Miami, Florida
Miami emotional support animal letters.
An evaluation-based ESA letter from a Florida-licensed psychiatric provider, available in English or Spanish — issued only where clinically appropriate. $60.
An evaluation is required. A letter cannot be issued without one. The psychiatric evaluation comes first, and a letter follows only where the assessment supports it — which means it is possible to be evaluated and told a letter is not clinically appropriate.
The appointment can be in Spanish
More than half of Miami-Dade residents speak Spanish at home, and an evaluation is a conversation about symptoms, history and daily functioning — precisely the kind of discussion where a second language or an interpreter gets in the way.
Chabellys Payares is a native Spanish speaker and the evaluation can be conducted entirely in Spanish. There is more on Spanish-language care at psiquiatra en línea en Florida.
The letter itself is written in English, because that is what a Miami-Dade housing provider will be reading.
A rental market with real pressure behind it
Miami-Dade has among the tightest rental markets in the state, and that shapes how accommodation requests are received. Large managed buildings dominate the rental stock, most enforce written pet policies, and demand means landlords are rarely short of alternative applicants.
That pressure cuts both ways. It makes formal, well-documented requests more important, and it makes weak documentation more consequential — a management company with a queue of applicants has little incentive to work through an ambiguous letter from an unfamiliar website.
Under the Fair Housing Act and Florida Statute §760.27, a housing provider may request reliable information supporting the disability and the need for the specific animal where these are not readily apparent. They cannot require a particular form or a notarised document, and where an accommodation is granted they cannot charge pet fees, pet deposits or additional rent.
A caution specific to a market this size: the volume of ESA-selling websites targeting Miami is high, and so is landlord familiarity with them. Documentation from a named provider licensed in Florida, following an actual evaluation, is what distinguishes a request that gets processed from one that gets challenged.
How it works
A psychiatric evaluation comes first — 60 minutes by secure video, in English or Spanish. A letter follows only where the assessment supports it, and you will be told directly if it does not.
Patients across Miami, Miami Beach, Hialeah, Coral Gables, Doral, Kendall, Aventura and North Miami can be seen, along with anyone else physically located in Florida at the time of the appointment.
$60 for the ESA letter evaluation. The main ESA page sets out the law and the warning signs in full, and how to get an ESA letter in Florida walks through the steps.
Nearby: Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton and Pompano Beach.
Book online, call 954-692-7017, or text 954-531-5108.
Common questions
What you may be wondering.
Can the evaluation be done in Spanish? Yes. Chabellys Payares is a native Spanish speaker and the appointment can be conducted entirely in Spanish, with no interpreter. The letter is written in English, since that is what a housing provider will read.
My building has a strict no-pets policy. Does that end it? Not automatically. A reasonable accommodation request under Fair Housing law is assessed differently from a pet application, and a blanket no-pets policy does not by itself defeat one. A housing provider may still deny a request where the specific animal poses a direct threat to health, safety or property that cannot be addressed another way. No provider can guarantee how a particular building will decide.
Why not use one of the ESA websites advertising in Miami? Those documents typically come with no named Florida-licensed provider and no real evaluation, and Miami-Dade management companies have seen a great many of them. There is no ESA registry for anyone to check — none exists — so what a landlord assesses is whether a licensed clinician stands behind the letter.
In an emergency
Call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room. You can also call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Horizon Telepsychiatry is not an emergency service.
Horizon Telepsychiatry