Arkansas HOA Director Qualifications

Section 1 — Overview: Who can serve on an HOA board in Arkansas

Arkansas does not hand you a statutory checklist of who can serve on an HOA board. Instead, the recorded declaration or CC&Rs and the bylaws fix eligibility, board size, and terms, and the Arkansas Nonprofit Corporation Act of 1993, Ark. Code § 4-33-101 et seq., supplies the corporate baselines beneath them.¹ The condominium statute, the Arkansas Horizontal Property Act, Ark. Code § 18-13-101 et seq., is a traditional mid-twentieth-century act, and it says almost nothing about board composition or director eligibility; it speaks of the governing body only as an "administrator," a "board of administration," or some other "form of administration" the bylaws name.² The framework also splits along community lines: condominiums answer to the Horizontal Property Act, while planned communities have no HOA statute of their own and draw their director rules from the CC&Rs plus the Nonprofit Corporation Act.³ Arkansas requires no director certification or education, sets no statutory term limit, and disqualifies no owner automatically for unpaid assessments or a criminal history — a sharp departure from heavy-touch states such as Florida.⁴ The sections that follow show where the operative rules actually come from, lay out the order of precedence for each community type, and walk through eligibility, disqualification, tenure, and onboarding duties.

Section 2 — Where director qualifications come from

2A. What the Horizontal Property Act does and does not govern

The Arkansas Horizontal Property Act, Ark. Code § 18-13-101 et seq., traces back to Acts 1961 (1st Ex. Sess.), No. 60. It is a traditional condominium statute, not a modern uniform act.² The Act vests ultimate authority in the "council of co-owners" — defined as all the co-owners — and directs that recorded bylaws govern how the building is administered.⁵ Section 18-13-108 tells the bylaws to spell out the "form of administration, indicating whether this shall be in charge of an administrator or of a board of administration, or otherwise, and specifying the powers, manner of removal, and, where proper, the compensation thereof."⁶ Notice what the Act leaves out: it imposes no director-qualification checklist, no mandatory certification or education, no statutory term limit, and no automatic disqualification of delinquent or convicted owners. It hands the structure, powers, and removal of the governing body to the recorded bylaws instead.⁶ Arkansas has not adopted the Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act, so UCIOA declarant-control transition formulas and statutory removal supermajorities do not apply unless the Arkansas statute itself spells them out.⁷

2B. Planned communities and the corporate-law layer

Planned communities — the non-condominium subdivisions — have no dedicated Arkansas HOA statute, so their director qualifications come from the recorded CC&Rs and, where the association is incorporated, the corporate code.³ Most Arkansas associations of both types incorporate as nonprofit corporations under the Arkansas Nonprofit Corporation Act of 1993, Ark. Code § 4-33-101 et seq., with the director provisions sitting in the § 4-33-8xx range.¹ Those provisions set the statutory baselines. A board must have three or more individuals (§ 4-33-803);⁸ every director must be an individual, and the articles or bylaws may add other qualifications (§ 4-33-802);⁹ the articles or bylaws set terms, which may not run past the lesser of six years or the corporation's duration and default to one year (§ 4-33-805);¹⁰ members may remove directors with or without cause (§ 4-33-808);¹¹ a circuit court may remove a director in a judicial proceeding (§ 4-33-810);¹² and the board may fill vacancies (§ 4-33-811).¹³ Read it for what it is: corporate scaffolding, not HOA-specific qualification law.

2C. The declaration/CC&Rs and bylaws as the operative source

The recorded declaration or CC&Rs and the bylaws are where the real qualification rules live. Member-only board service, current-on-assessments requirements, staggered terms, and the like are governing-document choices, not statutory mandates.³ The order of precedence depends on the community type. For a condominium, an applicable Horizontal Property Act provision sits on top, then the declaration and bylaws, then the Nonprofit Corporation Act defaults, then board rules.⁶ For a planned community there is no HOA-statute layer at all: the CC&Rs and bylaws sit above the Nonprofit Corporation Act defaults, which sit above board rules.¹ So a manager has to identify the community type first, then read the governing documents against the right backstops. "Arkansas law" alone rarely answers a director-eligibility question, because the controlling rule almost always lives in the recorded documents.

Section 3 — Director eligibility, disqualification, and tenure rules

3A. Eligibility to serve

For incorporated associations of either type, one statutory eligibility rule applies: every director must be an individual. Beyond that, "[t]he articles or bylaws may prescribe other qualifications for directors" (Ark. Code § 4-33-802, Nonprofit Corporation Act).⁹ So a requirement that a director be a member or unit owner is a governing-document rule — found in the declaration or bylaws — not a statutory command, and it varies from community to community.⁹ Arkansas imposes no statutory residency or age requirement on HOA directors either; any such rule again comes from the governing documents.⁹ A "good standing" or "current on assessments" qualification is likewise a creature of the CC&Rs or bylaws, not the statute.³ And because § 4-33-802 requires directors to be individuals, a unit held by an entity — an LLC or a trust — cannot itself sit on the board; a natural person serves in its place, whether a co-owner, spouse, trustee, or designated entity representative, and the bylaws decide whether co-owners or spouses may serve at the same time.⁹ This holds for condominiums and planned communities alike whenever the association is incorporated.

3B. Disqualification and removal

Arkansas has no statutory bar that disqualifies a candidate or a sitting director for falling behind on assessments; any such disqualification has to come from a CC&R or bylaw provision.⁴ The same goes for criminal history: nothing in the Horizontal Property Act or the Nonprofit Corporation Act automatically disqualifies a person with a felony record, so a criminal-history bar exists only if the governing documents create one.⁴ Conflict-of-interest service gets handled at the corporate level by Ark. Code § 4-33-831, which does not bar an interested director from serving; it simply keeps a conflicted transaction from being voidable when the transaction was fair to the corporation or was properly disclosed and approved by the board or members.¹⁴ On owner-initiated removal, the source is the Nonprofit Corporation Act, not the Horizontal Property Act, which contains no removal mechanism for the governing body. Members may remove one or more directors they elected, with or without cause (Ark. Code § 4-33-808), and a circuit court may remove a director who engaged in fraudulent or dishonest conduct or gross abuse of authority or discretion, on a petition by the corporation or by members holding at least ten percent of the voting power of any class (Ark. Code § 4-33-810).^11,12 The articles or bylaws can vary these removal defaults.

3C. Board composition and terms

For incorporated associations, the minimum board size is a statutory default: a board must consist of three or more individuals, and the articles or bylaws may raise or lower that number, but never below three (Ark. Code § 4-33-803, Nonprofit Corporation Act).⁸ There is no statutory maximum; the upper number is a governing-document choice.⁸ The articles or bylaws set term length, which may not exceed the lesser of six years or the corporation's stated duration, defaulting to one year where the documents say nothing; directors may serve successive terms unless the documents bar it (Ark. Code § 4-33-805).¹⁰ Staggered terms are allowed but not required (Ark. Code § 4-33-806).¹⁵ Arkansas sets no statutory term limit on HOA directors — the six-year cap in § 4-33-805 limits how long a single term may run, not how many terms a director may serve.¹⁰ As for declarant or developer transition of board control, there is no general statutory transition timeline; the master deed or declaration sets that schedule. The 2025 amendments to the Horizontal Property Act introduced "declarant" and "development rights" concepts and, in the assessment context of Ark. Code § 18-13-116(b)(2), require the declarant to pay association expenses "from the date of the initial assessment until declarant control of the association terminates, or five (5) years from a declarant's first conveyance of a unit or apartment, whichever is earlier" — but they stop short of a UCIOA-style board-transition formula.¹⁶

3D. Onboarding and ongoing qualification duties

Arkansas requires no director certification or education for HOA board members. Neither the Horizontal Property Act nor the Nonprofit Corporation Act contains a certification or training mandate — a plain contrast with Florida, where each newly elected or appointed residential-condominium director must, within 90 days, both certify in writing that he or she has read the declaration, articles, bylaws, and policies and submit a certificate of completing a division-approved educational curriculum "at least 4 hours long," and where a director who fails to comply is suspended from board service until he or she does (Fla. Stat. § 718.112(2)(d)).⁴ Conflict-of-interest disclosure is expected at the corporate level under Ark. Code § 4-33-831, which protects a transaction only when the director disclosed the interest to the board or members and they approved it, or the transaction was fair to the corporation.¹⁴ The fiduciary baseline for directors comes from the Nonprofit Corporation Act and the common law, not the Horizontal Property Act: a director must discharge his or her duties "in good faith," "with the care an ordinarily prudent person in a like position would exercise under similar circumstances," and "in a manner the director reasonably believes to be in the best interests of the corporation" (Ark. Code § 4-33-830).¹⁷

Section 4 — Recent legislative and judicial activity

4A. Recent bills

One enacted bill in the past 24 months amended the statute that matters most to condominium associations — and it leaves director qualifications untouched.

4B. Recent appellate rulings

No qualifying Arkansas Court of Appeals or Arkansas Supreme Court decision in the past 36 months addresses HOA, POA, or condominium director eligibility, removal, board composition, or the director standard of care. The closest recent appellate decision, Foster v. Muruaga-Atkins, 2024 Ark. App. 526, construed the older Arkansas Nonprofit Corporation Act of 1963 in a family-farm nonprofit dispute over the validity of bylaws and the distribution of assets — not an HOA board-qualification question — so it does not control director-eligibility analysis.¹⁸ Trial-level disputes move through the Arkansas Circuit Courts, with appeals to the Arkansas Court of Appeals and discretionary review by the Arkansas Supreme Court.¹⁹

4C. Active legislative debates

HB 1660 of the 2025 Regular Session, "To Amend the Horizontal Property Act; To Regulate Property Owners Associations; and To Require an Audit for Certain Property Owners Associations," would have stretched statutory regulation to cover planned-community property owners associations, but it died in the House City, County & Local Affairs Committee and never became law.²⁰ No bill to enact a comprehensive Arkansas planned-community statute is pending, and no measure amending director qualifications or board composition is moving.²⁰

Section 5 — National positioning and related coverage

Arkansas is a light-touch, split-structure state for director qualifications. Its condominium statute, the Horizontal Property Act, is a traditional act that stays largely silent on the board, and its planned communities have no HOA statute at all, which leaves eligibility, terms, and disqualification to the governing documents and the Nonprofit Corporation Act of 1993. Compare that with heavy-touch Florida, which by statute requires director certification or an approved education course, caps a condominium director at no more than eight consecutive years absent a two-thirds owner vote (Fla. Stat. § 718.112(2)(d)2, counting service on or after July 1, 2018), and disqualifies owners who are delinquent on assessments and felons whose civil rights have not been restored for at least five years. Or with moderate-touch Arizona, where a petition signed by 25 percent of the votes — or 100 votes, whichever is less — in a community of 1,000 or fewer members forces a removal special meeting within 30 days (Ariz. Rev. Stat. § 33-1813). A manager used to statutory director screens in those states will find almost none in Arkansas statute and has to look to each community's governing documents instead. Arkansas has adopted no director-specific statutory rule beyond the general corporate baselines in the Nonprofit Corporation Act: directors must be individuals, a board needs at least three, a term may run no longer than six years, and members and the courts may remove a director.

HOA Weekly updates its Arkansas Director Qualifications coverage quarterly as the legislature and the courts act. Federal frameworks rarely dictate director qualifications, but Arkansas associations remain subject to federal law — the Fair Housing Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, and the OTARD rule — across their broader operations.

Footnotes

1. Arkansas Nonprofit Corporation Act of 1993, Ark. Code § 4-33-101 et seq. ↩
2. Arkansas Horizontal Property Act, Ark. Code § 18-13-101 et seq. ↩
3. Ark. Code § 18-13-108 (administration governed by recorded bylaws) ↩
4. Contrast: Fla. Stat. § 718.112(2)(d) (director certification/education, eight-year term limit, delinquency and felony disqualification) ↩
5. Ark. Code § 18-13-102 (definition of "council of co-owners") ↩
6. Ark. Code § 18-13-108 (form of administration; administrator or board of administration) ↩
7. UCIOA adopting states (Arkansas not listed) ↩
8. Ark. Code § 4-33-803 (number of directors; three or more) ↩
9. Ark. Code § 4-33-802 (qualification of directors; individuals; articles or bylaws may prescribe other qualifications) ↩
10. Ark. Code § 4-33-805 (terms of directors generally) ↩
11. Ark. Code § 4-33-808 (removal of directors elected by members or directors) ↩
12. Ark. Code § 4-33-810 (removal of directors by judicial proceeding) ↩
13. Ark. Code § 4-33-811 (vacancy on board) ↩
14. Ark. Code § 4-33-831 (conflict of interest transactions) ↩
15. Ark. Code § 4-33-806 (staggered terms for directors) ↩
16. Act 516 of 2025 (SB 323), To Amend the Horizontal Property Act (see § 9 applicability and amended § 18-13-116(b)(2)) ↩
17. Ark. Code § 4-33-830 (general standards for directors) ↩
18. Foster v. Muruaga-Atkins, 2024 Ark. App. 526 (Ark. Ct. App. 2024) ↩
19. Arkansas Judiciary, Court of Appeals (court structure) ↩
20. HB 1660 of 2025 (status: died in House committee) ↩