Unauthorized Pets in Rentals: What They Cost Landlords

I want to tell you about a puppy.

It was a mixed-breed puppy, which is the dog version of a mystery box (you don’t know exactly what’s inside, and I’m not convinced the dog does either). It was not house-trained. It was also staying at one of my properties, and nobody told me.

Someone snuck it in, so I found out about the puppy around the same time I found out about everything it had done. Those are two things I typically prefer in reverse order. This one chewed through baseboards, ruined floors, and kept going until the bill hit about $7,000. On a rental cash-flowing $300 a month, that’s almost two years of cash flow eaten by a puppy (in the baseboards’ case, literally).

(Before anybody from the rescue world emails me: I’m building a dog-first hotel, and this is a pro-dog article. It’s also an anti-surprise article).

What bugs me is how avoidable most of it was. If that puppy had been disclosed and screened, we’d have known what was coming and planned for it.

Every landlord eventually meets their own version of this puppy, and $7,000 turned out to be the cheap version. The expensive versions come down to what your paperwork can prove, which, for an animal nobody told you about, isn’t much.

You’re Not the Only One Who Got Surprised

PetScreening surveyed 673 property managers and leasing pros for its 2026 State of Pets in Rental Housing report. Unauthorized pets came out as their top pet problem. 

The same report found that only 43% of renters say they have a pet, compared with 71% of U.S. households, according to the American Pet Products Association. That’s a 28-point gap. Either renters are less into pets than everybody else, or plenty of dogs are living off the books, which is the report’s theory too.

Usually, nobody’s running a con. Someone adopts a puppy in month seven and never thinks to call you. A girlfriend’s dog comes over for a weekend in February and is somehow still there at Easter.

The Bills Come Later

Insurance usually won’t touch pet damage to the unit. Standard renter’s policies exclude it, and no adjuster in America considers a puppy an act of God (except maybe Air Bud). Chewed baseboards and a carpet that smells like a kennel get filed under preventable wear. That leaves your security deposit doing a job plenty of landlords assume insurance is doing.

Bites are the bigger number. Insurers paid $1.86 billion on 28,450 dog-related injury claims in 2025, averaging $65,450 per claim, according to the Insurance Information Institute and State Farm. On that same $300-a-month cash-flowing rental, a single average claim eats up about 18 years of cash flow.

The tenant’s renter’s policy is supposed to pay for a bite first. Plenty exclude certain breeds or any dog with a history of bites, and it gets messier if the tenant never told their insurer either. If you didn’t know the dog existed, you never asked for proof of coverage. Your own landlord policy may have animal exclusions, too, and it’s better to find that now than in a denial letter.

Disputes come down to paperwork

I’ll use Texas as an example because that’s where my properties are. Once a tenant moves out and provides a forwarding address, Property Code 92.103 starts a 30-day clock for the deposit refund. Anything you keep needs a written, itemized list under 92.104, and normal wear and tear doesn’t count. 

If they sue, 92.109 puts the burden on you to prove the deductions were reasonable. Miss the 30 days and the law presumes bad faith. That clock does not care how busy your month was. A bad-faith finding costs $100 plus three times what you wrongly kept, plus the tenant’s attorney’s fees.

Say you keep $600 for floor damage, your list goes out on day 34, and a judge rules against you. Now you owe $1,900, plus a lawyer you never hired.

If the animal were never disclosed, you would have even less to work with. There’s no pet addendum or description of the animal, and nothing signed showing the tenant knew your rules on pet sitting or adopting mid-lease. “I’m pretty sure those scratches weren’t there” won’t carry much weight when the burden of proof is on you.

(Outside Texas? Your state has its own deadlines and penalties. Look them up before a move-out forces the issue.)

That neighbor email is Exhibit A

In Texas, owning the house doesn’t automatically make you responsible for a tenant’s dog. Liability usually turns on what you knew about the dog being dangerous and whether you did anything once you knew.

Now picture the neighbor’s email saying the tenant’s dog charged her kid at the mailbox again. That email is evidence you knew. You can’t unread it. Attorneys in bite cases love a written complaint like that, especially next to a lease rule nobody enforced.

Three Houses, Three Rulebooks

Nobody sets out to run three different pet policies. It happens one house at a time. 

• House A has the good pet addendum and move-in photos. 
• House B has a one-line “no pets” clause. 
• House C is on a lease somebody downloaded in 2019. 

Each one looks fine on its own. Together, they read like a group project where the members never met.

That works until those leases have to back each other up in front of a judge or a fair housing investigator. They notice when similar situations got handled differently.

Assistance animals and ESA’s make this more urgent. HUD withdrew its assistance animal guidance in September 2025. A May 22, 2026, memo narrowed federal enforcement to animals individually trained for disability-related work or tasks. State laws didn’t change; residents can still sue on their own, and attorneys are telling landlords to be careful with denials. 

With the federal approach changing twice in eight months, this is not the place to freestyle. Have an attorney in your state review how you handle these requests.

One Pet Process for Every Door

The fix is boring: Run the same pet process on every property and keep the record. It’s free for housing providers, and more than 28,000 property management firms and communities use it. On a long-term rental, it looks like this:

1. Everyone Goes Through It: That includes residents with no animals. Their profile is free, takes a few minutes, and has them acknowledge your rules on pet sitting, visiting pets, and getting a pet mid-lease. That’s the signature you’ll want when the weekend dog is still around at Easter.
2. Every Animal Gets a File: Pet owners upload photos and vaccination records, then attest to your policies and their pet’s history, including bites. You get a FIDO Score, a paw rating of the pet’s housing risk built from more than 35 data points. It won’t make the decision for you, but it helps you make it the same way at every property.
3. Assistance Animals and ESAs Get Their Own Lane: Requests go to PetScreening’s in-house review team, which verifies the documentation with the healthcare provider. Residents don’t pay a profile fee, and you’re not improvising on a legal question that’s still moving.
4. Re-Up at Renewal: Have every resident refresh their profile every year. That’s how you meet the new puppy at renewal instead of at move-out.
5. One Dashboard for Every Door: Every animal and signed policy lives in one place, and it integrates with property management software, including Buildium, Rent Manager, AppFolio, and Yardi. When the neighbor emails, you can pull up that dog’s file instead of guessing.

If a property manager runs your doors, try this: Pick three random units (not the three you know are fine) and ask for the animal record on each. If it takes more than a few minutes, that’s your gap.

Back to That Puppy

None of that $7,000 was the puppy’s fault. A rescue that isn’t house-trained yet is just being a puppy. The problem was that no one on our side knew it was there, so no one had a plan.

So yes, still pro-dog, still anti-surprise. Most residents with pets will do this right if you give them a clear, single process, and that costs way less than the surprise.

Get the animals on paper before you have a puppy that has an appetite for baseboards.