Explainer

The Pet of an Assisted Living or Nursing Home Resident When the Facility Evacuates

By EmergencyPetPrep Editorial · Published August 24, 2026

Key takeaways

There are two different rulebooks and you have to know which one your building is under before anything else makes sense. A Medicare or Medicaid nursing facility is covered by the federal emergency preparedness rule at 42 CFR 483.73. Assisted living is not: 42 CFR 483.5 defines "facility" for that subpart as a skilled nursing facility or a nursing facility, and CMS's own surveyor guidance for the Emergency Preparedness Rule, State Operations Manual Appendix Z, Rev. 204, Issued 04-16-21, lists the seventeen provider and supplier types it covers without naming assisted living anywhere. Assisted living is licensed by your state, under whatever your state calls it, so an article about "the CMS rule" may be describing a rule that does not apply to your parent's community at all.
The federal rule for nursing facilities never mentions an animal, and it is detailed enough that the omission is legible rather than accidental. 42 CFR 483.73 enumerates food, water, medical and pharmaceutical supplies, temperatures, emergency lighting, fire detection and alarm systems, sewage and waste disposal, a system to track sheltered residents, safe evacuation, a means to shelter in place, medical documentation, the use of volunteers, and arrangements with other facilities to receive residents. Read on August 24, 2026 from the 2024 annual edition on govinfo and again from Cornell's mirror, word-boundary searches for "animal" and "pet" return zero across that section and across the whole of Part 483. That is a measured fact about those documents. It is not a claim that facility emergency plans ignore animals, because some of them plainly do not.
At least one state regulator asks the question outright, which is why the useful move is asking rather than assuming. Texas Health and Human Services, in its long-term care provider evacuation guidance, asks under the heading "Preparing to Leave the Facility": "How will you evacuate the pets of your residents, individuals, or clients? (Some evacuation sites might not accept pets)." Carry the frame with it. That question sits inside a list introduced by "Consider questions such as", so it is a planning prompt rather than a command about what happens to the animal, and it is Texas. The page was read live in a rendered browser session on August 24, 2026 and cross-checked word for word against an Internet Archive capture of the same page.
Service animals are a separate legal question from pets, and the answer helps less than most families expect. 28 CFR 35.104 defines a service animal as a dog individually trained to do work or perform tasks for a person with a disability, and states that emotional support, well-being, comfort, or companionship "do not constitute work or tasks for the purposes of this definition." Both halves of the ADA regulation then say the same thing about care: 28 CFR 35.136(e) provides that "A public entity is not responsible for the care or supervision of a service animal", and 28 CFR 36.302(c)(5) provides that "A public accommodation is not responsible for the care or supervision of a service animal." So even the strongest animal-access right in this area puts no duty on any facility to feed, walk or evacuate the animal. Housing law is a different body of law again, and the federal guidance on assistance animals in housing was withdrawn in 2025 with the withdrawal published in the Federal Register in 2026, so our post-disaster rental housing with pets guide carries that story with the primary documents rather than this page restating it.
If the facility will not answer, the route with a statute behind it is the State Long-Term Care Ombudsman, and unlike the federal emergency rule, its definition expressly reaches assisted living. 42 U.S.C. 3002(35) defines a long-term care facility to include "any other adult care home, including an assisted living facility, similar to a facility or institution described in subparagraphs (A) through (C)." Every state operates an Office of the State Long-Term Care Ombudsman as a condition of its funding under 42 U.S.C. 3058g. The program is not about animals and we are not going to predict what it will achieve in your case. It is a resident-advocacy route, two of the rules quoted on this page require the facility's own emergency contact list to carry the ombudsman's number already, and if you cannot find yours, the agency that licenses the building is the other office that will know.

The text lands at nine at night and you are a thousand miles away. Your mother’s assisted living community is evacuating, buses are coming in the morning, and nobody has mentioned the cat. You call the front desk and get voicemail. You open the residency agreement you signed last year and find a paragraph about pet deposits, a paragraph about breed restrictions, and nothing at all about a storm. So you do what anybody would do, which is search for the rule, and you find article after article confidently describing a federal regulation that, it turns out, may not apply to your mother’s building at all.

This page is about that gap. It is written for two people. One is choosing a community for a parent or for themselves, months or years ahead of anything, and wants to know whether the animal can come and what happens in an emergency. The other is on the phone tonight. If you are the second person, the section headed When the Facility Will Not Answer, or Has Already Gone is the one to read first.

The finding that organises everything below is not that nobody has thought about this. That would be a comfortable sentence and it would be false: a state regulator, a county template and a trade association guide all address resident animals in writing, and we quote all three. The finding is narrower and more useful. Every rule we retrieved that governs emergency planning, federal and state, is silent on resident animals. Three guidance documents written for exactly these facilities are not. And guidance is not what a surveyor cites a facility for missing. A facility can satisfy every emergency-planning criterion the documents below impose and still have no answer for your mother’s cat when the buses come. That is the reason to ask before move-in, and the reason a general article about “the law” cannot answer the question for your building.

We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. This page does not say who is legally responsible for a resident’s animal, what a court would decide, whether a facility has breached any duty, or what anybody should file. Every regulation, statute and guidance document quoted below is quoted from a copy we retrieved ourselves, with the jurisdiction named and the date the publisher gives, precisely so you can go and read it. One of the documents here carries no date on its face, and where that is true we say so rather than let a page look current by default. Rules differ by state and they change. Verify against your own state and your own signed agreement before relying on anything here.

First, Which Rulebook Your Building Is Actually Under

Almost every mistake in this subject starts here, and it is a category error rather than a detail. “Long-term care” in ordinary speech covers a nursing home, an assisted living community, a memory care unit and a board-and-care home. In federal regulation it does not.

A Medicare or Medicaid participating nursing facility is covered by 42 CFR 483.73. That section sits inside Subpart B of Part 483, and the subpart defines its own subject. 42 CFR 483.5 provides: “For purposes of this subpart, facility means a skilled nursing facility (SNF) that meets the requirements of sections 1819(a), (b), (c), and (d) of the Act, or a nursing facility (NF) that meets the requirements of sections 1919(a), (b), (c), and (d) of the Act.” The same definition adds that “Facility” may include a distinct part of an institution, that it “does not include an institution for individuals with intellectual disabilities or persons with related conditions” as described elsewhere in the chapter, and that for Medicare and Medicaid purposes the facility is always the entity that participates in the programme. The basis for all of it, at 42 CFR 483.1(a)(1)(i), is that “Skilled nursing facilities participating in Medicare must meet certain specified requirements”, with the parallel Medicaid provision alongside it. This is a participation regime. It reaches buildings that bill those programmes.

Assisted living is not in that regime at all. CMS publishes the interpretive guidance its surveyors apply to the Emergency Preparedness Rule as Appendix Z of the State Operations Manual. The copy cms.gov served us on August 24, 2026 carries its own revision line, “(Rev. 204, Issued: 04-16-21)”, and its table of contents enumerates the provider and supplier types the rule covers: religious nonmedical health care institutions, ambulatory surgical centres, hospices, psychiatric residential treatment facilities, PACE programmes, hospitals, transplant programmes, long-term care facilities, intermediate care facilities for individuals with intellectual disabilities, home health agencies, comprehensive outpatient rehabilitation facilities, critical access hospitals, outpatient physical therapy and speech-language pathology providers, community mental health centres, organ procurement organisations, rural health clinics and federally qualified health centres, and end-stage renal disease facilities. Seventeen types, each attached to its own regulatory citation. Assisted living is not one of them, and the phrase “assisted living” does not appear anywhere in that document.

Two things follow that are worth being blunt about. An article that tells an assisted living reader CMS requires their community to have an emergency plan under 42 CFR 483.73 is describing a rule that does not reach them. And a page quoting Appendix Z as though it were current is quoting an April 2021 revision: that is the revision line the file carries, not an assurance that no newer transmittal exists, so check the CMS manuals page before you rely on the date.

So assisted living is a state licensing question, and the states do not even agree on the name. California licenses a residential care facility for the elderly. Florida and Virginia license an assisted living facility. Federal law, which has to reach all of them at once, uses more names again: 42 U.S.C. 3002(35) covers a nursing facility, “a board and care facility”, and “any other adult care home, including an assisted living facility”, and the Administration for Community Living describes the ombudsman programme as serving people in facilities “such as nursing homes, board and care and assisted living facilities, and other residential care communities.” Three practical ways to find out which category your building is in, in ascending order of effort: ask the community what it is licensed as and ask to see the licence; ask the state agency that issued it; and ask the local Long-Term Care Ombudsman, whose remit covers both categories. That last route is the subject of a section further down, because it turns out to be the answer to more than one question on this page.

What the Federal Rule Requires, and the Exact Shape of What It Leaves Out

If your parent is in a Medicare or Medicaid nursing facility, this is the rule, and it is worth reading rather than summarising, because the shape of it is the finding.

42 CFR 483.73(a) requires an emergency preparedness plan reviewed and updated at least annually, which must “Be based on and include a documented, facility-based and community-based risk assessment, utilizing an all-hazards approach, including missing residents.” It must include strategies for the events that assessment identifies, and it must address the resident population “including, but not limited to, persons at-risk”.

Then subsection (b) lists what the policies and procedures must address, at a minimum. Among them:

“The provision of subsistence needs for staff and residents, whether they evacuate or shelter in place”, and the enumeration under it opens with “Food, water, medical, and pharmaceutical supplies.” It continues with alternate energy sources to maintain temperatures protecting resident health and safety and the safe storage of provisions, emergency lighting, fire detection, extinguishing and alarm systems, and sewage and waste disposal.
A system to track the location of on-duty staff and sheltered residents, and if they are relocated, the facility must “document the specific name and location of the receiving facility or other location.”
“Safe evacuation from the LTC facility, which includes consideration of care and treatment needs of evacuees; staff responsibilities; transportation; identification of evacuation location(s); and primary and alternate means of communication with external sources of assistance.”
“A means to shelter in place for residents, staff, and volunteers who remain in the LTC facility.”
A system of medical documentation preserving resident information; the use of volunteers and other emergency staffing strategies; and “The development of arrangements with other LTC facilities and other providers to receive residents in the event of limitations or cessation of operations to maintain the continuity of services to LTC residents.”

Subsection (c) then requires a communication plan carrying names and contact information for staff, entities providing services under arrangement, residents’ physicians, other LTC facilities and volunteers, plus contact information for emergency preparedness staff, “The State Licensing and Certification Agency” and “The Office of the State Long-Term Care Ombudsman.” It requires “A means of providing information about the general condition and location of residents under the facility’s care as permitted under 45 CFR 164.510(b)(4).” Subsections (d) and (e) add training, two exercises a year, and emergency and standby power.

Now the measurement, stated with its denominator and its route, because a claim about what a document does not say needs at least as much evidence as a claim about what it does.

We retrieved 42 CFR 483.73 twice on August 24, 2026, from the 2024 annual edition XML on govinfo and again from Cornell’s Legal Information Institute mirror, and confirmed both copies carry the same section text. Word-boundary searches for “animal”, “animals”, “pet”, “pets” and “service animal” return zero in both. We then widened the search to the whole of 42 CFR Part 483, Subparts A through I, which includes the definitions at 483.5, resident rights at 483.10, and physical environment at 483.90. Still zero. And we read the rulemaking record that created the section: the final rule at 81 FR 63860, published September 16, 2016, running from page 63860 to page 64044, which references section 483.73 sixty-five times across roughly 1.35 million characters of preamble and comment response. Zero occurrences of “animal”, “animals”, “pet”, “pets” or “service animal” in that document either.

One caution about how to read that last figure, and we want to be explicit because the tempting version of this sentence is not supportable. The correct reading is that the subject never appears in the rulemaking record at all. It is not that CMS weighed resident animals and decided against requiring planning for them. Nothing we retrieved establishes that, and we are not going to write it.

A short methodological warning for anyone who wants to check this themselves, because we nearly fooled ourselves with it: do not count these words with a naive substring search. A plain search for “cat” inside the text of 483.73 returns twenty-one hits, every one of them inside certification, location or communication, and a plain search for “pet” across Part 483 returns well over a hundred hits from competency, appetite and their relatives. The word-boundary counts above are zero. The substring counts are not, and the difference is the whole of the finding.

The one place CMS’s nursing home surveyor guidance does mention an animal

An unqualified claim that “CMS never mentions animals” would be false, and we went looking for the counterexample rather than waiting for someone to find it.

CMS’s guidance to surveyors for long-term care facilities is Appendix PP of the State Operations Manual. The copy cms.gov served us on August 24, 2026 carries the revision line “(Rev. 232; Issued: 07-23-25)” and runs to roughly 2.36 million characters. Across all of it there are exactly five word-boundary occurrences of “animal”, “animals”, “pet” or “pets”, and they sit in only two places. Three of them are in a single bullet, in a list of examples of individualised, non-pharmacological interventions to help meet behavioural health needs, between a bullet about assisting a resident outdoors in the sunshine and one about spiritual needs: “Providing access to pets or animals for the resident who enjoys pets (e.g. a cat for a resident who used to have a cat of their own)”. The remaining two are the phrase “human, animal, or microorganisms”, which appears twice inside the definition of biologicals. There are zero occurrences of “service animal” in the entire document.

Read that bullet carefully, because it is doing something different from what a family hopes. It is about the facility providing access to an animal as part of person-centred care. It is not about a resident’s own animal, it is not about who owns or houses that animal, and it has nothing to do with an emergency. What it does establish is that CMS’s guidance is capable of talking about animals when it means to, which makes the silence in Appendix Z a more interesting fact rather than a less interesting one.

The resident-rights provision people reach for, and why we stop short of it

Somebody will point at 42 CFR 483.10(e)(2), under the heading “Respect and dignity”, which gives a resident of a Medicare or Medicaid nursing facility “The right to retain and use personal possessions, including furnishings, and clothing, as space permits, unless to do so would infringe upon the rights or health and safety of other residents.”

We are quoting it because you will encounter it, and then stopping. Whether a provision whose own examples are furnishings and clothing reaches a living animal is a legal question, and answering it would be exactly the thing this page said in its second paragraph it will not do. What is checkable, and what we will say, is this: the word “animal” does not appear in that section, or anywhere else in Part 483. If somebody tells you that regulation settles your parent’s cat, ask them where a court has said so, and ask a lawyer licensed in that state.

The Guidance Is Not Silent, and That Gap Is the Whole Problem

Here is where the useful part of this page lives. Three documents written for exactly this facility type do address resident animals, in their own words, in writing. Each one carries a different kind of authority and each needs its scope carried with it.

Texas Health and Human Services asks the question outright. Its long-term care provider emergency preparedness material includes a page called Core Function Five: Evacuation, whose frame is set at the top: “Ensure that your disaster plan considers the following topics.” Under the heading “Preparing to Leave the Facility”, introduced by the phrase “Consider questions such as:”, it lists a numbered set. The fourth reads:

“How will you evacuate the pets of your residents, individuals, or clients? (Some evacuation sites might not accept pets).”

Carry three things with that sentence. First, its audience: the same page states that “HCSSAs, nursing facilities, and assisted living facilities can help their clients register with the 211 system”, so assisted living is expressly inside the audience for this material, which is precisely where the federal rule is not. Second, its force: it sits inside “Consider questions such as”, so it asks the plan to answer the question. It does not decide what happens to the animal. Third, its jurisdiction: Texas. It is one state, and it is guidance rather than a rule with a citation.

A retrieval note, stated precisely, because we would rather you knew how we read it. The hhs.texas.gov host returned HTTP 403 to plain automated retrieval on the attempt we made. That is one route failing, not an unreachable source. We read the page live in a rendered browser session on August 24, 2026, and separately read the bytes of an Internet Archive capture of the same URL taken on October 31, 2025. The sentence above is identical in both, character for character.

Snohomish County, Washington, puts it on a planning checklist. The county publishes a Disaster Preparedness Plan Template for use in Long Term Care Facilities, a 32-page fill-in document that carries no publication date on its face. Its pre-emergency section reaches an item headed “Plan for evacuation and relocation of residents”, under which fifteen lettered sub-items, a through o, run from identifying who implements the evacuation, through counting ambulatory and non-ambulatory residents, transportation arrangements, mutual aid agreements, evacuation routes, timing, staff accompaniment and resident tracking. Item j is “Determine what items and how much each resident should take.” Item k is:

“Plan for evacuation and shelter of pets and service animals.”

That is one county’s template. It is not a rule, it binds nobody, and it sits in a document a facility fills in for itself. What it shows is that when somebody sits down to write a complete evacuation checklist for a long-term care building, the animal turns up on it.

A Florida trade association wrote a whole section about it, twenty years ago. The Florida Health Care Association and the Florida Center for Assisted Living publish a Disaster Preparedness Guide for Assisted Living Facilities whose pages carry a 2006 copyright line. Its page 30 carries a section headed Pets, which opens:

“If residents enjoy the companionship of pets in an assisted living community, Administrators must be sure to include these furry, feathered, and finned friends in their emergency management plans.”

The section runs Before the Storm, During a Storm and After a Storm, with a Pet Disaster Supply Kit list and a suggestion to involve residents in a “pet patrol” to check that animals have food, bowls, a carrier and whatever else they need. And its evacuation planning checklist, further into the guide, carries this line among the items a facility ticks off:

“Staff assigned and trained to do a final check on facility to ensure all residents and pets are out of the building before the facility is left.”

Label that document honestly, in three ways. It is a trade association guide rather than a regulator. It carries a 2006 copyright, which makes it the oldest thing on this page. And we retrieved it from a third-party mirror rather than from the association’s own site, so treat its content as evidence of what the association published rather than as a current statement of anybody’s position.

One species note, because that quotation invites a question. The phrase “furry, feathered, and finned” is the trade association’s wording, and it is not this site endorsing every species as an ordinary option in a care community. The 2022 compendium on non-traditional pets published by the National Association of State Public Health Veterinarians with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes an instruction pointed directly at this setting: “Do not keep reptiles in childcare centers, nursery schools, primary schools, or other facilities with children younger than 5 years old or facilities that care for older adults and those with weakened immune systems (such as long-term care facilities and nursing homes).” The compendium repeats that same facility instruction for amphibians, fish and other aquatic animals; for backyard poultry; and for pet rodents and, in its own parenthetical, some other small mammals such as hedgehogs. That is a public health recommendation about keeping such animals in such settings, not a licensing rule, and our page on where exotic pets are accepted during an evacuation carries the compendium’s wording at length.

The join, which is ours

What the sources say: the federal emergency preparedness rule for nursing facilities, the interpretive guidance CMS wrote for that rule, and the rulemaking record that produced it all contain no reference to an animal. A state regulator, a county template and a trade association guide all do.

What none of them says: not one of those three guidance documents makes anything happen. Texas asks the plan to consider the question. Snohomish County offers a template line. The Florida association offers a checklist item. None of them is a requirement a surveyor cites a facility for missing.

What this site concludes from putting them together, and this is our own reasoning rather than a published protocol: across the documents we retrieved, the animal question sits in the guidance layer rather than in the enforceable emergency rules. One state we read does regulate resident pets in an enforceable licensing standard, and it never carries the subject across into its emergency rules; that is the Virginia section below. Nothing in the emergency rules we read requires an answer for a resident’s cat, so a facility can meet every criterion those rules impose and still not have one. Which is why the useful action is not to look up the rule. It is to get your facility’s own written answer, from its own plan and its own residency agreement, while nobody is under pressure.

What Three States Require, Named One at a Time

There is no national answer here and we are not going to manufacture one. We read three states. They differ in design, not merely in strictness, and the differences are instructive. We make no claim about how many states do what, and none of these three is evidence about a fourth.

Florida: a form, with a county-sized hole in it

Florida assisted living facilities submit a Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan against a state form. The current one is AHCA Form 3180-5006, September 2023, and the form’s own footer names the rule that incorporates it, 59A-36.019, Florida Administrative Code. The form states its own job in its opening paragraph:

“The Minimum Emergency Management Planning Criteria for Assisted Living Facilities must be used to develop a Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan (“CEMP” or “Plan”) for assisted living facilities. The criteria will serve as the format for compliance review by designated plan approvers.”

We downloaded that form from AHCA’s own domain on August 24, 2026 and searched it. Zero occurrences of “animal”, “animals”, “pet”, “pets” or “service animal.”

But do not stop at the state floor, because the form itself tells you not to:

“County Emergency Management Agencies may require additional information or revise specific criteria requirements due to a facility’s location, hazard analysis, or resident demographics.”

That sentence is where a local answer may actually exist. If you are in Florida, the question worth asking your county emergency management agency is whether it has added anything, because the state form is explicit that it can.

A retrieval gap belongs here rather than in a footnote. Florida publishes a separate emergency management planning criteria form for nursing homes, AHCA Form 3110-6006. The URL we found for it returned HTTP 404 and we did not retrieve it. We therefore claim nothing about it, we do not infer its contents from the assisted living form, and nothing on this page is a statement about “Florida facilities” as a class.

California: a long list, a right to read the plan, and no animal on it

California’s emergency and disaster plan requirement for residential care facilities for the elderly is at Health and Safety Code section 1569.695, most recently amended by Stats. 2025, Ch. 546, Sec. 8 (SB 582), effective January 1, 2026. It opens: “In addition to any other requirement of this chapter, a residential care facility for the elderly shall have an emergency and disaster plan that shall include, but not be limited to, all of the following:” and then lists them.

What is on the list is detailed. Evacuation procedures with an assembly point marked on the facility sketch. “Plans for the facility to be self-reliant for a period of not less than 72 hours immediately following any emergency or disaster, including, but not limited to, a short-term or long-term power failure.” Transportation and evacuation procedures, with facility vehicle keys available to staff on all shifts. A four-part contact list: emergency response personnel, the Community Care Licensing Division, “The local long-term care ombudsman”, and transportation providers. “At least two appropriate shelter locations that can house facility residents during an evacuation. One of the locations shall be outside of the immediate area.” Utility shut-off valve locations. Procedures for emergency power, inoperable call buttons, communicating with residents and families, medication administration and refrigerated storage, assistive devices needing electricity, identifying residents with special needs, and confirming the location of each resident during an emergency response. Further down, an evacuation chair at each stairwell and a set of keys on each shift opening every occupied resident unit, every facility vehicle, every facility exit door, and the cabinets and files holding the plan itself.

Zero occurrences of “animal” or “pet” across the whole retrieved section.

And then the subsection that is genuinely useful to a family, at 1569.695(g):

“A facility shall make the plan available upon request to residents onsite, any responsible party for a resident, the local long-term care ombudsman, and local emergency responders. Resident and employee information shall be kept confidential.”

If your parent is in a California residential care facility for the elderly, that is a stated route to read the actual document rather than to be told about it. Whether your state has anything similar is a question for your state licensing agency, and we did not check fifty of them.

Read the last two subsections of the same section together, because they are an unusually honest description of how thin the inspection layer is. Subsection (i) provides that the Community Care Licensing Division “shall confirm, during annual licensing visits, that the emergency and disaster plan is on file at the facility and includes required content.” Subsection (k) then provides: “Nothing in this section shall create a new or additional requirement for the department to evaluate the emergency and disaster plan.” Confirming that a plan is on file and contains the required content is a different act from evaluating whether it would work, and the statute says so itself.

Virginia: the state regulates resident pets in detail, and its emergency rules never mention them

Virginia is the cleanest demonstration of the shape of this problem, because both halves are written down in the same chapter and they do not touch.

Virginia’s standards for licensed assisted living facilities carry a section headed Pets living in the assisted living facility, at 22VAC40-73-840. Subsection A provides: “Each assisted living facility shall develop and implement a written policy regarding pets living on the premises that will ensure the safety and well-being of all residents and staff.” Where a facility allows pets, the policy must state the types permitted and the conditions, and: “Before being allowed to live on the premises, pets shall have had all recommended or required immunizations and shall be certified by a licensed veterinarian to be free of diseases transmittable to humans.” Pets living on the premises must have regular examinations and immunizations appropriate for the species and are restricted from central food preparation areas, documentation must be kept at the facility, and the section adds that a pet must have “a suitable temperament, be healthy, and otherwise pose no significant health or safety risks to residents, staff, volunteers, or visitors.” A companion section at 22VAC40-73-850 governs visiting pets.

That is a state that has thought carefully about animals in assisted living. Neither 22VAC40-73-840 nor 22VAC40-73-850 contains the string “evacuat” or the word “disaster”.

Now Part IX of the same chapter, headed Emergency Preparedness, which is five sections: 22VAC40-73-950 (emergency preparedness and response plan), -960 (fire and emergency evacuation plan), -970 (drills), -980 (emergency equipment and supplies) and -990 (plan for resident emergencies and practice exercise). Section 950 requires written emergency response procedures for “assessing the situation; protecting residents, staff, volunteers, visitors, equipment, medications, and vital records; and restoring services”, with procedures addressing, among other things, “Conducting evacuations and sheltering in place, as appropriate, and accounting for all residents” and conducting relocations to emergency shelters or alternative sites.

We retrieved all five sections on August 24, 2026. Across the entire Part IX there are zero occurrences of “pet”, “pets”, “animal” or “animals”.

One provision in that Part is worth writing down, at 22VAC40-73-990(D): “The plan for resident emergencies shall be readily available to all staff, residents’ families, and legal representatives.” Like California’s subsection (g), that is a stated route to the document itself.

So: three states. One regulates resident pets in careful detail and never connects that to its emergency rules. One publishes a state emergency planning form with no animal on it and an explicit invitation for counties to add requirements. One publishes a long statutory list with no animal on it and a right for a responsible party to read the plan. A fourth state, Texas, publishes guidance that asks the question directly. Four jurisdictions, four different shapes, and no national sentence that would be true about all of them.

Service Animals Are a Different Question, and the Difference Helps Less Than Expected

Keep these two words apart, because conflating them is how families end up making an argument that was never available to them.

A service animal, under the ADA, is a narrow category defined by training. 28 CFR 35.104 provides:

“Service animal means any dog that is individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of an individual with a disability, including a physical, sensory, psychiatric, intellectual, or other mental disability. Other species of animals, whether wild or domestic, trained or untrained, are not service animals for the purposes of this definition. The work or tasks performed by a service animal must be directly related to the individual’s disability. Examples of work or tasks include, but are not limited to, assisting individuals who are blind or have low vision with navigation and other tasks, alerting individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing to the presence of people or sounds, providing non-violent protection or rescue work, pulling a wheelchair, assisting an individual during a seizure, alerting individuals to the presence of allergens, retrieving items such as medicine or the telephone, providing physical support and assistance with balance and stability to individuals with mobility disabilities, and helping persons with psychiatric and neurological disabilities by preventing or interrupting impulsive or destructive behaviors. The crime deterrent effects of an animal’s presence and the provision of emotional support, well-being, comfort, or companionship do not constitute work or tasks for the purposes of this definition.”

We have quoted that to its last sentence deliberately. The emotional support exclusion is not a gloss somebody added later. It is the closing sentence of the regulatory definition itself.

And now the provision that decides the question this page is actually about. 28 CFR 35.136(e), under the heading “Care or supervision”, provides in full:

“A public entity is not responsible for the care or supervision of a service animal.”

Its twin for privately operated facilities, at 28 CFR 36.302(c)(5), provides:

“A public accommodation is not responsible for the care or supervision of a service animal.”

Read those against what a family assumes. The ADA rules give a service animal broad access: 35.136(g) permits the handler to be accompanied in all areas where the public, participants or invitees are allowed to go, 35.136(h) bars surcharges, and 35.136(b) permits removal only in narrow circumstances. And in the same regulation, in a single sentence, the entity is told it is not responsible for caring for or supervising the animal. Even at its strongest, the access right does not make anybody at the facility responsible for feeding, walking or evacuating the animal. Somebody still has to, and that somebody is the reason the family-side plan below exists.

Two boundaries we are not crossing. Which half of the ADA reaches a particular building depends on who operates it: Title II reaches state and local government entities, so a county-run nursing home sits there, while Title III reaches privately operated public accommodations, whose twelve categories at 28 CFR 36.104 include “A day care center, senior citizen center, homeless shelter, food bank, adoption agency, or other social service center establishment”. We are not assigning a category to a facility we have not seen, and the point that matters here does not depend on it, because both titles carry the identical care-and-supervision sentence.

The second boundary is housing. Whether the Fair Housing Act reaches a particular residential care setting is a legal question and we do not answer it. What we can tell you is that the federal picture on assistance animals in housing changed recently and most of what you will find online is out of date: HUD’s two assistance-animal notices were withdrawn effective September 17, 2025, with the withdrawal published in the Federal Register on April 6, 2026, and further enforcement guidance issued in May 2026. Our post-disaster rental housing with pets page carries that story with the primary documents and their own stated limits, and hosting an evacuee’s pets when your lease says no covers the neighbouring version. We are deliberately not restating the analysis in different words here, because one account of it on this site is better than two. If a disability accommodation is genuinely what is at stake, the routes are a lawyer, a fair housing agency, or the facility’s own accommodation process, and none of them is a preparedness site.

The PETS Act, and Where It Stops

Thirty-one other pages on this site name the PETS Act, counted case-insensitively across the article source files on August 24, 2026. If you have read any of them, you arrive at this page expecting it to apply. It does not, and saying so plainly is more useful than stretching it.

The Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act of 2006 is Public Law 109-308. Its long title states its own scope: “To amend the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act to ensure that State and local emergency preparedness operational plans address the needs of individuals with household pets and service animals following a major disaster or emergency.”

Its section 2 inserts a new subsection into 42 U.S.C. 5196b providing that, in approving standards for state and local emergency preparedness operational plans, “the Director shall ensure that such plans take into account the needs of individuals with household pets and service animals prior to, during, and following a major disaster or emergency.” Its section 3 adds, to the list of emergency preparedness measures at 42 U.S.C. 5196, “plans that take into account the needs of individuals with pets and service animals prior to, during, and following a major disaster or emergency”, and authorises financial contributions “to the States and local authorities for animal emergency preparedness purposes”, including shelter facilities and materials that will accommodate people with pets and service animals. Its section 4 adds a new subparagraph to the federal essential assistance provision at 42 U.S.C. 5170b(a)(3), covering the “provision of rescue, care, shelter, and essential needs” both “to individuals with household pets and service animals” and “to such pets and animals.”

Every operative provision in that Act reaches a government emergency plan, a federal standard, a federal contribution, or federal assistance. Nothing in the Act’s text is addressed to a private facility’s own emergency plan. The Act is the reason a county may run a pet-friendly shelter and the reason a state plan is supposed to account for households with animals. It is not a rule about the building your parent lives in.

What to Ask, Before Move-In and Before the Season

Every question below has a named document behind it, and each one is a question rather than an entitlement. Ask them in writing, in the off season, and keep the answers with the residency agreement rather than in your inbox.

1. What is this community licensed as, and is it Medicare or Medicaid certified? This is first because it decides whether 42 CFR 483.73 reaches the building at all. Ask for the licence, and if the answer at the desk is vague, ask the state agency that issued it or the local ombudsman.

2. What does the residency or admission agreement say about the animal in an evacuation? Ask for that paragraph now rather than in a storm. This is the same discipline our page on your pet being at a boarding facility when the order hits establishes for a commercial animal facility, and the logic transfers even though the statutes do not: the document that decides this is the one somebody signed, not a general rule about the category. Do not carry the boarding and kennel statutes across, though. Those govern businesses that board animals, and a residence for people is a different licensing category entirely.

3. Does the emergency plan name a receiving facility, and does that receiving facility accept animals? These are two questions, not one, and Texas HHS supplies the reason in its own parenthetical: “(Some evacuation sites might not accept pets)”. A community that has a mutual aid agreement with a sister property forty miles inland has answered the first question and may not have asked the second.

4. May we read the emergency plan? In California, section 1569.695(g) says a facility shall make the plan available on request to residents onsite, any responsible party for a resident, the local ombudsman and local emergency responders. In Virginia, 22VAC40-73-990(D) says the plan for resident emergencies shall be readily available to residents’ families and legal representatives. Ask your own state’s licensing agency whether it publishes anything comparable. Where there is no such rule, asking politely still works surprisingly often.

5. Who is the named person authorised to collect the animal, and where do they live? This is the field that fails in a regional evacuation, for exactly the reason it fails on a boarding intake form. If the person named is a spouse or an adult child leaving in the same car on the same closed highway, the field has stopped doing anything. Name somebody outside the resident’s evacuation zone, tell that person they are named, and confirm the facility has a current number for them. What that person can and cannot authorise is a separate question, answered on our pet authority documents guide, which compares a durable power of attorney, a pet trust and a caregiver letter with primary sources and is honest about which of them anybody will act on at a counter. We are not re-deriving any of that here.

6. Who is the local Long-Term Care Ombudsman, and is that number already on the facility’s contact list? For a Medicare or Medicaid nursing facility, 42 CFR 483.73(c)(2)(iii) requires the Office of the State Long-Term Care Ombudsman on the facility’s own emergency communication plan. For a California residential care facility for the elderly, section 1569.695(a)(4)(C) requires the local long-term care ombudsman on the contact list. Ask for it. It is a number the facility is supposed to have.

The federal checklist that comes closest, and what it does not contain

CMS did once publish a consumer-side version of exactly this: an Emergency Planning Checklist: Recommended Tool for Persons in Long-Term Care Facilities and Their Family Members, Friends, Personal Caregivers, Guardians and Long-Term Care Ombudsmen, dated September 2007, six pages. Part I is addressed to residents, family members, friends, personal caregivers and guardians, and instructs: “Prior to any emergency, ask about and become familiar with the facility’s emergency plan,” then enumerates the location of emergency exits; how the alarm system works and modifications for residents who are hearing or visually impaired; plans for evacuation including how residents and visitors requiring assistance will be evacuated, how the facility will ensure each resident can be identified during evacuation, the facility’s evacuation strategy, where they will go, how medical charts will be transferred, and how families will be notified; whether families will be able to bring their loved one home rather than evacuating; and how family members can keep the facility apprised of their own location and contact information. Part II is written for ombudsmen. The document repeats its own scope caveat in the footer of each of its first four pages: “Note: Some of the recommended tasks may exceed the long-term care facility’s Federal regulatory requirements.”

Searched in both PDF extraction modes, that checklist contains zero occurrences of “animal”, “animals”, “pet”, “pets” or “service animal.” That is CMS’s own consumer-side list of what to ask a facility, written for exactly this reader, and the animal is not on it.

Two warnings attached to that citation, and both are the reason we are giving you an archive link rather than a live one. The document is dated September 2007, which makes it old enough that we would not treat any procedural detail in it as current. And the canonical cms.gov path for it now serves a different document. That URL returns HTTP 200 today and delivers a CMS sheet titled “Frequently Cited Emergency Preparedness Citation & Potential Impact”, which is not the checklist at all. We verified that ourselves on August 24, 2026 by downloading both. The 2007 checklist is cited here to an Internet Archive capture taken on April 11, 2012, with the timestamp in the source label, and nobody should present the live cms.gov URL as serving it.

The Family-Side Standby Plan, and the Form This Page Is Not Going to Publish

Let us be direct about a temptation. A page like this is supposed to end with a printable authorisation sheet naming somebody who can collect the animal. We are not publishing one, and the reason is not laziness.

This site already publishes the printable and already publishes the doctrine that governs it. Our neighbour pet emergency access agreement is the fill-in instrument, with the two households, every animal, gear locations, an explicit menu of permitted actions including moving the animals and transporting them to a named destination, veterinary care with an agreed spending limit, reciprocity, revocation and signatures. Our pet authority documents guide is the legal frame, comparing a durable power of attorney, a pet trust and a caregiver letter against primary law. And our page on being the pet sitter when the order comes states the thing every one of these sheets has to be read against: a signed letter is an agreement between the owner and the helper, and the checkpoint officer, the landlord, the boarding facility and the shelter did not sign it and are not obliged to read it. Publishing a second sheet here would split that asset and, worse, would quietly imply that a sheet grants an authority it does not.

What this setting changes about the fields, in one sentence: the animal is not in a home the helper can be given a key to, so the person named has to be somebody the facility will actually release an animal to, on file with the facility in advance, and the destination written in their row is somewhere other than the resident’s own address, because the resident’s address is the building being evacuated.

With that said, here is the standby plan, which is a set of arrangements rather than a document. It is the same relay described on our essential worker lockdown pet care relay page, adapted to a building the family does not live in:

A named standby caregiver who lives outside the resident’s evacuation zone. One name is a plan with a single point of failure. Two is a plan.
That person’s details on file with the facility, in writing, before the season, alongside whatever the facility’s own paperwork requires. Ask the facility what form it wants; the answer is facility-specific and this is exactly the sort of thing that cannot be done by phone from a shelter car park.
A carrier and a small kit staged where the standby caregiver can reach them, not in the resident’s room. A carrier inside an evacuated building is not a carrier.
The animal’s veterinary practice and microchip registration current, and reachable by the standby caregiver. Our pet emergency binder is the records layer for this, and the vet-authorisation question, which is genuinely separate from the who-may-collect question, is worked through on the authority documents page.
The facility’s own evacuation timing understood in advance. This is the part families consistently misjudge, because a care facility does not move on the same clock as a household. Our T-minus storm countdown card works one county’s published figures through in detail, and the row that matters here is Monroe County, Florida, which under a comprehensive plan policy restated in a 2012 county resolution initiates mandatory evacuation of mobile home residents, special needs residents, and hospital and nursing home patients at approximately 36 hours ahead of tropical storm winds. That page carries the limits with the number, and they matter: it applies only to a stated class of storm, it comes from a 2012 restatement, and Monroe County’s current evacuation information page publishes no hour figures at all, so it is a figure to confirm with the county rather than to plan against. We are pointing at that page rather than restating the resolution here, because it quotes the resolution directly, carries those limits alongside the hours, and one account of a county’s clock on this site is better than two. The point is not the figure. The point is that in the one county whose figures we carry, the group your parent belongs to is moved on an earlier phase than permanent residents by zone, so the assumption that a care facility moves on the same clock as a household is the assumption to go and check. Whatever your county’s answer is, it is why the animal question has to be settled before a watch is posted rather than during one.

When the Facility Will Not Answer, or Has Already Gone

Everything above assumes somebody picks up the phone. Here is what to do when nobody does, because a page whose every route ends at “ask the facility” has no answer for the reader it was written for.

Start with the two questions, not with the animal. Where are the residents being taken, and is the animal travelling with them or does it have to be collected, and by when. Those two answers determine everything else, and the first of them is often obtainable even when the front desk is not. For a Medicare or Medicaid nursing facility, 42 CFR 483.73(b)(2) requires the facility to document “the specific name and location of the receiving facility or other location” when sheltered residents are relocated, and 483.73(c)(6) requires a means of providing information about the general condition and location of residents. Those requirements are about people, not animals. The connection between them and your problem is our reasoning, not the regulation’s: the record that says where your mother went is the record that tells you which building to ask about the cat.

Do not drive to an evacuated building and try to get in. The person who can open a door is the one you need on the phone, and a facility under an order may be empty. Our page on a pet at a commercial facility when the order hits quotes one named veterinary hospital’s own published warning about entering its premises without staff, which is that hospital’s terms rather than a general rule, and the practical lesson transfers regardless of what your facility’s rules say.

Then the three routes that do not run through the facility’s front desk.

The State Long-Term Care Ombudsman. This is the one instrument on this page that covers both facility types. 42 U.S.C. 3002(35) defines “long-term care facility” to mean any skilled nursing facility, any nursing facility, a board and care facility, and “any other adult care home, including an assisted living facility, similar to a facility or institution described in subparagraphs (A) through (C).” Where the federal emergency rule stops at the nursing facility door, the ombudsman definition walks through it. Under 42 U.S.C. 3058g, a state agency must “establish and operate an Office of the State Long-Term Care Ombudsman” to receive its allotment, and the ombudsman’s statutory functions begin with identifying, investigating and resolving complaints that “are made by, or on behalf of, residents,” including residents with limited or no decision-making capacity, and that relate to action, inaction or decisions that may adversely affect residents’ health, safety, welfare or rights. The Administration for Community Living describes the programme in its own words: “States’ Long-Term Care (LTC) Ombudsman programs work to resolve problems related to the health, safety, welfare, and rights of individuals who live in LTC facilities, such as nursing homes, board and care and assisted living facilities, and other residential care communities.” ACL’s page links a state-by-state locator.

Three honest limits on that route. The ombudsman programme is not about animals; it is a resident-advocacy office and your question will reach it as a question about a resident. We are not predicting what it will do, how fast, or what it will achieve, because that is a prediction this site has no basis for. And it is a route for a complaint or a problem, not an emergency service; if there is an immediate threat to a person, that is a call to emergency services and not to an ombudsman.

The state licensing and certification agency. This is the office that licenses the building and inspects it. For a Medicare or Medicaid nursing facility its contact information is required on the facility’s own emergency communication plan under 42 CFR 483.73(c)(2)(ii); for a California residential care facility, section 1569.695(a)(4)(B) puts the Community Care Licensing Division on the required contact list. If you do not know which agency licenses your parent’s building, the ombudsman does.

County emergency management. The building sits in a county, that county issued or relayed the order, and it knows where facility evacuations in its jurisdiction went. It is also the office that can tell you whether a pet-friendly shelter is open, which is a separate question from what the facility did.

If the animal is confirmed alone in a building and nobody is going in, you have crossed from a facility question into an animal rescue request, and that is a different page: how to request a pet welfare check or rescue covers who takes such a request in a declared disaster, what makes one actionable, and the windows when nobody is entering any structure at all. If the animal has already been taken somewhere and you are trying to establish that it is your parent’s, proving a pet is yours and reclaiming it is the page for that.

And if all of those fail, the last route is a lawyer licensed in that state, found through the state bar’s lawyer referral service or the legal aid organisation serving that county. Our pet authority documents guide sets out those two routes in more detail, along with the federal Disaster Legal Services programme and its narrow eligibility limits. We are telling you where the door is. We are not telling you what is behind it.

What This Page Will Not Tell You

Four refusals, each with a reason you can check.

Who is legally responsible for a resident’s animal. Not because the question is unimportant, but because answering it is a legal conclusion about a specific facility, a specific agreement and a specific state’s law, and this site has no lawyer. What we can say is narrower and checkable: not one of the instruments we retrieved for this page says who evacuates a resident’s animal, or who is responsible for it during an emergency. The closest any of them comes is Virginia’s licensing standard for pets living in an assisted living facility, which requires a written policy and provides that pets “shall be well-treated and cared for in compliance with state regulations and local ordinances”, and which never mentions an evacuation or a disaster at all.

Whether a facility’s pet policy or its handling of an evacuation was lawful. Same reason. The routes for that question are a lawyer in that state, the state licensing agency, and the ombudsman, and all three are named above.

Whether a resident can still care for an animal. That is a clinical and capacity judgement about a person, and we are a preparedness site with no standing to make one about anybody. We will tell you what facilities are required to publish about their own pet policies. We will not assess your parent.

How to feel about it, or what to say. There is a real and common version of this situation in which a much-loved animal and a person are separated, and we have deliberately published no guidance about that. Our reason is specific and checkable rather than squeamish. The closest published material we found while researching this page is the list headed “Helping Residents in a Relocation: Suggested principles of care for relocated residents” in Part I of CMS’s September 2007 checklist. Read it and the reason we are not extending it is on the page: every item is about moving a person between buildings, from encouraging the resident to talk about expectations through to ensuring staff at the receiving facility introduce themselves. Not one line of it is about separating anybody from an animal. This site has no credentialed reviewer who could responsibly extend it, and building a gentler-sounding framework of our own would be this site manufacturing advice it has no standing to give. If that is the part that is hardest right now, this is not the page for it, and the facility’s own staff, a person you trust, or your own clinician are all better places to take it than a preparedness site.

The Checklist

Before move-in, or before the season if your parent is already there:

If it is happening now:

Call the facility and ask two things: where the residents are going, and whether the animal travels with them or must be collected, and by when
If the facility does not answer, call the ombudsman, the state licensing agency and county emergency management, in that order
Do not drive to an evacuated building and try to get in. Get the person who can open the door on the phone instead
If the animal is confirmed alone and nobody is entering the building, switch to a welfare check or rescue request
Write down every call: who, when, what number, what they said. It is the record that makes the next call shorter

Your pet is at a facility when the order hits is the same problem where the animal is the one in someone else’s building, and it works the contract layer in detail.
Pet authority documents: power of attorney, trust and caregiver letter owns the question of whose signature authorises what, with primary law. Everything this page says about a named person routes there.
Neighbour pet emergency access agreement is the printable instrument this site publishes, and the reason this page publishes none of its own.
Essential worker lockdown pet care relay is the caregiver relay this page’s standby plan is a variant of, including the veterinary consent question.
T-minus storm countdown card for pets carries the county-by-county evacuation clocks, including the phase that moves nursing home patients.
Request a pet welfare check or rescue is where to go when the animal is confirmed alone and nobody is going in.
Evacuating when the owner cannot lift the pet and evacuating a senior or disabled pet cover the mobility side of this, for the owner and for the animal respectively.
Post-disaster rental housing with pets carries the current federal picture on assistance animals in housing, which this page deliberately does not restate.
This page sits under the pet emergency playbooks library.

Frequently asked questions

Does a nursing home or assisted living facility have to evacuate a resident's pet?

We are not lawyers and this page does not answer who is legally responsible for anybody's animal, because that is a legal conclusion and not something this site has standing to give. What we can tell you is what the rules we read actually say. For a Medicare or Medicaid nursing facility, the federal emergency preparedness rule at 42 CFR 483.73 enumerates in detail what the facility's policies must address, including food, water, medical and pharmaceutical supplies, temperatures, emergency lighting, fire systems, sewage, a tracking system for sheltered residents, safe evacuation, sheltering in place, medical documentation, volunteers, and arrangements with other facilities to receive residents. Read from the 2024 annual edition on govinfo on August 24, 2026 and confirmed against Cornell's mirror, that section contains zero word-boundary matches for "animal" or "pet", and so does the whole of 42 CFR Part 483. Assisted living is not covered by that section at all: 42 CFR 483.5 defines "facility" for the subpart as a skilled nursing facility or a nursing facility, and assisted living is licensed by the states. State rules differ in design rather than merely in strictness, and none of the three we read, Florida, California and Virginia, names an animal anywhere in its emergency-planning requirements. So the answer for your parent's building is written in that building's own emergency plan and its residency or admission agreement, not in a general rule about the category. Ask for both, in writing, before a season starts. If the facility will not answer, the State Long-Term Care Ombudsman and the state licensing agency are the two routes that do not run through the front desk, and a lawyer licensed in that state is the person to ask what any of it means for you.

Is assisted living covered by the CMS emergency preparedness rule?

No, and this is the single most common error in articles about this subject. 42 CFR 483.5 states that "For purposes of this subpart, facility means a skilled nursing facility (SNF) that meets the requirements of sections 1819(a), (b), (c), and (d) of the Act, or a nursing facility (NF) that meets the requirements of sections 1919(a), (b), (c), and (d) of the Act." The emergency preparedness requirement at 42 CFR 483.73 sits inside that subpart, so it reaches Medicare and Medicaid participating nursing facilities. CMS's interpretive guidance for the Emergency Preparedness Rule, State Operations Manual Appendix Z, Rev. 204, Issued 04-16-21, downloaded from cms.gov on August 24, 2026, lists in its own table of contents the seventeen provider and supplier types the rule covers, and assisted living is not among them; the phrase "assisted living" does not appear anywhere in that document. Assisted living is a state licensing category with a different name in different places, including residential care facility for the elderly in California and assisted living facility in Florida and Virginia. Appendix Z carries its own revision line, which is the April 2021 revision, so check the CMS manuals page for a newer transmittal before treating any date on this page as current. The practical step is to find out what your community is actually licensed as. Ask the community and ask to see the licence, ask the state agency that issued it, and ask the local Long-Term Care Ombudsman, whose remit under 42 U.S.C. 3002(35) reaches both nursing facilities and assisted living.

What should I ask a facility about my parent's pet before move-in?

Ask five questions and ask for the answers in writing, because the document that decides this is the one attached to your parent's residency, not a general rule about the category. First, what is this community licensed as and is it Medicare or Medicaid certified, because that decides whether the federal nursing facility rule at 42 CFR 483.73 reaches it at all. Second, what does the residency or admission agreement say about the animal in an evacuation, and may we have a copy of the paragraph now. Third, does the emergency plan name a receiving facility, and does that receiving facility accept animals, which is a genuinely separate question: Texas Health and Human Services attaches its own parenthetical to the same point, "(Some evacuation sites might not accept pets)". Fourth, who is the named person authorised to collect the animal if the resident is hospitalised or relocated, and does that person live outside the same evacuation zone as the building. Fifth, who is the local Long-Term Care Ombudsman and is that number on the facility's emergency contact list, which the federal rule requires for a nursing facility at 42 CFR 483.73(c)(2)(iii) and which California requires for its assisted living communities at Health and Safety Code section 1569.695(a)(4)(C). In two of the states we read, the rule itself names people outside the staff who may read the plan: California Health and Safety Code section 1569.695(g) provides that a facility "shall make the plan available upon request to residents onsite, any responsible party for a resident, the local long-term care ombudsman, and local emergency responders", and Virginia's 22VAC40-73-990(D) provides that the plan for resident emergencies "shall be readily available to all staff, residents' families, and legal representatives." Ask your own state's licensing agency whether it publishes anything similar. And if the community will not answer any of the five in writing, that refusal is itself information: the State Long-Term Care Ombudsman and the state agency that licenses the building are the two offices that can be asked about a facility without going through its front desk.

The facility is evacuating right now and my mother's dog is still inside. What do I do?

Phone the facility first and ask two specific things: where the residents are being taken, and whether the animal is travelling with them or has to be collected, and by when. Do not drive to a building that has already been evacuated and try to get in yourself; the person who can open a door is the one you need on the phone, and a facility under an evacuation order may have nobody in it. If nobody answers, there are three routes that do not run through the front desk. The State Long-Term Care Ombudsman covers nursing homes and assisted living alike, because 42 U.S.C. 3002(35) defines a long-term care facility to include "any other adult care home, including an assisted living facility, similar to a facility or institution described in subparagraphs (A) through (C)", and every state runs an office under 42 U.S.C. 3058g. The state licensing and certification agency is the second, and for a Medicare or Medicaid nursing facility its contact information is required to be on the facility's own emergency communication plan under 42 CFR 483.73(c)(2)(ii). The third is the emergency management office for the county the building sits in. If the animal is confirmed alone in a building and nobody is going in, that is a welfare-check and rescue request rather than a facility question, and our page on how to request a pet welfare check or rescue covers who takes that request and what makes one actionable. We cannot tell you what any of these offices will do, and nothing on this page is a promise that an animal will be retrieved.

Does the PETS Act cover a nursing home's or assisted living community's pets?

Read against its own text, no, and this is worth knowing precisely because the Act is cited so widely. The Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act of 2006, Public Law 109-308, is titled "To amend the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act to ensure that State and local emergency preparedness operational plans address the needs of individuals with household pets and service animals following a major disaster or emergency." Its operative section provides that in approving standards for state and local emergency preparedness operational plans, "the Director shall ensure that such plans take into account the needs of individuals with household pets and service animals prior to, during, and following a major disaster or emergency." A later section authorises financial contributions to states and local authorities for animal emergency preparedness purposes, and another adds federal essential assistance for the "provision of rescue, care, shelter, and essential needs" both to individuals with household pets and service animals and to those animals. Every one of those provisions reaches a government emergency plan or a federal assistance programme. None of them is addressed to a private facility's own emergency plan. Thirty-one other pages on this site name the PETS Act, counted case-insensitively across the article source files on August 24, 2026, which is why we are saying plainly where it stops. What a court would do with any of this is not a question we answer; that is one for a lawyer licensed in your state, found through that state's bar referral service or the legal aid organisation serving the county.

Is an emotional support animal treated like a service animal in a care facility?

Not under the ADA, and the regulation says so inside the definition itself rather than in a footnote. 28 CFR 35.104 provides that a service animal "means any dog that is individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of an individual with a disability," that "Other species of animals, whether wild or domestic, trained or untrained, are not service animals for the purposes of this definition", and, in the definition's closing sentence, that "The crime deterrent effects of an animal's presence and the provision of emotional support, well-being, comfort, or companionship do not constitute work or tasks for the purposes of this definition." Then read the provision families almost never reach: 28 CFR 35.136(e) provides that "A public entity is not responsible for the care or supervision of a service animal", and its twin for privately operated facilities at 28 CFR 36.302(c)(5) provides that "A public accommodation is not responsible for the care or supervision of a service animal." So even where the access right is at its strongest, nobody at the facility is obliged by that rule to feed, walk or evacuate the animal, and somebody still has to. Which half of the ADA reaches a particular building depends on who operates it, and we are not going to assign a category to a facility we have not seen. Housing law is a separate body of law with its own analysis, and the federal guidance on assistance animals in housing was withdrawn in 2025 and the withdrawal published in the Federal Register in 2026, so most articles you will find on that half are out of date; our post-disaster rental housing page carries the current picture with the primary documents. If a disability accommodation is what is actually at stake, that is a question for a lawyer or a fair housing agency, not for a preparedness site. If you do not have a lawyer, your state bar association's lawyer referral service and the legal aid organisation serving your county are the two routes that need no disaster and no declaration to use.

Can a facility have a pet policy at all, or say the animal cannot come?

One of the three states we read requires a facility to have a written pet policy and writes out what it must contain. Virginia's standards for licensed assisted living facilities, at 22VAC40-73-840(A), provide that "Each assisted living facility shall develop and implement a written policy regarding pets living on the premises that will ensure the safety and well-being of all residents and staff." Where pets are allowed, the same section requires the policy to state the types permitted and the conditions, and requires that "Before being allowed to live on the premises, pets shall have had all recommended or required immunizations and shall be certified by a licensed veterinarian to be free of diseases transmittable to humans." That is Virginia and it is a licensing standard rather than a statute; your state may have written something different or nothing at all. What this site will not do is tell you whether a particular policy is lawful, whether a facility has to make an exception, or what would happen if you challenged one. Those are legal questions and we are not lawyers. If it matters enough to fight about, the routes are a lawyer licensed in that state, the state licensing agency, and the State Long-Term Care Ombudsman, whose statutory job under 42 U.S.C. 3058g includes complaints "made by, or on behalf of, residents". What we would ask for first, before any of that, is the written policy itself and the emergency plan, because in two of the three states we read, the rule itself names people outside the staff who may read the plan: California names any responsible party for a resident, and Virginia names residents' families and legal representatives.

Are birds, fish or reptiles a reasonable pet for someone in a care community?

There is published public health guidance on exactly this and it is worth reading before the question becomes emotional. The 2022 compendium on non-traditional pets published by the National Association of State Public Health Veterinarians with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states: "Do not keep reptiles in childcare centers, nursery schools, primary schools, or other facilities with children younger than 5 years old or facilities that care for older adults and those with weakened immune systems (such as long-term care facilities and nursing homes)." The compendium repeats that same instruction about facilities for three further groups: amphibians, fish and other aquatic animals; backyard poultry; and pet rodents and, in its own parenthetical, some other small mammals such as hedgehogs. That guidance is about keeping such an animal in such a setting, and it is a recommendation from a veterinary public health body rather than a licensing rule. It is also not a judgement about any individual, and this site does not assess whether anybody is able to care for an animal. Our page on where exotic pets are accepted during an evacuation carries the compendium's wording in full alongside what it does and does not cover.

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Sources

We are not veterinarians, and we would rather you check these than take our word for anything. Every claim above traces to one of them. For your own animal, your vet is the expert, not this page.