Florida Condo Association Laws: The Chapter 718 Compliance Guide
Florida condo association laws live in one place: Chapter 718, Florida Statutes — the Florida Condominium Act. If you serve on a condominium board, every power you exercise and every obligation you carry flows from it, and since the Surfside collapse the Legislature has rewritten large parts of it in four consecutive sessions: SB 4-D (2022), SB 154 (2023), HB 1021 (2024), and HB 913 (2025). Milestone inspections, structural integrity reserve studies, website posting, expanded director education, and criminal penalties for records fraud are all now part of the statute. The compliance bar for a self-managed condo board has never been higher.
This guide walks Chapter 718 by compliance area — what the condo association Florida statutes actually require, where volunteer boards fall short, and how a modern association platform covers each area. The official statute is linked at the bottom.
What Chapter 718 is — and how it differs from Chapter 720
Chapter 718 governs every condominium association in the state of Florida. It sits above your declaration of condominium, articles, and bylaws, and no governing document can override it. One note on names: you'll see it cited as the Florida Condominium Act, Florida condo association law, or lumped into "Florida condominium and community association law" — all of it means Chapter 718. And if you've been searching for your "condo HOA": legally there's no such thing in Florida. Homeowners' associations are governed by Chapter 720, the Florida Homeowners' Association Act, cooperatives by Chapter 719, and condominiums by Chapter 718 — the rules differ in important ways, so start by confirming which chapter your community actually lives under (your declaration will say).
Two structural differences from HOA law matter most. First, condominiums are actively regulated: the DBPR's Division of Florida Condominiums, Timeshares, and Mobile Homes licenses, investigates, and arbitrates — Florida HOAs have no equivalent regulator. Second, because unit owners share ownership of the building itself, Chapter 718 layers on building-safety obligations (milestone inspections, reserve studies, mandatory structural reserves) that Chapter 720 boards never see.
The post-Surfside reform wave: 2022–2025
SB 4-D (2022) — Milestone inspections and SIRS. Created mandatory milestone structural inspections and the structural integrity reserve study (SIRS) for buildings three habitable stories or higher.
SB 154 (2023) — The glitch-fix. Refined the milestone timeline (30 years, with local authority to require 25 for coastal buildings), clarified which buildings need a SIRS, and tightened who may perform them.
HB 1021 (2024) — "Condo 3.0." Expanded director education (a 4-hour curriculum plus written certification, valid 7 years), extended the website-posting requirement from 150+ units down to 25+ units effective January 1, 2026, criminalized records fraud and kickbacks, and expanded DBPR enforcement authority.
HB 913 (2025) — SIRS deadlines and funding flexibility. Extended the SIRS completion deadline (December 31, 2025, or alongside a milestone inspection due by December 31, 2026 — but no later), raised the reserve-item threshold from
0,000 to
5,000 (indexed for inflation), allowed reserve funding by special assessment, line of credit, or loan with majority approval, required 15-year retention of milestone and SIRS reports, and required SIRS providers to disclose if they intend to bid on the resulting repair work.
The direction of every one of these bills is the same: more documentation, more transparency, more money that must actually be in the bank. Boards running the building from a shared inbox and a spreadsheet are the ones the Legislature had in mind.
Chapter 718, broken down by compliance area
1. Board meetings and notice — §718.112
What the statute requires. Board meetings are open to all unit owners, with notice posted conspicuously on the condominium property at least 48 hours in advance. Meetings at which regular or special assessments will be considered require 14 days' mailed and posted notice. Owners have the right to speak on agenda items. Minutes are official records.
Where boards fall short. Same failure mode as every association: the notice that can't be proven. When an assessment is challenged, the first document requested is the notice and the affidavit of mailing — and "we posted it by the elevator" with no record rarely survives.
2. Official records and the 25-unit website rule — §718.111(12)
What the statute requires. Official records — governing documents, minutes, financial records, contracts, ballots, insurance policies, inspection reports — must be maintained for 7 years (milestone inspection and SIRS reports: 15 years), organized so they can actually be inspected, and made available within 10 working days of a written request. Since January 1, 2026, associations with 25 or more units must post digital copies of key records on a website or mobile app. HB 1021 made destroying or falsifying official records a criminal offense.
Where boards fall short. The 25-unit website rule quietly swept in hundreds of small self-managed buildings that never had to think about this before. And a 15-year retention window for structural reports outlives any single board — it has to live in a system, not in a treasurer's filing cabinet.
3. Director education and certification — §718.112(2)(d)
What the statute requires. New directors must, within 90 days of election or appointment, submit the written certification and complete the department-approved education curriculum (4 hours under HB 1021, covering inspections, reserves, elections, records, financial literacy, fines, and meetings). The certificate is valid for 7 years of uninterrupted service.
Where boards fall short. Nobody tracks the 90-day clock. The gap surfaces later, in an election dispute or a DBPR complaint, when the association is asked to produce certificates it never collected.
4. Annual financial reporting — §718.111(13)
What the statute requires. Within 90 days of fiscal year-end the association must prepare its annual financial report, with rigor scaled to revenue — from a report of cash receipts and expenditures for the smallest associations up to audited statements at $500,000 or more — and deliver it to owners on request.
Where boards fall short. Boards that don't watch revenue against the statutory tiers during the year discover in February that they owe an audit they haven't engaged a CPA for.
5. Fines and suspensions — §718.303
What the statute requires. Fines are capped at
00 per day,
,000 aggregate. Before any fine is levied the owner gets at least 14 days' written notice and a hearing before an independent committee — not the board. Unlike an HOA fine under Chapter 720, a condo fine may not become a lien on the unit.
Where boards fall short. The independent-committee requirement invalidates more condo fines than anything else, and boards routinely try to collect fines through the assessment ledger as if they were lienable. They aren't.
6. Assessments, liens, and estoppels — §718.116 and §718.121
What the statute requires. The association has a lien for unpaid assessments, interest (18% default), late fees (greater of 5 or 5% of the installment), and collection costs — but only after a 45-day notice of intent to record a lien, and foreclosure only after a further 45-day notice of intent to foreclose. Estoppel certificates are due within 10 business days of request, with capped fees.
Where boards fall short. Every step is procedural. A missing 45-day letter, an unproven mailing, or stacked charges above the statutory caps costs the association the lien — after the attorney fees are already spent.
7. Elections — §718.112(2)(d)
What the statute requires. Condo elections are far more formalized than HOA elections: a first notice at least 60 days before the election, candidate self-nomination at least 40 days out, a second notice with the ballot 14–34 days before, secret written ballots with signed outer envelopes, no floor nominations, and at least 20% of eligible voters must cast ballots for the election to be valid.
Where boards fall short. The 60/40/14 calendar is unforgiving — miss the first-notice date and the election is defective before a single ballot goes out. Contested condo elections go to mandatory DBPR arbitration, where the paper trail is the whole case.
8. Milestone inspections and SIRS — §553.899 and §718.112(2)(g)
What the statute requires. Buildings three habitable stories or higher need a milestone structural inspection at 30 years (25 if the local authority requires it for coastal buildings), then every 10 years after. The same buildings need a structural integrity reserve study every 10 years, and — the part with teeth — reserves for SIRS items must actually be funded: for budgets adopted after the statutory cutoff, boards can no longer waive or underfund structural reserves. HB 913 allows funding via special assessment, line of credit, or loan with majority approval, raised the reserve-item threshold to 5,000 (indexed), and set the final SIRS completion deadline at December 31, 2026 for associations pairing it with a milestone inspection.
Where boards fall short. This is the section that has produced the six-figure special assessments in the news. Boards that deferred reserves for decades are now required to fund them on a study's schedule. The only way the numbers work is a budget built years ahead — which requires the reserve study, the budget, and the assessment history to live in one coherent financial picture.
9. Disputes and DBPR oversight — §718.1255
What the statute requires. Many condo disputes — elections, records access, meetings — go to the DBPR's mandatory nonbinding arbitration or presuit mediation before anyone can sue. The Division can also investigate complaints and fine associations directly.
Where boards fall short. Arbitration is a documents contest. The association that can produce the notice, the minutes, the ballot envelopes, and the ledger wins; the one that can't, settles.
How The Good HOA helps Florida condo boards comply with Chapter 718
Official records and the website rule (§718.111(12)). Records live as structured, timestamped entries with a 10-year minimum retention horizon, and documents — including milestone and SIRS reports — are kept until you remove them, well past the 15-year statutory window. The community website add-on at <your-slug>.thegoodhoa.com is exactly the posting surface the 25-unit rule requires.
Meetings and notice (§718.112). Meeting notices, agendas, and minutes are timestamped records; residents are notified automatically, so the 48-hour and 14-day windows are provable, not anecdotal.
Fines with due process (§718.303). The fine workflow captures notice date, hearing date, committee members, and outcome — and because condo fines aren't lienable, they're tracked separately from the assessment ledger instead of polluting it.
Assessments, liens, estoppels (§718.116). Autopay collects maintenance fees, late fees apply uniformly by policy, the 45-day notices are templated and timestamped, and estoppel data is a button, not a research project. See collecting overdue dues without drama.
Elections (§718.112(2)(d)). The Voting module's Official polls are append-only and cryptographically sealed, with PDF/CSV exports for the records file — the paper trail arbitration asks for.
Reserves and the SIRS budget cliff (§718.112(2)(g)). The Financials module keeps reserve balances, budgets, and assessment history in one picture, so the board can see years ahead whether the SIRS schedule is funded — before it becomes a special-assessment emergency. See passing a special assessment without a riot and building a budget that survives the year.
Start a free 14-day trial of The Good HOA and import your unit roster, fee schedule, and historical records. The pattern across every post-Surfside reform is that Chapter 718 now assumes documentation discipline most volunteer boards never built — the platform's job is to make that discipline the default.
Regulator: Florida DBPR, Division of Florida Condominiums, Timeshares, and Mobile Homes — complaints, arbitration, and the director-education curriculum.
This article is a plain-language summary for condominium board members. It is not legal advice. Confirm specifics with your association's attorney — the Florida Legislature has amended Chapter 718 every session since 2022 and shows no sign of stopping. Statutory citations are current as of publication.