A year ago, on 1 August 2025, Minneapolis added height and weight to the protected classes of its Civil Rights Ordinance. The City Council had approved the amendments unanimously on 1 May, Mayor Jacob Frey approved them on 5 May (Ordinance No. 2025-022), and on the day they took effect the city announced that anyone “living, working or visiting Minneapolis” now had new protections in employment, housing, education, business, professional organisations, public accommodations and public services.
That is worth reporting a year later rather than on the day, because two details only become visible once you read the text next to the city’s own explanation of it. One of them is better than almost anything else on the books. The other is the reason this article exists.
The good part: it protects the impression, not the number
Most legal protection for fat people runs through a diagnosis. You get a claim to the extent that you can be described as impaired, disordered or ill. We have written about that trade in Weight Discrimination: What You Can Actually Do, and it is the central weakness of the disability route.
Minneapolis does not do that. The city’s own protected class page defines the ground plainly: height means how tall you are, weight means how much you weigh, and this “includes actual numbers and how people see you, such as tall or short, heavy or light.”
That second half is the important one, and it is in the ordinance text itself. The definition, as quoted by the law firm Ogletree Deakins from the signed amendment, reads: “A numerical measurement of body height, body weight, or body size. Height encompasses, but is not limited to, an impression of a person as tall or short, regardless of numerical measurement. Weight encompasses, but is not limited to, an impression of a person’s weight (fat, thin, etc.), regardless of numerical measurement.” Employment lawyers reading it point out what follows: future claims may mirror the “regarded as” analysis familiar from the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Minnesota Human Rights Act, which lets someone bring a claim on perceived rather than actual status.
This matters because discrimination does not consult a scale. Nobody is turned down for a job at a BMI cut-off. They are turned down because someone in the room decided they looked lazy, unhealthy, unrepresentative, or “not a fit”. The harm attaches to the attribution, and Minneapolis attached the protection to the attribution as well. Michigan, which has protected weight since 1977, and New York City, which added it in 2023, protect the characteristic. Minneapolis protects being seen as having it.
The part that cancels a good deal of it
The same amendments contain a carve-out. According to employment-law analyses of the signed ordinance, the protections relating to height and weight do not override actions an employer takes to comply with other federal, state or local law, and the ordinance further clarifies that it does not prohibit covered entities from offering voluntary wellness program incentives that promote healthy weight management.
Read those two sentences together. An employer in Minneapolis may not treat you worse because they think you are fat. The same employer may attach money to you becoming less so, as a benefit, on a voluntary basis, with the city’s explicit blessing.
We were not able to open the signed ordinance PDF at the city’s legislative document server; it is behind a bot check that blocks direct retrieval. So this clause is reported here on the authority of two independent law-firm analyses of that document, published three weeks apart and each linking to it: Stinson LLP writes that the ordinance “further clarifies that it does not prohibit covered entities from offering voluntary wellness program incentives that promote healthy weight management”, and Saul Ewing writes that “the ordinance makes clear that employers are permitted to offer incentives supporting weight management as part of a voluntary program without violating the law.” What we can verify directly is the other half of the point: the city’s public-facing protected class page, the page an ordinary resident would read to find out what the law now does for them, lists the exceptions for essential job duties, undue hardship and direct threat. It does not mention the wellness carve-out at all.
Why this is not a technicality
An anti-discrimination ground says something specific: this characteristic is not a legitimate basis for treating people differently, and it is not something people can or should be asked to change. That is the definition Minneapolis itself uses. A workplace incentive for “healthy weight management” says the opposite, in the same building, from the same employer, with money attached.
The two messages do not cancel out neatly. The employer who runs the incentive scheme is the employer who later decides whether you are “a fit”. Voluntary is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it is doing it in a room where one party sets the salary.
There is a defensible reason for the exception, and it is not hidden: employers in the United States operate wellness programmes under a thicket of federal rules, and a city ordinance that made them unlawful would put employers in conflict with law they cannot opt out of. The ordinance says as much in its own compliance clause. That explains the carve-out. It does not make the contradiction go away. It relocates it: the city has protected the ground as far as city law reaches, and the incentive structure sits in the part it does not reach.
What Minneapolis actually gets you, and where it stops
Height and weight can still be considered where a person cannot be accommodated without changing the main purpose of a programme or service, or where health or safety would be at risk. Employers additionally have a defence where height or weight prevents someone from performing essential job duties, where accommodation would be an undue hardship, or where there is a direct threat to health or safety. Those are conventional limits and they are the same ones disability law uses.
The reach is the notable part. Minneapolis covers employment, housing, education, business, professional organisations, public accommodations and public service, and applies to any employer with an employee performing services in the city, wherever the employer sits. With this, Minneapolis joins Michigan, New York City, Washington DC, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Madison, Urbana and Binghamton on a short list.
The German question this raises early
Germany has no weight ground at all. The General Equal Treatment Act (AGG) does not list body weight, and fat people in Germany argue through disability, general civil law, or nothing. A parliamentary motion to add body weight, among other characteristics, had its first reading in the Bundestag in June 2026 (Drucksache 21/4538, tabled by the opposition group Die Linke). It is a proposal, not law, and we covered it when it was introduced.
Here is what Minneapolis makes worth asking now rather than later. Germany does not have to invent an employer weight-incentive structure; it already has one, in statute. Under Section 20b of the Fifth Book of the Social Code, the statutory health insurers fund workplace health promotion, specifically the building of health-promoting structures inside firms. Section 65a governs bonuses for health-conscious behaviour, and its second paragraph reads: the health insurer “should also provide in its bylaws that, for workplace health promotion measures run by employers, both the employer and the participating insured persons receive a bonus.”
Whether any given programme targets weight is a matter of programme design, not of the statute, and we are not claiming the statute mandates it. The point is structural. If body weight became a protected characteristic in the AGG, it would land on top of a subsidised, legally anchored system of employer-side health incentives that nobody has yet had to test against a weight ground, because there is no weight ground to test it against. Minneapolis had to answer that question and answered it with an exception. Germany would have to answer it too, and the time to ask is while the text is still being drafted.
If you are dealing with this now
- Know which door you are using. In most places the weight ground does not exist and the argument runs through disability. What that costs you is set out in our cornerstone on weight discrimination.
- Separate the offer from the assessment. A wellness incentive is not evidence of discrimination. Being passed over afterwards, by the people who ran it, may be. Keep the two records separately and keep them dated.
- Medical settings are a different fight. See What to Do When a Doctor Blames Everything on Your Weight and How to Find a Weight-Neutral Doctor.
A law that bans discrimination on the basis of being seen as fat, and in the next clause protects the programme that pays you to stop being fat, is not a failure. It is a good law with the shape of the problem still visible in it. That shape is worth naming before the next jurisdiction copies the text.
Sources: City of Minneapolis, “Minneapolis expands anti-discrimination protections in Civil Rights Ordinance”, 1 August 2025, https://www.minneapolismn.gov/news/2025/august/new-civil-rights-protections · City of Minneapolis Department of Civil Rights, “Protected classes”, retrieved 15 August 2026, https://www.minneapolismn.gov/government/departments/civil-rights/complaint-investigations/protected-class · Stinson LLP, “Minneapolis Amends Its Civil Rights Ordinance to Expand Protections in Employment Decisions”, 16 June 2025, https://www.stinson.com/newsroom-publications-minneapolis-amends-its-civil-rights-ordinance-to-expand-protections-in-employment-decisions · Saul Ewing LLP, “Minneapolis Expands Anti-discrimination Ordinance”, 12 June 2025, https://www.saul.com/insights/blog/minneapolis-expands-anti-discrimination-ordinance · Ogletree Deakins, “Local Politics Makes a Big Splash”, 17 June 2025 (quoting the ordinance definitions), https://ogletree.com/insights-resources/blog-posts/local-politics-makes-a-big-splash-amendments-to-minneapolis-civil-rights-ordinance-provide-further-protection/ · Jackson Lewis P.C., “Minneapolis Anti-Discrimination Law Revised”, 22 May 2025 · Signed ordinance No. 2025-022, City of Minneapolis legislative information system, document 39068 (linked by all four firms; not directly retrievable, the server returns a bot challenge) · Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, Act 453 of 1976 · NYC Local Law 61 of 2023 · Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksache 21/4538, first reading June 2026 · SGB V § 20b and § 65a, https://dejure.org/gesetze/SGB_V/65a.html