Texas Fair Housing Act: State Rules Explained (2026)

Texas did not expand the list of people protected from housing discrimination when it wrote its own fair housing statute. The Texas Fair Housing Act, codified at Texas Property Code Chapter 301, prohibits discrimination based on the same seven classes covered by the federal Fair Housing Act: race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, and familial status. Texas added one meaningful protection beyond those seven — discrimination based on hair texture or a protective hairstyle such as braids, locs, or twists is also barred under Chapter 301. Beyond that single addition, Texas stops where federal law stops, in sharp contrast to California, which layers on more than a dozen state-specific protected categories. Individual Texas cities fill some of that gap with their own ordinances, but there is no statewide equivalent to California's expanded list, and several statutory exemptions carve out situations where Chapter 301 doesn't apply at all.

Chapter 301 bars discrimination in the sale, rental, financing, or advertising of housing on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or familial status — the identical seven classes protected under the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. Texas adopted its own statute so the state could administer complaints locally rather than routing every case through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Texas Workforce Commission's Civil Rights Division (TWCCRD) enforces Chapter 301 as the state's HUD-certified Fair Housing Assistance Program agency, which means a complaint filed with TWCCRD carries the same substantive weight as one filed directly with HUD. A person alleging discrimination has one year from the date of the alleged act to file an administrative complaint with TWCCRD. A separate, longer clock runs for private lawsuits: under Property Code Section 301.151, an aggrieved person can sue in district court up to two years after the discriminatory act or the breach of a conciliation agreement, whichever is later, and that two-year period pauses while an administrative complaint on the same facts is pending. Familial status protection means a landlord or seller cannot refuse to rent or sell, or set different terms, because a household includes children under 18 — with one narrow federal carve-out for qualifying senior housing under the Housing for Older Persons Act, where at least 80% of occupied units must have one resident age 55 or older.

The one place Texas genuinely goes further than the federal Fair Housing Act is hair. Chapter 301 was amended to bar housing discrimination based on hair texture or a protective hairstyle commonly associated with a particular race or national origin, including braids, locs, twists, and similar styles. That protection did not exist under the original 1968 federal act and still isn't explicit in it, which makes Texas's language a genuine state-level expansion rather than a restatement. For a landlord, seller, or agent, this shows up in practice as a narrow but real rule: a decision to reject an applicant, steer a buyer, or write different lease terms because of a hairstyle tied to race or national origin is treated the same as a decision made because of race itself. It is a single-issue expansion, not a broad new category — Texas did not follow California's model of adding sexual orientation, gender identity, source of income, marital status, or ancestry as statewide protected classes.

Subchapter C of Chapter 301 carves out several exemptions. The best-known is the so-called "Mrs. Murphy" exemption: an owner who lives in one unit of a building with no more than four total units, and rents out the others directly, is exempt from most of Chapter 301's rental provisions. A separate exemption covers a private owner of three or fewer single-family homes at any one time, sold or rented without using a real estate broker or agent. Here's the trap: Property Code Section 301.041 makes clear that these exemptions do not excuse discriminatory advertising, and they do not apply once a broker or agent is involved. Sections 301.022 (discriminatory statements or publication), 301.026 (residential real estate-related transactions, meaning appraisal and lending), and 301.027 (brokerage services) all stay fully in force regardless of any owner-side exemption. In practice, that means an owner might be legally exempt from Chapter 301 on a duplex they occupy — but the moment they list it with a licensed agent, or the moment any party publishes discriminatory listing language, the exemption disappears for everyone involved in that transaction. Agents can never rely on a client's personal exemption to justify discriminatory marketing or unequal service.

Disability is the protected class that generates the most day-to-day compliance questions, because it comes with two affirmative duties the other six classes don't: reasonable accommodation (a change to a rule or policy) and reasonable modification (a physical change to the unit, typically at the tenant's expense). A landlord who won't waive a strict no-pets policy for a tenant with a documented disability-related need for an assistance animal, or who won't allow a tenant to install a grab bar at their own cost, can be liable under Chapter 301 even without any intent to discriminate. Assistance animals get their own sub-rule: a housing provider cannot charge a pet deposit, pet fee, or pet rent for a qualifying assistance animal. The analysis runs on a two-part test — does the person have a disability, and does the person have a disability-related need for the animal — and if both answers are yes, a reasonable accommodation is generally required unless it would impose an undue financial burden or fundamentally alter the housing provider's operations. One nuance worth knowing for 2026: after HUD's 2026 rescission of its 2020 assistance-animal guidance, standard pet deposits and pet rent can once again be applied to an emotional-support animal that isn't individually task-trained, while a task-trained service animal remains fee-exempt — a distinction agents should flag to landlord clients rather than assume away.

Outside of hair texture, Texas has not added sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, source of income, ancestry, or age as statewide protected classes under the Fair Housing Act — all categories California adds through its own Fair Employment and Housing Act and Unruh Civil Rights Act. A Texas landlord who refuses a Section 8 voucher holder or declines to rent to a same-sex couple is not violating Chapter 301 anywhere the state law applies on its own. Several Texas cities close part of that gap with local ordinances. TWCCRD's own intake process acknowledges this directly: the agency will not accept a housing discrimination complaint for property located in Austin, Corpus Christi, Dallas, Fort Worth, or Garland, because those five cities operate their own HUD-certified Fair Housing Assistance Program agencies with locally expanded protected classes that can include sexual orientation, gender identity, or source of income. An agent working a listing inside one of those five cities is operating under a materially different, broader rule than an agent working the same transaction in a suburb thirty minutes away, and needs to know which set of rules applies before advising a client on what they can and cannot ask or require.

A discriminatory housing practice under Chapter 301 exposes a respondent to real money on two separate tracks. Through TWCCRD's administrative process, the commission can order actual damages, injunctive relief, and reasonable attorney fees, and it can assess a civil penalty of up to $10,000 against a respondent previously found to have committed a discriminatory housing practice. Through a private civil action under Section 301.151, a court can award the same categories of relief plus court costs to the prevailing party. For a licensed agent, there's a second, separate exposure that has nothing to do with TWCCRD: your license itself. Texas Occupations Code Section 1101.652 lists discrimination as an independent ground for the Texas Real Estate Commission to suspend or revoke a license, and its list of protected categories is actually broader than Chapter 301's — it adds ancestry on top of race, color, religion, sex, disability, familial status, and national origin, and it specifically calls out steering a buyer or tenant toward or away from a neighborhood based on those characteristics. A TWCCRD finding, a HUD finding, or a private lawsuit judgment can all trigger a parallel TREC complaint, and TREC's disciplinary process doesn't require a criminal conviction or even a TWCCRD finding first — it can act on the underlying conduct directly. The practical risk for most agents isn't an overt refusal to work with someone — it's steering: subtly recommending different neighborhoods, schools, or price ranges based on assumptions about a buyer's race, family status, or national origin, even with good intentions. Chapter 301 treats steering as its own violation, whether the agent is the listing agent, buyer's agent, or acting as an intermediary between both sides of a deal, and the same duty of equal treatment runs through TREC's rules on agency conduct. Listing language carries its own exposure, too — phrases like "perfect for a young professional" or "walking distance to churches" can trigger a Chapter 301 complaint independent of how the transaction was actually handled, and it can overlap with liability under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act when the language misrepresents who a property is available to. Day One's Texas practice exams pull fair housing and steering questions from the same TREC-weighted topic mix as the real sales agent exam, so you see Chapter 301 scenarios in roughly the proportion they actually appear on test day.