Michigan Source of Income Discrimination Ban Law 2025

Michigan's source-of-income protection wasn't a single law. It arrived as a package of five bills, House Bills 4062 and 4063, and Senate Bills 205, 206, and 207, all enacted together and taking effect April 2, 2025.

[Cite: Fair Housing Center of Southeast & Mid Michigan, "FACT SHEET: Source of Income Protections in Rental Housing in Michigan"]

Those five bills became Public Acts 199, 200, 178, 179, and 180 of 2024, respectively.

[Cite: Michigan Legislature, bill records for HB 4062, HB 4063, SB 205, SB 206, SB 207 (2023-2024 session)]

The protected category covers benefit and subsidy programs: housing assistance, including Housing Choice Vouchers, public assistance, emergency rental assistance, veterans' benefits, Social Security and Supplemental Security Income, retirement programs, child support, and other programs administered by a federal, state, local, or nonprofit entity.

[Cite: Michigan House Fiscal Agency, legislative analysis of HB 4062 and HB 4063]

Income derived illegally is explicitly excluded from this protection.

[Cite: Michigan House Fiscal Agency, legislative analysis of HB 4062 and HB 4063]

The law's general application is tied to a landlord's total unit count: it applies to a landlord with 5 or more rental units in Michigan.

[Cite: Fair Housing Center of Southeast & Mid Michigan, "FACT SHEET: Source of Income Protections in Rental Housing in Michigan"]

A landlord operating fewer than 5 units in the state falls outside that threshold. A landlord researching this law independently should confirm which specific bill section this threshold sits within, since the primary legislative text wasn't directly accessible for this article; the figure is confirmed here through a fair housing organization's published fact sheet rather than the bill text itself.

House Bill 4063, the piece of this package that amended the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act specifically, carries its own set of exemptions, distinct from the general unit-count threshold.

[Cite: Michigan House Fiscal Agency, legislative analysis of HB 4062 and HB 4063]

Those exemptions cover a building with up to two units where the owner or their spouse, parent, child, or sibling resides in one of the units; a single-family dwelling where the lessor or a close relative resides; and a unit an owner or lessor rents out for up to 12 months, provided they occupied it as their own home for at least the 3 months immediately before renting it out.

[Cite: Michigan House Fiscal Agency, legislative analysis of HB 4062 and HB 4063]

A landlord who qualifies for House Bill 4063's owner-occupied exemption isn't automatically exempt from House Bill 4062's separate landlord-tenant provisions, and a landlord under the 5-unit threshold on the general side isn't automatically exempt from the civil rights act's own terms if they don't independently meet its specific owner-occupied criteria.

[Cite: Michigan House Fiscal Agency, legislative analysis of HB 4062 and HB 4063]

That's the single most important structural point this law creates for a compliance review. A property owner needs to check eligibility against each statute's own exemption language separately, rather than assuming one exemption determination settles the question for the entire package.

House Bill 4062 gives a tenant a private right of action against a landlord who violates this law, with damages set at either the tenant's actual damages or up to 4.5 times the monthly rent, whichever is greater, plus court costs and reasonable attorney's fees.

[Cite: Michigan House Fiscal Agency, legislative analysis of HB 4062 and HB 4063]

That 4.5-times-rent figure functions as a floor a tenant can recover even without proving a larger actual-damages amount, which is a meaningful exposure figure for a landlord in a higher-rent market.

Separately, House Bill 4063 is enforced through the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, which investigates complaints, and through private civil actions in circuit court, with damages that can include reasonable attorney's fees.

[Cite: Michigan House Fiscal Agency, legislative analysis of HB 4062 and HB 4063]

A tenant facing source-of-income discrimination isn't limited to choosing only one of these two paths; the landlord-tenant lawsuit route and the civil rights complaint route exist as separate mechanisms tied to their respective underlying statutes.

Once a landlord has received all the information required to process a housing-assistance or voucher application, that approval has to be completed within 30 days.

[Cite: Fair Housing Center of Southeast & Mid Michigan, "FACT SHEET: Source of Income Protections in Rental Housing in Michigan"]

A landlord who delays processing an otherwise-complete voucher application well past that 30-day window, without a documented reason tied to missing information, is creating the kind of pattern that could support a discrimination claim, even without an outright refusal to rent.

Adding source of income as a protected category to the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act specifically, rather than leaving this solely as a landlord-tenant statute, gives tenants access to the state's existing civil rights complaint infrastructure through the Michigan Department of Civil Rights.

[Cite: Michigan Advance, "Legislature passes rent-related bills during lame duck to bar income-based discrimination"]

That's a different institutional path than a standalone landlord-tenant statute would have provided on its own, and it's part of why this package needed both a civil-rights-focused bill and a landlord-tenant-focused bill working together.

Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed this package of bills on December 30, 2024, but the protections didn't become effective until April 2, 2025, roughly three months later.

[Cite: Logical Property Management, "Senate Bills 205-207: Michigan's New Anti-Discrimination Laws for Landlords"]

That gap gave landlords, property managers, and the screening systems many of them use time to update application policies and staff training before the law became enforceable.

A screening policy that flags an applicant negatively simply because part or all of their rent will come from a voucher or benefit program, rather than direct employment income, is the core practice this law targets.

[Cite: Michigan Department of Civil Rights, press release on the source-of-income law]

A landlord can still evaluate an applicant's overall ability to pay rent, including verifying that a voucher or benefit amount actually covers the required portion of rent, but can't treat the source of that income, as opposed to its sufficiency, as a disqualifying factor on its own.

Because a tenant can pursue either the private lawsuit path or the MDCR complaint path, and because each carries a different evidentiary and procedural posture, a landlord's own documentation of why a specific application was denied, tied to legitimate, non-income-source criteria, matters under both potential enforcement routes.

[Cite: Michigan House Fiscal Agency, legislative analysis of HB 4062 and HB 4063]

A denial decision that isn't clearly documented against neutral criteria is harder to defend regardless of which enforcement path a tenant eventually chooses.

A landlord or management company operating a mix of larger buildings and smaller, owner-occupied properties across Michigan needs a policy that distinguishes between them, since the general 5-unit threshold and House Bill 4063's separate owner-occupied carve-outs won't necessarily classify every property the same way.

[Cite: Fair Housing Center of Southeast & Mid Michigan, "FACT SHEET: Source of Income Protections in Rental Housing in Michigan"]

A single, portfolio-wide screening policy that assumes uniform coverage across every property risks either over-restricting a genuinely exempt small property or under-complying on a covered one.

The practical starting point is auditing every Michigan property in a portfolio against both exemption structures separately, the general unit-count threshold and House Bill 4063's owner-occupied carve-outs, rather than applying a single coverage determination across an entire portfolio.

Updating screening criteria and staff training to treat source of income as a neutral factor, evaluated only for whether it sufficiently covers rent, and building a documented 30-day processing standard for voucher and assistance applications, closes the two most direct compliance gaps this law creates.