The Department of Housing and Urban Development has thrown out an eleven-year-old legal theory that let disability-access complaints against apartment buildings and condos sit open indefinitely, replacing it with a hard one-year filing deadline. HUD says the old approach pushed more than $110 million in unplanned repair costs onto building owners over the past five years, regardless of whether those owners had any hand in the original construction. For households who rent or are shopping for a home, the change matters less as a legal technicality and more as a signal of who absorbs the cost when a multifamily property turns out to be missing required accessibility features.
A One-Year Clock Replaces an Open-Ended Rule
Under the Fair Housing Act, a design-and-construction accessibility violation in a covered multifamily building — generally one with an elevator and four or more units, or ground-floor units in a smaller building — used to be treated as a “continuing” violation. That meant an administrative complaint could be filed at almost any point in the building’s life, for as long as the inaccessible feature existed, even decades after the property changed hands. A memorandum from Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity Craig Trainor, dated August 31, 2026, ends that approach. Effective immediately, HUD will treat a design-and-construction violation as a one-time event that occurs during construction and ends when the certificate of occupancy is issued. An administrative complaint now has to be filed within one year of that date, full stop.
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Where the $110 Million Figure Came From
HUD’s announcement, issued the day after the memo took effect, is explicit about the dollar cost of the prior rule: “During the last five years, as a result of the previous guidance, over $110 million in onerous repair costs were imposed on building owners, regardless of whether they contributed to any alleged design and construction violations,” the agency stated in its release. Secretary Scott Turner framed the move as part of a broader push on housing affordability, saying the rescinded guidance reflected “legal theories that have no basis in law.” Assistant Secretary Trainor went further, saying the Fair Housing Act’s statute of limitations “is part of the law, not a suggestion for sly bureaucrats to disregard.” Because those repair bills typically fall on whoever owns the building at the time a complaint is filed — not necessarily the original developer — the cost has often landed on current owners, including operators of workforce and market-rate apartment buildings who then price it into rent or resale. HUD’s stated rationale is that closing off open-ended retrofit exposure removes one line item that owners have been passing through to tenants and buyers, though the agency’s release does not put a number on how much of the $110 million actually reached renters’ monthly bills versus owners’ balance sheets.
Why the 2013 Rule Spread Liability to Owners Who Never Built Anything
The policy being rescinded traces to an April 2013 joint statement from HUD and the Department of Justice, which held that a building’s inaccessible features created a continuing injury for as long as they existed, meaning a complaint could be filed “at any time until the violation is corrected.” That theory made no distinction between the developer who built a noncompliant property and a later buyer who simply purchased it decades on. HUD’s new memo notes that under the old approach, the agency in some cases withheld financing from owners who had no role in a property’s original design unless they agreed to costly retrofits, even when no resident had requested the changes and no complaint had been filed. The guidance now states plainly that the law “does not impose an ongoing duty on subsequent owners to ensure that a dwelling conforms to those standards.” HUD and DOJ had already jointly rescinded part of the 2013 statement on August 13, 2026; the August 31 memo is the follow-up that spells out exactly when the new one-year clock starts running.
A Circuit Split HUD Says It Is Now Resolving
HUD’s guidance leans on a 2008 en banc ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which held that a design-and-construction violation ends when construction is complete, with the certificate of occupancy marking that point. That put the Ninth Circuit at odds with an earlier, unpublished Sixth Circuit decision that tied the violation to the date a noncompliant unit is actually sold or rented. HUD’s memo sides with the Ninth Circuit’s approach, arguing that treating an accessibility gap as an unending violation “swallowed the Act’s statute of limitations whole.” The agency says the shift is meant to give builders, current owners, and prospective buyers a fixed, predictable point at which liability exposure closes.
The Two-Year Court Option the Guidance Doesn’t Touch
The one-year window applies only to administrative complaints filed with HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. A separate, longer path remains open: the Fair Housing Act still allows an aggrieved person to file a civil lawsuit in federal or state court within two years of the violation, independent of whether an administrative complaint was ever filed. The National Association of Home Builders, in a legal summary published the day after HUD’s announcement, confirmed that this private court route “applies only to administrative complaints” and is unaffected by the new memo. The guidance also leaves untouched the U.S. Attorney General’s separate authority to bring pattern-or-practice enforcement actions against builders directly, which carries its own timeframe under the statute.
The Household Bills That Get Reduced by Paperwork
A rule like this one shifts a repair cost quietly between owners, buyers and renters, which is how most housing expenses are settled in practice. Separately, many older households carry utility and property-tax bills that written programs already allow to be lowered, because LIHEAP energy assistance, senior property-tax relief and circuit-breaker credits, and SNAP for people 60 and over are all opt-in. A household is counted only once a form is filed, and no agency starts that paperwork on its own.
The Benefits Checklist covers 11 of those programs across 63 pages, listing the 2026 income limits that govern each one and a printable tracker for what has already been filed.
Read the 2026 income limits program by program in The Benefits Checklist.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
