HUD Fair Housing Complaint Deadline: One Year to File

If a landlord or other housing provider has discriminated against you, you have one year to file an administrative complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The clock starts from when the discriminatory act happened — or, if the discrimination involved more than one incident or was ongoing, from the date of the last incident.

This original record-reading guide is a general reading aid, not cited evidence. It does not depict a source record; the article text and source links provide the facts.

Key points

• You must file an administrative fair housing complaint with HUD within one year of a discriminatory housing act (see below).
• If the discrimination is continuing or involves more than one incident, HUD must receive your complaint within one year of the last incident (see below).
• This one-year rule is set out both in HUD’s own regulations and in the federal Fair Housing Act itself (see below).
• This deadline applies only to the administrative complaint process at HUD, not to a private lawsuit filed in court (see below).

What HUD’s regulation says

HUD’s regulations state the deadline directly, in the form of a question a complainant might ask and HUD’s answer to it:

“Yes, you must notify us within one year that you are a victim of discrimination. If you indicate that there is more than one act of discrimination, or that the discrimination is continuing, we must receive your information within one year of the last incident of discrimination.” — 24 CFR 103.35

That regulation makes two things clear: the baseline deadline is one year, and when the discrimination is continuing rather than a single event, HUD counts that year from the most recent incident rather than the first one.

What the Fair Housing Act says

The same one-year deadline appears in the underlying statute, the Fair Housing Act, at 42 U.S.C. § 3610:

“An aggrieved person may, not later than one year after an alleged discriminatory housing practice has occurred or terminated, file a complaint with the Secretary” — 42 U.S.C. § 3610

The statute’s wording — “occurred or terminated” — matches the regulation’s approach: the filing window runs from a single discriminatory act, or, if the practice continued, from when it ended.

Why the two sources match

The regulation at 24 CFR 103.35 sets out the same one-year deadline that Congress wrote into the Fair Housing Act at 42 U.S.C. § 3610. Both set the same one-year period, and both use the same logic for ongoing discrimination: the year is measured from the last incident, not the first one. That consistency is why this deadline can be stated as a single, settled answer rather than as two competing rules.

What this article does not answer

This article covers only the deadline for filing an administrative complaint with HUD under the Fair Housing Act. It does not address:

• The separate deadline for filing a private civil lawsuit in court, which is a different process from the HUD administrative complaint described here.
• What legally counts as “the last incident” when someone alleges that discrimination has been continuing; that determination depends on the specific facts of a case.
• The deadlines that apply when a complaint instead goes to a state or local fair-housing agency, since those agencies can operate under their own procedures.

Source links

• 24 CFR § 103.35 — eCFR, HUD fair housing complaint filing deadline
• 42 U.S.C. § 3610 — Fair Housing Act, administrative enforcement provision