What it changes for boards and managers

“Fees or other financial requirements” is broader than an application fee. The phrase reaches architectural review deposits, plan-check charges, inspection fees, refundable compliance or damage deposits, bonds, capital contributions and impact-style charges tied to an ADU. An association that has built an ADU policy around cost recovery has built it on a definition the Legislature removed.

Cost recovery is the motivation, and it is not a defence. Reviewing an ADU application genuinely costs an association money — the architect's time, the committee's administration, sometimes counsel. Section 714.3(b) does not carve out cost-based fees. The association absorbs the cost as a common expense.

Published ADU policies with fee schedules are the exposure. A void provision left in the association's published guidelines still deters owners, which is the effect the statute targets. Removal is the compliance step, not non-enforcement.

Objective design standards are where the remaining authority lives — and they have to be genuinely objective. “Materially compatible with the primary dwelling” invites the argument that the standard is a prohibition wearing a costume. A specified roof pitch, an approved exterior material list, a stated setback: those are applied the same way by any reviewer, and they are the kind of standard the handbook contemplates.

Standards may not exceed state ADU law. This is the limit boards most often overshoot. An association cannot impose a size, height or setback standard stricter than the Government Code allows and call it aesthetic.

The rental rules that travel with this

An association that cannot stop the construction sometimes tries to stop the use. Two provisions close that route.

Civil Code sections 4740(a) and 4741(a) allow rental of a separate-interest ADU or JADU notwithstanding contrary governing documents, regardless of when those documents were adopted. Section 4741(b) requires that at least 25 percent of separate interests be allowed as rental or leasable units.

One limit does exist and it comes from the state, not the association: AB 1154 bars JADUs from short-term rental use, requiring any rental term to exceed 30 days. An association whose concern is transient occupancy in a JADU has a statutory answer rather than a covenant one.

What has not been settled

Whether sections 714.3 and 4751 reach condominium and mixed-zoning developments at all is contested, whatever boards are being told.

In April 2026 a San Diego County Superior Court judge ruled for the association in a dispute over a Carlsbad condominium owner's garage conversion, reasoning that the statute speaks to lots “zoned for single-family residential use” while the parcel in question also permitted townhomes and small condominiums, and that the Legislature “could have easily” extended the provision to condominium developments and did not.

That is a trial court decision. It binds nobody else, and the judge anticipated appellate review. The honest description of the law is that the ADU protections are clear for single-family-zoned developments and unresolved for condominium and mixed-zoning ones.

AB 956, on the Governor's desk as of today, would change “zoned for” to “zoned to allow” in both sections — language that would reach the mixed-zoning situation directly. It is not signed, and the Governor has until September 30, 2026 to act.

What to watch next

Two things. The Government Code ADU sections were renumbered in the 2025 package — former sections 66324, 66327 and 66332 are now 66311.5, 66313.5 and 66311.7 — so an association policy citing the old numbers cites sections that no longer say what it claims.

And separate conveyance of ADUs as condominiums remains opt-in for local agencies under AB 1033. Most California jurisdictions have not adopted an enabling ordinance. Where one has, the association's role changes considerably — and in at least one county it becomes a permitting gatekeeper.