The ADA and HOA Common Areas

Section 1: Overview — The ADA and community association property

The Americans with Disabilities Act rarely reaches a community association's common areas. Title III of the ADA, 42 U.S.C. § 12181 et seq., with implementing regulations at 28 C.F.R. part 36, prohibits disability discrimination by places of public accommodation, a defined set of privately operated facilities open to the public.¹ Residential common areas that serve residents and their guests generally do not qualify as places of public accommodation, so Title III generally leaves an association's pool, clubhouse, gym, and walking paths alone.² Specific activities can change that result on the facts, including renting the clubhouse to the general public, selling pool or gym memberships to non-residents, hosting events open to the public, and operating a sales or leasing office.³ For residential accessibility, the Fair Housing Act, not the ADA, is the governing statute, addressed at Reasonable Accommodations & Modifications.⁴

Two points cause the most confusion. First, the 2024 web accessibility rule is a Title II rule that applies to state and local government entities and does not reach private community associations.⁵ Second, the ADA service-animal standard, including the two permissible questions, applies only where an association operates a public accommodation; residential animal requests run through the broader Fair Housing Act, addressed at Assistance Animals & Pet Restrictions.^6,7 The sections that follow set out the statutory framework, the activities that can bring an area within Title III, recent federal activity, and the interaction with state law.

Section 2: The statutory and regulatory framework

2A. Title III and the definition of a public accommodation

Title III prohibits any private entity that owns, leases (or leases to), or operates a place of public accommodation from discriminating on the basis of disability in the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of that place.⁸ The obligation attaches only to private entities. Title II covers state and local government entities instead, and 28 C.F.R. § 36.104 treats a community association as a private entity rather than a public one.¹

Section 36.104 defines a place of public accommodation as a facility operated by a private entity whose operations affect commerce and fall within at least one of twelve categories. The regulation enumerates them: a place of lodging; an establishment serving food or drink; a place of exhibition or entertainment; a place of public gathering; a sales or rental establishment; a service establishment; a station used for specified public transportation; a place of public display or collection; a place of recreation such as a park or zoo; a place of education; a social service center establishment; and a place of exercise or recreation such as a gymnasium, health spa, bowling alley, or golf course.¹

Residential common areas do not fit those categories when they serve only residents and their guests, because each category describes a facility open to the public. The Department of Justice has stated in technical assistance that a strictly residential complex is not a place of public accommodation, while common areas that function as one of the twelve categories, and that the association does not reserve for the exclusive use of residents and their guests, can be covered.² The qualifier "generally" matters here, because coverage turns on how a facility actually operates, not on its label.

Section 36.104 also defines a place of lodging. A facility qualifies if it is an inn, hotel, or motel, or if it provides guest rooms for stays that are primarily short-term (generally 30 days or less) where the occupant has no right to return to a specific unit, under conditions and amenities similar to a hotel, including on- or off-site reservation service, rooms available on a walk-up or call-in basis, housekeeping or linen service, and acceptance of reservations without guaranteeing a particular unit.¹ Whether short-term-rental activity within an association meets that definition depends on those factors and turns on the facts.

2B. What Title III requires where it applies

Where Title III applies, existing facilities must meet the readily achievable barrier removal standard at 28 C.F.R. § 36.304, which requires a public accommodation to remove architectural barriers where doing so is readily achievable.⁹ Section 36.104 defines readily achievable as "easily accomplishable and able to be carried out without much difficulty or expense," and lists the factors: the nature and cost of the action; the overall financial resources of the site and the number of persons employed there; the geographic separateness and fiscal relationship of the site to any parent entity; and the resources and structure of any parent entity.¹ The 2010 ADA Standards for Accessible Design govern alterations and new construction; § 36.104 defines those Standards and subpart D of part 36 sets them out.¹

For pools, the 2010 Standards address swimming pools at section 242, which sets the scoping requirement, and section 1009, which sets the technical specifications for pool lifts, sloped entries, transfer walls, transfer systems, and pool stairs.¹⁰ For newly constructed or altered pools, section 242 requires large pools (300 or more linear feet of pool wall) to provide two accessible means of entry and smaller pools at least one.¹⁰ For existing pools, the obligation runs through readily achievable barrier removal rather than an absolute lift mandate, and DOJ guidance states that if providing a fixed lift is not readily achievable, the business need not provide one.¹⁰ A residential pool limited to the exclusive use of residents and their guests generally falls outside these requirements altogether.¹⁰ Separately, ADA Title I, the employment title, reaches an association that has 15 or more employees for each working day in 20 or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding year, under 42 U.S.C. § 12111.¹¹

2C. Animals, websites, and the FHA boundary

The ADA service-animal rules sit at 28 C.F.R. § 36.302(c). Section 36.104 limits the definition of service animal to a dog individually trained to do work or perform tasks for an individual with a disability, and comfort, emotional support, and companionship do not count as work or tasks.¹ A separate provision at § 36.302(c)(9) requires a public accommodation to make reasonable modifications to permit a miniature horse individually trained to do work or perform tasks, subject to assessment factors.⁶ When the service an animal provides is not obvious, staff may ask only two questions: whether the animal is required because of a disability, and what work or task it has been trained to perform.⁶ These rules apply only where the association operates a public accommodation.

The Fair Housing Act reaches further and governs the residential situation. Its reasonable-accommodation provision contains no service-animal training requirement in the statute and does not limit itself to dogs, which is why the ADA two-question script does not govern a resident's animal request.⁷ Assistance Animals & Pet Restrictions addresses those requests.

On websites, no Title III web-accessibility regulation exists. DOJ issued web accessibility guidance in 2022 stating its longstanding interpretation that Title III applies to the goods and services offered on the web, but that document is guidance rather than a legislative rule and sets no technical standard.¹² The 2024 web accessibility rule is a Title II rule that applies to state and local government entities and does not reach private community associations.⁵ Serial-plaintiff demand letters asserting website inaccessibility follow a documented litigation pattern aimed at private entities, and industry counts recorded 2,281 website-accessibility lawsuits filed in federal court in 2023, roughly 73 percent of them in New York.¹³ The Fair Housing Act remains the dominant residential accessibility law regardless of Title III's reach, and Reasonable Accommodations & Modifications addresses it.⁴

Section 3: When association facilities become public accommodations

A. Amenity access and outside users

DOJ technical assistance illustrates the line. Where a residential complex sells pool memberships to the general public, the pool qualifies as a place of public accommodation; where a condominium association restricts its party room to owners, residents, and their guests and declines to rent it to outside businesses or organizations, the party room does not.³ DOJ guidance on pools states the same principle: a community pool tied to a private residential community and limited to the exclusive use of residents and their guests falls outside coverage, while a pool the association makes available to the public for rental or use falls within Title III.¹⁰ Limited guest access consistent with a residents-and-guests policy does not by itself convert a facility. The analysis turns on whether use opens to the general public, and it turns on the facts.

B. Events and programs

Opening an amenity to the public for an event such as a swim meet, tournament, or community-wide sale raises a fact-specific question about whether, and for what period, the area operates as a place of public accommodation. DOJ technical assistance treats coverage as a function of actual public use rather than of the facility's residential character, and confirms that common areas function as public accommodations only when the association does not reserve them for the exclusive use of residents and their guests.^2,3 This page states the rule and does not advise on structuring events.

C. Sales and leasing offices and short-term rentals

A sales or leasing office is a place of public accommodation in its own right, because it opens to the public and functions as a sales or rental establishment under 28 C.F.R. § 36.104, and DOJ has said so in technical assistance addressing residential rental offices.^2,3 Short-term-rental activity may raise a place-of-lodging question under the § 36.104 factors set out in Section 2A. Whether a given arrangement meets that definition turns on the facts, and this page leaves the question open pending application of those factors.¹

D. Obligations that follow, and the ones that do not

Where an area is a public accommodation, the association's obligations for existing facilities run through readily achievable barrier removal under 28 C.F.R. § 36.304, and alterations and new construction follow the 2010 Standards, including the pool provisions at sections 242 and 1009.^9,10 The ADA service-animal rules at § 36.302(c), including the two permissible questions, apply inside those public-accommodation zones only, and residential animal requests run through the Fair Housing Act.^6,7 On websites, no Title III web-accessibility regulation reaches associations, and the 2024 Title II rule does not apply to them.^12,5

Section 4: Recent rulemaking, litigation, and legislative activity

A. Recent rulemaking and guidance

B. Recent federal court decisions

No federal court of appeals decided, within the past 36 months, whether a stand-alone website is a place of public accommodation, and no reported federal appellate decision in that window holds that a residents-only association common area is a place of public accommodation. Recent activity on the website question has come from the district courts, and it is divided. In Mejia v. High Brew Coffee, Inc., No. 1:22-cv-03667-LTS, 2024 WL 4350912 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 30, 2024), Chief Judge Laura Taylor Swain held that a stand-alone website is not a place of public accommodation under Title III, aligning the court with the physical-nexus approach that several circuits follow.¹⁶

C. Legislation and active debates

The Websites and Software Applications Accessibility Act of 2025 (H.R. 3417, 119th Congress), which Representative Pete Sessions introduced on May 14, 2025 with Representative Steny Hoyer, would direct DOJ and the EEOC to set and enforce uniform web and application accessibility standards across ADA titles, including Title III public accommodations. The House Committees on Education and Workforce and the Judiciary received it, and it has not been enacted.¹⁷ The ADA Compliance for Customer Entry to Stores and Sites (ACCESS) Act of 2026 (H.R. 8396, 119th Congress) would add a written-notice and cure period before certain Title III suits over architectural barriers could proceed. It remains pending and has not been enacted.¹⁸

Section 5: Interaction with state law and related coverage

The ADA sets a floor, not a ceiling. State accessibility statutes and building codes may reach further than Title III, and some state public-accommodation laws define covered entities more broadly than federal law, which means an association outside Title III can still face obligations at home. State health and building codes govern pool safety and construction independently of the ADA, and those codes, rather than Title III, are where most association pool obligations originate for residents-only facilities.¹⁰ Because these overlays vary, boards should confirm current requirements against their own state's rules and then consult their state's Insurance Requirements, Condo Safety Inspections, and Architectural Review pages.

HOA Weekly's federal ADA coverage updates quarterly as DOJ and the federal courts act, and state accessibility and pool-code overlays appear in the Insurance Requirements and Condo Safety Inspections columns across the state matrix.

Footnotes

1. 28 C.F.R. § 36.104 (Definitions), eCFR ↩
2. U.S. Dep't of Justice, ADA Technical Assistance Letter (residential common areas and Title III), justice.gov ↩
3. ADA Title III Technical Assistance Manual (III-1.2000, illustrations re: pool memberships, party room, rental office), ADA.gov ↩
4. 42 U.S.C. § 12181 (Title III definitions; exclusion of facilities covered or expressly exempted under the Fair Housing Act), uscode.house.gov ↩
5. Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability; Accessibility of Web Information and Services of State and Local Government Entities, Final Rule, 89 Fed. Reg. (Apr. 24, 2024), federalregister.gov ↩
6. 28 C.F.R. § 36.302(c) (service animals; two permissible questions; miniature-horse provision), eCFR ↩
7. HUD FHEO, Assessing a Person's Request to Have an Animal as a Reasonable Accommodation Under the Fair Housing Act (2020) (FHA reaches support animals, not limited to dogs, no statutory training requirement) ↩
8. 42 U.S.C. § 12182(a) (Prohibition of discrimination by public accommodations), govinfo.gov ↩
9. 28 C.F.R. § 36.304 (Removal of barriers), eCFR ↩
10. Questions and Answers: Accessibility Requirements for Existing Swimming Pools at Hotels and Other Public Accommodations (sections 242 and 1009; readily achievable; residential community pools), ADA.gov ↩
11. 42 U.S.C. § 12111(5) (definition of "employer," 15 or more employees), uscode.house.gov ↩
12. Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA (2022) (guidance; no detailed technical standard under Title III), ADA.gov ↩
13. Cong. Research Serv., R48104, The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Public Accommodations in Web Services (no binding Title III web-accessibility rule of general applicability), congress.gov ↩
14. Extension of Compliance Dates for Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability; Accessibility of Web Information and Services of State and Local Government Entities, Interim Final Rule (Apr. 20, 2026), federalregister.gov ↩
15. Acheson Hotels, LLC v. Laufer, 601 U.S. 1 (2023) (slip op., vacated as moot), supremecourt.gov ↩
16. Mejia v. High Brew Coffee, Inc., No. 1:22-cv-03667-LTS, 2024 WL 4350912 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 30, 2024) (stand-alone website not a place of public accommodation); see also CRS R48104 discussing the physical-nexus circuit split, congress.gov ↩
17. H.R. 3417, Websites and Software Applications Accessibility Act of 2025, 119th Cong., congress.gov ↩
18. H.R. 8396, ADA Compliance for Customer Entry to Stores and Sites (ACCESS) Act of 2026, 119th Cong., congress.gov ↩