What 2026 produced instead

The 2026 Regular Session had more association content than 2025, which is a low bar. It amounted to one bill, filed twice: HB 260 and SB 121, the condominium declaration-consents measure, which were 99.8% textually identical and both died in committee. Neither received a committee vote.

Beyond that, community associations appear in 2026 only as carve-outs inside bills about something else. SB 246 and HB 586, the two wholesaling and unsolicited-offer measures, both excluded from their reach “[a] maintenance or repair agreement entered into by a homeowners' association in a common interest community” and “[a] declaration of any covenants, conditions, or restrictions created in the formation of a homeowners' association, a group of condominium owners, or other common interest community.” Worth noting precisely: those carve-outs are existing law in Ala. Code ch. 8-42, carried forward without change markers, not something either bill would have created. Both bills died anyway.

The topics with no Alabama bill in either session

These are live legislative subjects in other states. In Alabama, across 2,018 bills in two regular sessions plus a special session, none was filed on any of them:

solar rights in HOAs · EV charging in HOAs · flag display · political signs · religious displays · pet restrictions · HOA short-term-rental restrictions or preemption · accessory dwelling units · reserve studies · condominium structural or milestone safety inspections · estoppel and resale certificates · transfer fees · HOA fining authority · board elections and director qualifications · architectural review · developer transition · manufactured-home community governance · HOA insurance mandates · assessments, liens and foreclosure under the HOA Act.

The post-Surfside condominium safety agenda that reshaped Florida and reached a dozen other states has not produced an Alabama bill in any form.

Where the change actually came from

This is the part that matters operationally, and it is the reason a null result is worth publishing rather than shrugging at. Alabama community-association law did change in this window — just not in Title 35.

Act 2026-495, effective August 1, 2026, rewrote parts of the Alabama Nonprofit Corporation Law at Title 10A, Chapter 3A. It abolished member derivative actions against nonprofit corporations outright, added a new ground on which a membership nonprofit may deny a records request, and repealed the financial-statements-for-members section. Because virtually every incorporated Alabama HOA and condominium association is a Chapter 3A membership nonprofit, those changes reach associations directly.

An observer watching only § 35-20 and § 35-8A for two years would have concluded that nothing happened. The most significant change of the period was somewhere else entirely.

What it means for boards and managers

Three practical consequences follow from a legislature that is not legislating in this area.

The declaration is doing more work. Where a statute is silent, the recorded instrument governs. Alabama's HOA Act runs thirteen sections; it does not supply the election procedures, records timelines, fine caps or reserve requirements that comprehensive-statute states legislate. What an Alabama association may do is largely what its declaration and bylaws say it may do, read against Title 10A.

The courts are the moving part. Six substantive Alabama appellate decisions on association law issued between August 2025 and June 2026 — on relative hardship, architectural approval, assessment liability after a tax sale, and the jurisdictional limits on collection judgments. That is where Alabama association law is actually developing.

Watch Title 10A, not just Title 35. The Alabama Law Institute files a Business and Nonprofit Entities Code revision most years; 2025 produced Act 2025-281 and 2026 produced Act 2026-495. That annual vehicle has now twice changed the corporate machinery every incorporated association runs on.

What to watch next

Nothing can be prefiled for 2027 until the Organizational Session convenes on January 12, 2027, and the Regular Session begins February 2, 2027. Alabama has no carryover, so every dead 2026 bill starts again from zero, and the entire Legislature stands for election first.

The Alabama Law Institute's annual entities-code bill is the likeliest vehicle to reach associations again, on the strength of it having done so in each of the last two sessions. We found no announced 2027 agenda from the Institute, from the Community Associations Institute's Alabama chapter, or from the Alabama Association of REALTORS, and no legislator on record saying they will file an association bill.