps saying what was true on the day it was written.

   functions/lib/letters.ts

5. 5

   A housing provider can verify it without seeing your health information

   Every letter carries a six digit ESA ID and a public verification page. It confirms whether the letter is genuine, current, expired or revoked, and shows the animal and the dates. It shows nothing about your condition, and it does not name your clinician. The same lookup answers identically for a letter that does not exist and one that is not theirs, so IDs cannot be enumerated.

   functions/api/verify/[id].ts

Where we can review

Coverage is published live at /api/coverage and every state page checks it, so a page can never claim we serve somewhere we do not.

How the writing is held to a standard

• Every legal claim is dated

  Each page shows when it was last reviewed, and that date is emitted in its structured data. This area moved twice in five years and most competing content is quietly out of date, so a date is the most useful thing a reader can be given.

• Citations are verified, or omitted

  Every statutory citation is checked against a primary or legal-publisher source, and the sources are listed on the page that relies on them. Where a pinpoint section has not been verified, the page names the statute and the enforcing agency instead of printing a section number nobody checked. An invented citation is worse than no citation, because a reader will take it to their landlord.

  src/content/states/types.ts

• Pages are checked for being the same page twice

  A set of location pages that differ only by a place name is what Google calls a doorway, and it is the ordinary failure of this industry. Every pair of pages here is measured for similarity on each build and the build fails above a threshold. The first run failed on over a thousand pairs, and the fix was to delete the pages that had nothing of their own to say.

  scripts/seo-audit.mjs

• We describe what the law says, not what you should do

  This site is not a law firm and none of it is legal advice. Pages say what a statute provides and what a housing provider may or may not do, and leave the reader to apply it or to take advice. Where something is genuinely unsettled, such as pet fees after the May 2026 rescission, the pages say it is unsettled rather than picking the answer that suits us.

• No page tells you that you qualify

  Eligibility is a clinical judgement made by a licensed person after evaluating you, and it can come back no. A site that tells every reader they qualify is describing a product rather than a standard, and the document such a process produces is worth what the process was.

What we will not do

• Guarantee approval. A review that cannot decline is not a review.
• Sell a registration, certificate, ID card, vest or tag. No federal or state register of emotional support animals exists, and California legislated to require sellers of these products to say so in writing.
• Issue documentation in a state where no clinician of ours is licensed. The queue refuses a cross-state claim outright, so a letter we could not lawfully write is one we do not take money for.
• Claim an emotional support animal has public access rights, or helps you fly. It does not, and it has not since 2021.
• Tell you that a housing provider cannot charge a pet fee. That was true until HUD rescinded its guidance in May 2026, and it is now a question your state answers.