District of Columbia HOA Director Qualifications

Section 1: Overview — Who can serve on an association board in the District

Start with the question every prospective board member asks: who is actually allowed to serve? In the District of Columbia, the answer comes mostly from an association’s own governing documents and from the District of Columbia Nonprofit Corporation Act of 2010. The Condominium Act sets up the executive board and steers the handoff out of declarant control, but it hands the real questions — who sits on the board, what qualifies them, and how long they serve — to the bylaws.¹ For condominiums, the statute in charge is the District of Columbia Condominium Act of 1976, D.C. Code § 42-1901.01 et seq. Older buildings — those whose instruments were recorded before March 29, 1977 — may instead answer to the predecessor Horizontal Property Act in Title 42, Chapter 20.² Non-condominium homeowners associations get no dedicated District statute at all, and housing cooperatives follow their own track under the General Cooperative Association Act of 2010.³ Notice what the District does not require: no director certification or education, no term limit, and no automatic bar on owners who fall behind on assessments or carry a criminal record. That sets it sharply apart from heavy-touch jurisdictions like Florida and California. The sections that follow trace where the rules come from, lay out who may serve and who may be removed, review recent activity, and place the District on the national map.

Section 2: Where director qualifications come from

2A. The Condominium Act and the Horizontal Property Act

The District of Columbia Condominium Act of 1976, D.C. Code § 42-1901.01 et seq., governs condominiums the District created after March 28, 1977.² Inside the Act, Subchapter III handles control and governance. Section 42-1903.01 requires recorded bylaws that provide for self-government by an association of all unit owners, it lets the unit owners elect the executive board once declarant control ends, and it leaves the number of board members and their terms to the bylaws.¹ Section 42-1903.02 governs declarant control and steps unit owners onto the executive board as the transition proceeds.⁴ Section 42-1903.08(d) tells every officer and board member to exercise the care the law demands of a fiduciary of the unit owners.⁵

What the Act leaves out matters just as much as what it covers. It sets no qualification checklist, no certification or education requirement, no term limit, and no automatic disqualification of owners who are delinquent or convicted. The statute assumes an executive board and a fiduciary standard, then leaves the substance — who may serve, and for how long — to the recorded instruments.

The older Horizontal Property Act sits in Title 42, Chapter 20.⁶ It came first, and it runs shorter and less detailed than the Condominium Act. Section 42-1901.01 makes the point directly: the Condominium Act supersedes the Horizontal Property Act, no one may create a condominium under the older law after March 28, 1977, and instrument provisions recorded before that date survive.² So a manager figures out which statute governs a building by its creation date. Instruments recorded before March 29, 1977 may keep running under the Horizontal Property Act — unless the community has amended its documents to adopt the newer statute.²

2B. No planned-community statute; cooperatives are separate

The District has no comprehensive planned-community or general homeowners association statute. For a non-condominium association, director qualifications come from the recorded covenants, conditions, and restrictions — the CC&Rs — and from the corporate code, not from any HOA-specific law. The District has nothing like a uniform common interest ownership act imposing director eligibility rules on non-condominium communities.

Housing cooperatives, which are common in the District, run on a separate track. The General Cooperative Association Act of 2010, D.C. Code § 29-901 et seq., governs them.³ Their director and board rules live in that chapter, and you should not import them into a condominium or homeowners association analysis. The distinction is practical: before a District practitioner can name the governing rules, the practitioner has to pin down whether the building is a condominium, a non-condominium association, or a cooperative.

2C. The corporate-law layer and the governing documents

Most District condominium and homeowners associations organize as nonprofit corporations under the District of Columbia Nonprofit Corporation Act of 2010, D.C. Code § 29-401.01 et seq., with the director provisions running through § 29-406.01 and the sections that follow.⁷ That statute supplies the corporate baselines. A board must seat three or more directors, with the exact number fixed in or under the articles or bylaws.⁸ A director has to be an individual; the articles or bylaws may add other qualifications, and a director need not be a District resident or a member of the corporation unless those documents say so.⁹ The Act also fills in defaults for terms, staggered terms, removal, and vacancies, and it expressly lets a corporation set additional director qualifications in its governing documents.¹⁰ This is a corporate-governance statute built on the Model Nonprofit Corporation Act — not an HOA-specific qualification law, and not the older District nonprofit law it replaced.

The recorded declaration or CC&Rs and the bylaws are where the actual qualification rules live, and the order of precedence depends on the community type. For a condominium, the Condominium Act — or the Horizontal Property Act, for an older building — sits on top, then the declaration and bylaws, then the Nonprofit Corporation Act defaults, then board-adopted rules. For a non-condominium homeowners association there is no HOA statute layer at all: the CC&Rs and bylaws sit on top, then the Nonprofit Corporation Act defaults, then board rules. So the manager’s job runs in order — identify the community type, fix the governing statute by creation date for a condominium, then read the governing documents against the corporate baselines to find the real eligibility rules.

Section 3: Director eligibility, disqualification, and tenure rules

A. Eligibility to serve

Whether a director must be a unit owner or a member is a question the governing documents answer, not the Condominium Act. The Condominium Act leaves board composition to the bylaws,¹ and the Nonprofit Corporation Act’s default says a director need not be a member unless the articles or bylaws require it.⁹ In practice, most associations do impose a member or unit-owner requirement through their bylaws — but the source is the document, not the statute, and that holds for condominiums and non-condominium associations alike. The corporate statute asks only that a director be an individual, which means an LLC or a trust that owns a unit cannot sit on the board itself; a natural person tied to that entity would have to qualify and serve in its place.⁹ The District imposes no statutory residency or age requirement either — a director need not live in the District under the corporate default, so any age or residency condition has to come from the governing documents.⁹ Good-standing or “current on assessments” requirements are documentary in the same way; no District statute conditions board service on assessment status. And co-owners, spouses, trustees, and entity representatives are handled by the bylaws — or, where the bylaws say nothing, by the corporate rule that a director be an individual.⁹

B. Disqualification and removal

Delinquency does not disqualify a candidate or a sitting director by operation of District statute. Any bar for unpaid assessments has to come from the governing documents; in the District it is documentary, not a statutory rule. Criminal history is not an automatic statutory disqualifier at the candidate stage either. The Nonprofit Corporation Act does, though, let a board remove a sitting director on specific grounds — one convicted of a felony, one declared of unsound mind by a final court order, one found by a final court order to have breached a director’s duty, one who has missed the number of meetings the governing documents specify, or one who no longer meets a qualification the articles or bylaws set at the start of the term.¹¹ Conflict-of-interest limits work through the conflicting-interest-transaction rules and the standards of conduct, not through an eligibility bar.¹²

The power to remove a director by owner vote comes from the Nonprofit Corporation Act and the governing documents, not from the Condominium Act. Members may remove a director with or without cause, unless the articles or bylaws limit removal to cause.¹¹ Separately, the Superior Court of the District of Columbia may remove a director, in a proceeding brought by or on behalf of the corporation, on a finding of fraudulent conduct, gross abuse of position, or intentional harm to the corporation.¹³ Both rules reach incorporated associations of either type. The mechanics of a recall vote — notice, ballots, and quorum — are a board-elections question, taken up separately.

C. Board composition and terms

The floor on board size comes from the corporate statute: at least three directors, with the exact count set in or under the articles or bylaws.⁸ There is no statutory ceiling — the maximum is whatever the governing documents choose. Term length runs the same way, against a corporate backstop. If the articles or bylaws name no term, the default is one year; and except for certain appointed or designated directors, a single term may not run longer than five years, though a director may win additional terms.¹⁰ The articles or bylaws may stagger terms by splitting directors into groups.¹⁴ Read that carefully: the District sets no statutory term limit. The five-year figure caps how long one term lasts, not how many terms a person may serve, so any true term limit has to come from the governing documents.¹⁰ For condominiums, § 42-1903.02 governs declarant board representation and the graduated handoff of control. The instruments may let the declarant appoint and remove board members during a control period — one that may not exceed three years for an expandable condominium or one with convertible land, or two years for any other condominium, and that ends no later than the conveyance of units representing three-fourths of the common-element interests. By the time half of those interests have been conveyed, a special meeting must let unit owners other than the declarant pick at least one-third of the board.⁴

D. Onboarding and ongoing qualification duties

The District requires no director certification and no education. There is no District version of the Florida rule that, within 90 days of election or appointment, each residential condominium director certify in writing to the secretary that the director has read the association’s declaration, articles of incorporation, bylaws, and current written policies — or instead complete an approved course. A District director takes office with no statutory onboarding step at all.¹⁵ Conflict-of-interest disclosure expectations come from the Nonprofit Corporation Act’s standards of conduct and its conflicting-interest-transaction rules, not from a condominium-specific disclosure mandate.¹² The fiduciary, or standard-of-care, baseline draws on two sources working together. For condominiums, § 42-1903.08(d) requires an executive board member to exercise the care the law demands of a fiduciary of the unit owners, and a court reviews the board’s decisions under the business judgment standard.^{5, 16} For incorporated associations generally, the Nonprofit Corporation Act sets the standards of conduct — good faith, the care a person in a like position would reasonably believe appropriate, and a reasonable belief that the action serves the best interests of the corporation — along with the standards of liability for directors.^{12, 17} These duties attach the moment a director takes office; they are not qualifications a candidate must clear before serving.

Section 4: Recent legislative and judicial activity

A. Recent measures

No District measure enacted in the past 24 months changes who qualifies for a board seat, how a board is composed, or how a director is removed. The recent condominium action has centered on something else entirely — how associations meet and vote.

B. Recent appellate rulings

Nothing qualifies here either. A review of District of Columbia Court of Appeals decisions over the past 36 months turns up no published opinion that squarely addresses director eligibility, director removal, board composition, the declarant-control transition, or the standard of care for association directors. The one recent opinion that touches condominium governance, Unit Owners Association of 2337 Champlain Street Condominium v. 2337 Champlain Street, LLC (D.C. May 9, 2024), turned on developer disclosure claims, a contractual limitations period, and the validity of declarant-adopted bylaw amendments creating a third-party easement. It did not decide director eligibility, removal, or composition.²⁰

C. Active legislative debates

No active Council proposal would enact a comprehensive planned-community statute or impose statutory director qualifications, term limits, or certification on community associations. The condominium proposals that are moving, or recently moved, keep their focus on virtual meetings and voting — not on board eligibility.

Section 5: National positioning and related coverage

Put the District on the national map, and it lands on the light-touch end. Its condominium statute leaves the board largely to the bylaws, and its non-condominium homeowners associations have no dedicated statute at all, so eligibility, terms, and disqualification rest on the governing documents and the Nonprofit Corporation Act of 2010. Heavy-touch jurisdictions go the other way. Florida makes residential condominium directors certify in writing — or complete an approved course — within 90 days of taking office, caps a board member at four consecutive two-year terms absent a two-thirds owner vote, disqualifies candidates who are not current on assessments by the candidacy deadline, and bars felons unless their civil rights have been restored for at least five years before they seek election.¹⁵ California’s Civil Code § 5105 sets a ceiling on the disqualifications an association may adopt and requires any candidate disqualification to apply equally to sitting directors: “If an association disqualifies a nominee pursuant to this section, an association in its election rules shall also require a director to comply with the same requirements.”²¹ For an operator working several jurisdictions, the lesson is plain: the District imposes almost nothing by statute, so each association’s governing documents control and have to be read one at a time. One more distinction is worth keeping straight. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals is the highest local court — the functional equivalent of a state supreme court — and it is not the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, a federal court that sits outside the local association appellate path.²²

HOA Weekly refreshes its District of Columbia director-qualifications coverage each quarter, as the Council and the District of Columbia Court of Appeals act. Federal frameworks rarely dictate director qualifications, but District associations still answer 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 — in their broader operations.

Footnotes

1. D.C. Code § 42-1903.01, Bylaws; unit owners’ association and executive board thereof; powers and duties ↩
2. D.C. Code § 42-1901.01, Applicability of chapter; corresponding terms; supersedure of prior law ↩
3. D.C. Code § 29-901 et seq., General Cooperative Association Act of 2010 ↩
4. D.C. Code § 42-1903.02, Control by declarant; graduated representation of unit owners in executive board ↩
5. D.C. Code § 42-1903.08, Unit owners’ associations; powers and rights (subsection (d), fiduciary care) ↩
6. D.C. Code Title 42, Chapter 20, Horizontal Property Regimes ↩
7. D.C. Code § 29-406.01, Requirement for and functions of board of directors ↩
8. D.C. Code § 29-406.03, Number of directors ↩
9. D.C. Code § 29-406.02, Qualifications of directors ↩
10. D.C. Code § 29-406.05, Terms of directors generally ↩
11. D.C. Code § 29-406.08, Removal of directors by members or other persons ↩
12. D.C. Code § 29-406.30, Standards of conduct for directors ↩
13. D.C. Code § 29-406.09, Removal of directors by judicial proceeding ↩
14. D.C. Code § 29-406.06, Staggered terms for directors ↩
15. Fla. Stat. § 718.112 (2025), board member eligibility, certification, and term limits ↩
16. D.C. Code § 42-1902.09, Compliance with condominium chapter and instruments (business judgment standard) ↩
17. D.C. Code § 29-406.31, Standards of liability for directors ↩
18. D.C. Law 25-195, Association Meeting Flexibility Temporary Amendment Act of 2024 (effective July 19, 2024, 71 DCR 6754) ↩
19. D.C. Code § 42-1903.03, Meetings; electronic notice (permanent virtual-meeting provisions) ↩
20. Unit Owners Ass’n of 2337 Champlain St. Condo. v. 2337 Champlain St., LLC, No. 21-CV-0798 (D.C. May 9, 2024) ↩
21. Cal. Civ. Code § 5105, Election rules; director and candidate qualifications (subsection (f)) ↩
22. District of Columbia Court of Appeals, official court description (highest court for the District) ↩