Condo Special Assessment Rules in Florida (2026)

Updated September 17, 2026. Quick answer: For a Florida condominium, the statute never says in one sentence that the board can levy an ordinary special assessment without an owner vote, but it structurally implies exactly that: the one membership check the statute does impose on rising assessments, the 115%-of-last-year substitute-budget process, expressly excludes one-time special-assessment items from its own calculation, and a unit-owner vote is required only for the narrower case of funding a Structural Integrity Reserve Study item by special assessment, line of credit, or loan (Fla. Stat. § 718.112(2)(f)2.c.(I)). Florida’s separate homeowners’ association statute is more direct: it lets the board levy an assessment at a board meeting so long as the meeting notice says assessments will be considered (§ 720.303(2)(c)2), no membership vote required by that statute either.

Key statute: Fla. Stat. § 718.112 (Bylaws, including the board’s assessment/notice powers and the post-Surfside Structural Integrity Reserve Study mandate at (2)(g)) and § 718.116 (Assessments; liability; lien and priority; interest; collection), both Florida Condominium Act; § 553.899 (mandatory Milestone Inspection for aging condo/co-op buildings, enacted after the June 2021 Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside); Fla. Stat. § 720.303 governs the separate, non-condominium Homeowners’ Association Act, which has no equivalent reserve-study mandate

How Florida lets an association approve it

Fla. Stat. § 718.112(2)(i) requires only that “the manner of collecting from the unit owners their shares of the common expenses shall be stated in the bylaws,” setting no unit-owner vote threshold for a special assessment itself. The one owner-facing check the statute does impose, the 115%-of-prior-year substitute-budget mechanism at § 718.112(2)(e)2, applies only to the annual operating budget and by its own terms “shall exclude… anticipated expenses of the association which the board does not expect to be incurred on a regular or annual basis for the repair, maintenance, or replacement of the items listed in paragraph (g)”; a true one-time special assessment for those reserve items falls outside that 115% owner check entirely. A membership vote is required only in the narrower case of funding a Structural Integrity Reserve Study (SIRS) item: § 718.112(2)(f)2.c.(I) states “[r]eserves for the items listed in paragraph (g) may be funded by regular assessments, special assessments, lines of credit, or loans. A special assessment, a line of credit, or a loan under this sub-subparagraph requires the approval of a majority vote of the total voting interests of the association.” For Florida’s separate homeowners’ associations under Chapter 720 (non-condominium subdivisions), the statute is more direct: § 720.303(2)(c)2 states “[a]n assessment may not be levied at a board meeting unless the notice of the meeting includes a statement that assessments will be considered and the nature of the assessments,” which by its own structure lets the board levy the assessment at that meeting with no membership vote required by the statute itself.

The notice you’re owed

For condominiums, § 718.112(2)(c)1 requires that “[w]ritten notice of a meeting at which a nonemergency special assessment… will be considered must be mailed, delivered, or electronically transmitted to the unit owners and posted conspicuously on the condominium property at least 14 days before the meeting,” with an affidavit of compliance filed in the association’s official records, and separately that “[n]otice of any meeting in which regular or special assessments against unit owners are to be considered must specifically state that assessments will be considered and provide the estimated cost and description of the purposes for such assessments.” Once levied, § 718.116(10) adds that “[t]he specific purpose or purposes of any special assessment… shall be set forth in a written notice of such assessment sent or delivered to each unit owner,” and restricts use of the money: “[t]he funds collected pursuant to a special assessment shall be used only for the specific purpose or purposes set forth in such notice,” with any excess becoming common surplus. Florida’s Homeowners’ Association Act imposes the identical 14-day rule for HOAs at § 720.303(2)(c)2: written notice “must be mailed, delivered, or electronically transmitted to the members and parcel owners and posted conspicuously on the property… not less than 14 days before the meeting.”

Paying it: plan, interest, and late fees

Fla. Stat. § 718.116(3) sets a statutory interest ceiling and late-fee cap: “[a]ssessments and installments on assessments which are not paid when due bear interest at the rate provided in the declaration, from the due date until paid[; t]he rate may not exceed the rate allowed by law, and, if no rate is provided in the declaration, interest accrues at the rate of 18 percent per year,” and “[i]f provided by the declaration or bylaws, the association may, in addition to such interest, charge an administrative late fee of up to the greater of $25 or 5 percent of each delinquent installment for which the payment is late.” Payments are applied in a fixed statutory order: interest first, then the late fee, then collection costs and attorney fees, then the delinquent assessment itself. No provision in Chapter 718 gives an owner a right to demand an installment payment plan for a special assessment; that is left to the declaration. There is likewise no statutory dollar cap on the total amount of a special assessment itself, only the purpose-restriction described above.

Fla. Stat. § 718.116(5)(a)-(b): the association holds a lien on each condominium parcel for unpaid assessments that “relate[s] back to the recording of the original declaration of condominium” (subordinate to first mortgages of record, which instead take priority from the claim of lien’s own recording), and “[t]he lien is not effective 1 year after the claim of lien was recorded unless, within that time, an action to enforce the lien is commenced,” a period “automatically extended for any length of time during which the association is prevented from filing a foreclosure action by an automatic stay resulting from a bankruptcy petition.”

Does Florida require a reserve study?

Yes, for condominiums, and this is the state’s key post-Surfside differentiator. Fla. Stat. § 718.112(2)(g)1 requires that “[a] residential condominium association must have a structural integrity reserve study completed at least every 10 years after the condominium’s creation for each building on the condominium property that is three habitable stories or higher,” covering the roof, load-bearing structure, fireproofing, plumbing, electrical systems, waterproofing, windows/exterior doors, and any other component with a deferred-maintenance or replacement cost over $25,000 (inflation-adjusted), performed or verified by a licensed engineer, architect, or certified reserve specialist. A related but separate statute, § 553.899(3)(a), requires a “milestone inspection” (a structural life-safety inspection, not the same document as the SIRS) for the same class of buildings, “three habitable stories or more,” performed “by December 31 of the year in which the building reaches 30 years of age… and every 10 years thereafter,” with catch-up deadlines of December 31, 2024 or 2025 for buildings that already passed 30 years before, or shortly after, July 1, 2022. Reserve-waiver authority has been sharply curtailed since Surfside: § 718.112(2)(f)2.b lets a unit-owner-controlled association vote, by majority of total voting interests, “to provide no reserves or less reserves,” but “[f]or a budget adopted on or after December 31, 2024, the members of a unit-owner-controlled association that must obtain a structural integrity reserve study may not determine to provide no reserves or less reserves… for items listed in paragraph (g),” with a narrow exception only for a multicondominium association that has division-approved alternative funding. Florida’s separate, non-condominium Homeowners’ Association Act has no counterpart: § 720.303(6)(b) states only that “the budget may include reserve accounts,” making reserves entirely optional for a Chapter 720 HOA unless the membership affirmatively votes them in under § 720.303(6)(d).

Honest gaps

We read §§ 718.111, 718.112, 718.115, 718.116, and 718.103 (condos), § 553.899 (milestone inspections), and § 720.303 (HOAs) directly from the official Florida Legislature statutes site, but did not review the entirety of Chapter 718 (it runs through § 718.128) or Chapter 720, and did not independently review Chapter 719 (cooperatives), which § 553.899 also covers. We did not verify whether any individual county or city (Miami-Dade and Broward both had pre-existing 40-year recertification ordinances predating the statewide 2022 law) layers an additional local inspection requirement on top of § 553.899; that is a real possibility this session did not check. The board-can-levy-without-a-vote conclusion for ordinary condo special assessments is our own structural reading of the statute’s silence plus its explicit carve-outs (the 115% exclusion and the SIRS-specific vote requirement), not a single sentence in the statute that states it as a general rule the way § 720.303(2)(c)2 does for HOAs; a court or the specific declaration and bylaws of a given condominium could still impose a stricter vote requirement than the statutory floor described here. Note also that an earlier automated summarization pass on this same statute (before the underlying raw HTML was fetched and read directly) asserted that Florida condo law affirmatively requires a majority owner vote for any special assessment; that claim does not survive contact with the statute’s actual text, which imposes that vote only for SIRS-item funding, and it was discarded in favor of the verbatim quotes above.

Source note. Read directly from the Florida Legislature’s own statutes site on September 17, 2026.

Related: HOA rules in a 55+ community · how a special-assessment foreclosure actually works · lump sum vs. a payment plan.

General information drawn from each state’s own statutes as read at its official legislature or code-publisher site (or a verbatim codified mirror where noted), not legal advice. Special-assessment law is state law, and every association’s own declaration and bylaws add rules on top of the statutory floor described here. We are not a law firm and this is not legal advice.