Arkansas HOA Governing Statute

1. Overview — How HOAs are governed in Arkansas

Arkansas regulates condominiums, but it has never passed a comprehensive HOA statute for ordinary planned communities. As a result, most single-family subdivision associations answer to their recorded covenants and to general corporate law rather than to a dedicated community-association code.

The Arkansas Horizontal Property Act, codified at Ark. Code Ann. § 18-13-101 et seq., sets the rules for condominium-style ownership. A community falls under the Act only when its developer opts in by recording a master deed.¹

Non-condominium homeowners associations and property owners associations work differently. They follow their recorded covenants, conditions, and restrictions — often called CC&Rs or bills of assurance. When an association incorporates as a nonprofit, the Arkansas Nonprofit Corporation Act of 1993, Ark. Code Ann. § 4-33-101 et seq., supplies the corporate formalities.²

Arkansas has not adopted the Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act. Its 1961 Horizontal Property Act remains a traditional horizontal property statute, not a UCIOA-style common-interest code.³ That puts Arkansas firmly in the CC&R-primary group of states, alongside neighbors such as Alabama and Mississippi, and apart from comprehensive-statute states such as Florida, California, and Texas.

The sections that follow lay out the statutory framework, the compliance obligations it creates, recent legislative and judicial activity, and where Arkansas stands in the national picture.

2. The statutory framework

The Arkansas Horizontal Property Act, Ark. Code Ann. § 18-13-101 et seq., began as Act 60 of the First Extraordinary Session of 1961 and carried forward at Ark. Stat. Ann. §§ 50-1001 to -1020 (1947).⁴ The Act follows the mid-twentieth-century model of state condominium enabling laws. It is not the Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act, which Arkansas has never adopted in any form.³ The statute reaches only property that an owner has expressly submitted to its regime by recording a master deed under § 18-13-103 and § 18-13-104, so it governs condominium-style horizontal property regimes rather than planned communities in general.⁵

Structurally, the Act runs from § 18-13-101 through § 18-13-120. It sets out how to create a horizontal property regime (§ 18-13-103), what the master deed must contain (§ 18-13-104), the plans that must accompany it (§ 18-13-105), the bylaws that govern administration (§ 18-13-108), how to modify that administration (§ 18-13-109), the books of receipts and expenditures and the right to inspect them (§ 18-13-110), how the law treats ownership and valuation of separate units and common elements (§ 18-13-112), liability for expenses and assessments (§ 18-13-116), insurance and reconstruction (§§ 18-13-117 to 18-13-119), and unit-level taxation (§ 18-13-120).⁶ The defined terms in § 18-13-102 include "apartment" — the unit of independent ownership, whether residential, commercial, industrial, or otherwise — along with "general common elements" and "limited common elements." Act 516 of 2025 added three more: "common elements," "declarant," and "development rights."⁷ The Act hands administration to the council of co-owners, which operates under bylaws recorded with the master deed.⁸

Compared with newer condominium statutes in neighboring states, Arkansas's version stays short, declaration-driven, and friendly to developers. Tennessee's Condominium Act of 2008, Tenn. Code Ann. § 66-27-201 et seq., governs every condominium created in Tennessee after January 1, 2009, and it carries detailed declarant-control provisions, point-of-sale disclosures, and unit-owner association governance requirements that Arkansas's 1961 statute simply does not have.⁹ Arkansas's Act includes no separate insurance-reserve mandate, no statutory resale-disclosure package, and no statutory dispute-resolution track beyond ordinary civil litigation.

The Act covers only condominium-style horizontal property regimes that someone has expressly submitted to it through a recorded master deed.⁵ It does not reach planned-community HOAs governed by recorded subdivision bills of assurance, townhome associations that are not organized as horizontal property regimes, lot-and-block subdivisions, or any community whose original declaration never invoked § 18-13-103 et seq. The recorded master deed is the trigger. If the developer did not expressly elect the horizontal property regime and record the master deed that § 18-13-104 requires, the Act does not apply — no matter how the association behaves in practice.⁵

That distinction matters at intake. A property manager evaluating an Arkansas portfolio has to read the recorded chain of title first and decide whether each community is a horizontal property regime or a plat-and-bill-of-assurance subdivision. Default assumptions are risky here. A community marketed as a "condominium" does not fall under the Act unless the master deed expressly invokes it, and a community with shared amenities and a property owners association does not fall under the Act simply because it acts like one. A misclassification at intake follows into every later decision on assessments, records inspection, insurance, and enforcement.

Arkansas has no dedicated planned-community or property-owners-association statute. For a typical single-family subdivision association, the operative rule book is the recorded declaration — called a bill of assurance, a declaration of covenants, or CC&Rs — backed by the association's articles of incorporation, bylaws, and board-adopted rules.¹⁰ In a planned-community dispute, the order of precedence runs from applicable state and federal law, to the recorded declaration, to the bylaws, and then to the rules and resolutions. Arkansas courts construe restrictive covenants strictly and resolve doubts in favor of the free use of land, so an association can enforce only a restriction that appears clearly in the recorded instrument.¹¹

The Arkansas Nonprofit Corporation Act of 1993, Ark. Code Ann. § 4-33-101 et seq., supplies the corporate scaffolding when the association incorporates as a nonprofit — the prevailing structure for Arkansas HOAs formed after December 31, 1993. The Act governs corporate formation, membership rights, director duties and indemnification, member and board meeting procedures, voting and proxies, records inspection at the corporate level, and amendment of the articles and bylaws.² Associations incorporated before December 31, 1993, instead follow the Arkansas Nonprofit Corporation Act of 1963, Ark. Code Ann. § 4-28-201 et seq.¹² But the 1993 Act is a corporate-governance statute, not an HOA-specific one. It tells you how the association functions as a corporation, not what it may do as a community association. It does not, for example, regulate assessment caps, fining procedures, architectural review, resale disclosures, or board-election conduct in any way specific to community associations.

The practical result is straightforward. The binding rule book for an Arkansas planned-community HOA is the recorded declaration, supplemented by the bylaws and the Nonprofit Corporation Act's corporate formalities, and reinforced by the common law of restrictive covenants and contract. State statutes do not fill the gaps — the declaration does. Where the declaration says nothing or speaks ambiguously, the association's authority shrinks accordingly, and Arkansas courts will resolve the ambiguity in favor of the homeowner's free use.¹¹

3. Compliance obligations created by the statutory framework

Governance obligations

For condominium regimes under the Horizontal Property Act, the bylaws that govern administration must be inserted in or appended to the master deed and recorded with it. They must address the care, upkeep, and surveillance of the common elements, the way the association collects common expenses, and the designation of personnel.⁸ For any horizontal property regime in existence on or after January 1, 2021, the Act allows decision-making through the procedures in the recorded bylaws, including the electronic and remote procedures that Act 795 of 2021 permits.⁸ Under § 18-13-110, the books of receipts and expenditures must stay available for examination by all co-owners at convenient hours on working days.¹³ Planned communities are different. Their governance obligations — meeting notice, election procedures, quorum, board fiduciary duties, records access, and proxy voting — do not come from any HOA-specific statute. They arise from the recorded CC&Rs and bylaws and, when the association is incorporated, from the Arkansas Nonprofit Corporation Act of 1993 at the corporate level.²

Financial obligations

For condominiums, § 18-13-116 requires co-owners to pay common expenses in the percentages the master deed establishes, and it authorizes additional assessments on units offered for rent.¹⁴ A co-owner cannot escape this duty by waiving the use of, or abandoning, the unit. Unpaid assessments come first out of the sale proceeds on conveyance, ahead of every encumbrance except taxes and duly recorded mortgages.¹⁴ Act 516 of 2025 added declarant assessment-payment rules tied to the earlier of two dates: the end of declarant control, or five years from the declarant's first unit conveyance.⁷ For planned communities, assessment authority, budget approval, reserves, and audits are contractual matters set by the recorded declaration. No Arkansas statute imposes a community-association-wide audit or reserve-funding mandate.

Disclosure obligations

For condominiums, the disclosure rules largely live at the front end, in the recording requirements. The master deed (§ 18-13-104) and the plans that accompany it (§ 18-13-105) must be recorded in the office of the county clerk and ex officio recorder where the property sits, which gives purchasers constructive notice.⁵ Arkansas has no statutory condominium resale-certificate or seller-disclosure-package requirement like those in Florida or Texas. Planned communities have no statutory resale-disclosure framework either. The recorded declaration still has to be filed in the county land records to bind later owners, consistent with the general restrictive-covenant recording requirement at Ark. Code Ann. § 18-12-103.¹¹

Dispute resolution obligations

The Horizontal Property Act sets no internal or alternative dispute-resolution requirement. Disputes proceed as ordinary civil actions in Arkansas Circuit Court, with appeals to the Arkansas Court of Appeals and discretionary review by the Arkansas Supreme Court. Planned communities follow the same default. Their notice and opportunity-to-be-heard requirements — before fines or enforcement actions, for example — generally come from the declaration, the bylaws, or the general due-process principles that Arkansas covenant-enforcement caselaw lays out, not from any HOA-specific statute. Arkansas has no dedicated HOA ombudsman, regulator, or arbitration track.

4. Arkansas's recent legislative and judicial activity

Recent bills

Arkansas lawmakers spent the latest session fine-tuning condominium rules while leaving broader homeowner-association regulation on the table.

Recent court rulings

Arkansas's appellate courts continue to enforce recorded covenants against owners with notice, even where some lots in a subdivision have shifted to other uses.

Active legislative debates

The open question in Arkansas is whether the state should regulate property owners associations directly, or leave them to their recorded declarations as it does today.

5. National positioning and related coverage

Arkansas sits in the CC&R-primary tier of state HOA frameworks, alongside Alabama and Mississippi. In these states, the operative rules for non-condominium associations are the recorded declaration, the corporate-formalities statute, and the common law of restrictive covenants — not a comprehensive community-association code. That places Arkansas at the opposite end of the spectrum from comprehensive-statute states such as California (the Davis-Stirling Common Interest Development Act), Florida (Chapter 720, Florida Statutes), and Texas (Property Code Chapter 209), and apart from the nine UCIOA jurisdictions: Alaska, Colorado, Minnesota, Nevada, and West Virginia under the 1982 version, and Connecticut, Delaware, Vermont, and Washington under the 2008 version.³

For multi-state operators moving into Arkansas, the takeaway is practical. Intake diligence on each Arkansas community has to center on the recorded declaration and master deed rather than a uniform statutory rulebook, and policy templates that travel across UCIOA jurisdictions will not map cleanly onto Arkansas planned communities. Current legislative momentum is narrow: Act 516 of 2025 modernized the condominium-side definitions, but the failure of HB 1660 of 2025 in committee signals that a comprehensive Arkansas planned-community statute is not on the near horizon.

6. Closing note

HOA Weekly updates its Arkansas Governing Statute coverage each quarter, as the General Assembly and the Arkansas appellate courts act. Federal frameworks — including the Fair Housing Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, and the FCC OTARD rule — apply to Arkansas condominium and planned-community associations regardless of the state framework, and we will cover them in detail in the forthcoming /federal/ section.

Footnotes

1. Act of Apr. 10, 2025, No. 516, 2025 Ark. Acts (codified as amended at Ark. Code Ann. §§ 18-13-101 to -120) (Horizontal Property Act). ↩
2. Arkansas Nonprofit Corporation Act of 1993, Ark. Code Ann. § 4-33-101 et seq. (orig. Act of 1993, No. 1147). ↩
3. Unif. Common Interest Ownership Act (Unif. Law Comm'n 1982 & amended 2008) (not enacted in Arkansas; adopted in nine jurisdictions — Alaska, Colorado, Minnesota, Nevada, and West Virginia (1982 version), and Connecticut, Delaware, Vermont, and Washington (2008 version)). ↩
4. Act of 1961, No. 60, 1961 Ark. Acts (1st Extraordinary Sess.) (formerly Ark. Stat. Ann. §§ 50-1001 to -1020), as carried forward by Act of Apr. 10, 2025, No. 516. ↩
5. Ark. Code Ann. §§ 18-13-103 to -104 (2025) (establishment of horizontal property regimes by recorded master deed; master-deed contents). ↩
6. Ark. Code Ann. §§ 18-13-101 to -120 (2025) (Horizontal Property Act, full chapter). ↩
7. Act of Apr. 10, 2025, No. 516, §§ 1–9, 2025 Ark. Acts (definitions, master deed, valuation, assessments, applicability). ↩
8. Act of 2021, No. 795, 2021 Ark. Acts (codified at Ark. Code Ann. § 18-13-108) (bylaws and remote decision-making for horizontal property regimes). ↩
9. Tennessee Condominium Act of 2008, Tenn. Code Ann. § 66-27-201 et seq. (applicable to condominiums created after Jan. 1, 2009). ↩
10. Arkansas Nonprofit Corporation Act of 1993, Ark. Code Ann. § 4-33-101 et seq. (corporate governance for nonprofit HOAs incorporated after Dec. 31, 1993). ↩
11. Ark. Code Ann. § 18-12-103 (2011) (restrictive covenants must be executed and recorded to be effective). ↩
12. Arkansas Nonprofit Corporation Act of 1963, Ark. Code Ann. § 4-28-201 et seq. (orig. Act of 1963, No. 176). ↩
13. Ark. Code Ann. § 18-13-110 (2025) (books of receipts and expenditures; examination by co-owners). ↩
14. Ark. Code Ann. § 18-13-116 (2025) (liability for expenses and assessments). ↩
15. S.B. 323, 2025 Gen. Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Ark. 2025) (enacted as Act No. 516). ↩
16. H.B. 1660, 2025 Gen. Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Ark. 2025) (died in committee at sine die adjournment, May 5, 2025). ↩
17. First Serv. Bank v. Snowden, 2026 Ark. App. 213 (Apr. 1, 2026). ↩