District of Columbia HOA Records Inspection

Section 1 — Overview

The District of Columbia governs condominium association records through the D.C. Condominium Act of 1976, and one provision carries most of the weight: D.C. Code § 42-1903.14. The District applies an availability standard rather than a fixed response deadline, and it is not a UCIOA jurisdiction; for the District’s planned communities and housing cooperatives, records rights rest largely on corporate and cooperative law plus the governing documents.¹ The central condominium provision says the books and records “shall be available” for examination and copying by a unit owner in good standing for a proper purpose, exercised during reasonable hours on business days, and it sets no day-count clock.¹ The District runs heavily to condominiums and housing cooperatives. Of roughly 303,950 housing units, the D.C. Policy Center counts 64,300 condominium units and 28,600 units in cooperatives, against far fewer non-condominium planned-community HOAs — so the Condominium Act is the primary records source for most associations.² Records-enforcement disputes proceed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, and appeals go to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, the District’s highest local court. No intermediate local appellate court sits between them, and that court is distinct from the federal U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.³ Nationally, the District lands between hard-clock statutory-deadline jurisdictions such as Florida and California and jurisdictions that rely on a reasonableness or availability standard, and for its non-condominium communities it leans on corporate-law inspection rights. The Quick-Reference table and the detail below lay out the mechanics by community type.

Section 2 — Quick-Reference: District of Columbia HOA Records Inspection

Section 3 — The records-inspection framework in detail

3A. Records subject to inspection

For condominiums, the records right is statutory. D.C. Code § 42-1903.14 requires the unit owners’ association — or the declarant, managing agent, or other person the bylaws name — to keep detailed records of receipts and expenditures that affect the operation and administration of the condominium.¹ The same section makes the association’s books and records available for examination and copying, and it spells out what that includes: the membership list, owner mailing addresses, and financial records, down to the aggregate salary information of association employees.¹ Meeting minutes get separate treatment in § 42-1903.03, which requires the association to record minutes and make them available to unit owners in good standing on 5 days’ written notice identifying the specific minutes.⁴ The Act also lets owners holding 33 1/3% of the votes in the association (or a lower percentage, if the instruments set one) demand an independent audit of the books.¹

The District’s non-condominium communities sit on different footing. The Condominium Act does not reach planned communities or cooperatives; for those, records rights flow from corporate and cooperative law plus the recorded governing documents. Where a planned-community association incorporates as a nonprofit, the Nonprofit Corporation Act of 2010 controls. Section 29-413.01 requires permanent minutes, appropriate accounting records, and a membership record, and it requires the corporation to keep at its principal office the articles, bylaws, minutes and member communications for the past 3 years, the director/officer list, and the most recent biennial report.⁵ Section 29-413.02 then gives members a right to inspect those records, the accounting records, and the membership list.⁶ Because condominiums and housing cooperatives dominate the District, most records requests run through § 42-1903.14; cooperative requests turn on the cooperative’s governing documents and the applicable Title 29 statute — general cooperative associations, limited cooperative associations, or nonprofit corporation law, depending on how the entity is organized.⁷

3B. The request-and-response sequence

Standing under the Condominium Act runs to a unit owner in good standing or the owner’s authorized agent. Section 42-1901.02(32) defines a “unit owner in good standing” as an owner who is not delinquent more than 30 days on any amount owed and not found in violation of the condominium instruments or rules.¹³ The request must serve a proper purpose related to membership — not pecuniary gain, commercial solicitation, or any unrelated end.¹ The Act prescribes no written form for a § 42-1903.14 request, though the separate minutes right does require 5 days’ written notice identifying the specific minutes.⁴

On timing, the Act uses an availability standard, not a clock. Records “shall be available” within the District, or within 50 miles of it, for examination and copying during reasonable hours on business days.¹ No fixed number of days appears in the statute, so no one should describe the District as a day-count jurisdiction for condominiums. Planned communities under the Nonprofit Corporation Act work differently: a member delivers a signed notice in the form of a record at least 5 business days before inspecting, the inspection happens during regular business hours at the principal office (for basic records) or a reasonable location (for other records), and § 29-413.04(b) sets a “reasonable time” standard for records outside the basic set.^{6, 9} Limited cooperative associations carry a 10-business-day response window under § 29-1005.05.¹⁰ On charges, a condominium association may impose and collect a fee that reflects the actual costs of materials and labor before it provides copies;¹ a nonprofit may impose a reasonable charge covering labor and material that does not exceed the estimated cost of production, reproduction, or transmission, and it may deliver copies electronically when that format is available and requested.⁸

3C. Withholding, confidentiality, and the membership/owner list

The Condominium Act sets out an explicit withholding list. Under § 42-1903.14(c), an association may withhold drafts not yet incorporated into its books and records, along with records on personnel matters and medical records, contracts and leases under negotiation, pending or anticipated litigation, administrative enforcement proceedings, communications with legal counsel, disclosures that would violate law, executive-session minutes and materials, and the individual files of owners other than the requester.¹ The Act narrows “anticipated litigation” to cases where a party or its counsel has made a specific threat of litigation, which keeps associations from invoking the litigation exemption open-endedly.¹ The membership list and owner mailing addresses remain inspectable, but the proper-purpose condition bars their use for pecuniary gain or commercial solicitation.¹

Planned communities take a structurally different path. The Nonprofit Corporation Act does not enumerate categories of withholdable records; instead, it conditions access to accounting records, the membership list, and meeting-record excerpts on a good-faith, proper purpose that the member describes with reasonable particularity and that connects directly to the records sought.⁶ The membership list carries its own protection: § 29-413.07 bars anyone from obtaining or using it, without board consent, to solicit money or property (except to solicit member votes in an election), for any commercial purpose, or for sale.¹¹ A nonprofit may also answer a list demand by providing a list compiled no earlier than the date of the demand.⁸

3D. Remedies and enforcement for noncompliance

The Condominium Act carries no records-specific penalty, no per-day fine, and no statutory-damages figure. An owner enforces the records right through the District’s general condominium remedy in § 42-1902.09, which authorizes an action for damages, injunctive relief, or any other available remedy for noncompliance with the Act, and which lets the substantially prevailing party in litigation between an owner and the association recover reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs.¹² Planned communities get a tailored remedy: under § 29-413.04, the Superior Court may summarily order inspection of basic records at the corporation’s expense, and for other records the court hears the application on an expedited basis and orders the corporation to pay the member’s costs, including reasonable attorneys’ fees, unless the corporation proves it refused in good faith on a reasonable basis.⁹

Enforcement runs through the courts, not an agency. The trial forum is the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, and appeals go to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, the District’s highest local court. No intermediate local appellate court sits between them, and the D.C. Court of Appeals is not the federal U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which plays no part in the local records-enforcement path.³ No standing District agency adjudicates HOA records disputes; under the Condominium Act, the agency role reaches only developer registration and public-offering-statement review, which the Department of Housing and Community Development administers, while the Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection (the successor to the former Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs) handles corporate entity filings.¹⁴

Section 4 — Recent legislative and judicial activity

A. Recent bills

The most recent District measure to touch the governance section that houses a condominium records right is the permanent virtual-meeting law.

The Nonprofit Corporation Act records provisions (§§ 29-413.01 to 29-413.07) were last amended in 2013, and no measure in the past 24 months has changed them.⁶

B. Recent rulings

A search of D.C. Court of Appeals and Superior Court sources turned up no published District decision from the past 36 months interpreting § 42-1903.14 or §§ 29-413.02 to 29-413.04 as applied to a common-interest community’s records. Many Superior Court inspection orders go unpublished and never reach free databases, so practitioners should treat the absence of published authority as a gap in reported case law, not a settled construction of the statutes.

C. Active legislative debates

No active proposal specifically targets the records-inspection framework — a fixed response deadline, copy-fee caps, electronic-records rules, or new penalties. Recent common-interest-community activity has centered on virtual meetings and electric-vehicle charging, and neither amends § 42-1903.14.

Section 5 — National positioning and related coverage

The District is a condominium-statute jurisdiction, not a UCIOA jurisdiction. Its 1976 Condominium Act predates the uniform common-interest acts, and its records rule for non-condominium communities rests on corporate and cooperative law plus governing documents. That pairing — a standalone condominium statute alongside general corporate law for everything else — places the District closer to states such as Alabama and Arkansas than to comprehensive hard-clock states such as Florida and California, which impose detailed day-count production deadlines and statutory penalties. What sets the District apart is its composition: condominiums and cooperatives dominate, planned-community HOAs are few, and the appellate structure is unusual — the D.C. Court of Appeals serves as the highest local court, with no intermediate appellate court and no connection to the federal D.C. Circuit, and Council legislation must clear a Congressional-review period before it takes effect. For multi-state operators, the practical point is simple: the District is small but condominium-dense, condominium records requests are common, and the controlling rule is the Condominium Act’s availability standard, not any uniform-act framework.

HOA Weekly updates its District of Columbia records-inspection coverage quarterly, as the Council and the D.C. Court of Appeals act. Federal frameworks — the Fair Housing Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, and the FCC’s OTARD rule — also apply to District associations, whatever the local framework says.

Footnotes

1. Council of the District of Columbia, D.C. Code § 42-1903.14, Books, minutes, and records; inspection (D.C. Official Code) ↩
2. D.C. Policy Center, Taking Stock of the District’s Housing Stock (64,300 condominium units and 28,600 cooperative units) ↩
3. District of Columbia Courts, Court of Appeals (highest local court; reviews Superior Court decisions) ↩
4. Council of the District of Columbia, D.C. Code § 42-1903.03, Meetings; electronic notice (minutes examination on 5 days’ written notice) (D.C. Official Code) ↩
5. Council of the District of Columbia, D.C. Code § 29-413.01, Corporate records (Nonprofit Corporation Act of 2010) (D.C. Official Code) ↩
6. Council of the District of Columbia, D.C. Code § 29-413.02, Inspection of records by members (Nonprofit Corporation Act of 2010) (D.C. Official Code) ↩
7. Council of the District of Columbia, D.C. Code § 29-910, Meetings; regular and special (general cooperative associations) (D.C. Official Code) ↩
8. Council of the District of Columbia, D.C. Code § 29-413.03, Scope of inspection right (agent/attorney, electronic copies, charges) (D.C. Official Code) ↩
9. Council of the District of Columbia, D.C. Code § 29-413.04, Court-ordered inspection (Superior Court; fee-shifting) (D.C. Official Code) ↩
10. Council of the District of Columbia, D.C. Code § 29-1005.05, Right of member and former member to information (limited cooperative associations; 10-business-day response) (D.C. Official Code) ↩
11. Council of the District of Columbia, D.C. Code § 29-413.07, Limitation on use of membership list (D.C. Official Code) ↩
12. Council of the District of Columbia, D.C. Code § 42-1902.09, Compliance with condominium chapter and instruments (general remedy; fee-shifting) (D.C. Official Code) ↩
13. Council of the District of Columbia, D.C. Code § 42-1901.02(32), Definitions (“unit owner in good standing”) (D.C. Official Code) ↩
14. District of Columbia Office of Administrative Hearings, Condominium (Condominium Act administered by the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development) ↩
15. Council of the District of Columbia, D.C. Law 25-324, Fairness and Stability in Housing Amendment Act of 2024, § 301 (amending § 42-1903.03; effective May 2, 2025) (D.C. Law Library) ↩