Florida HOA EV Charging

Quick-Reference EV Charging Table

Chapters 718 (condominiums) and 720 (HOAs) are separate statutes, so the condominium EV rule does not by itself reach HOAs; cooperatives fall under a third statute, Chapter 719; and Florida amends these chapters frequently, so pull current text and cite by subsection.

Section 1: Overview — How EV charging is regulated for HOAs in Florida

Florida protects condominium unit owners' EV charging installations by statute, but gives homeowners' association parcel owners no equivalent statutory right — so the answer depends entirely on which chapter governs the community. The condominium provision, Fla. Stat. § 718.113(8), bars a declaration, a restrictive covenant, or a condominium board from prohibiting a unit owner from installing an electric vehicle charging station within the boundaries of the owner's limited common element or exclusively designated parking area.¹

Florida runs a split-statute state: Chapter 718 governs condominiums, Chapter 720 governs homeowners' associations, and Chapter 719 governs cooperatives — each a separate track with its own rules. Chapter 720 contains no EV-charging provision, so an HOA parcel owner's ability to install a charger turns on the recorded covenants and the association's architectural review authority under § 720.3035, not on § 718.113(8).

A condominium association retains meaningful control even though it can't prohibit installation: it may require bona fide safety and code compliance, reasonable architectural standards, use of a licensed installer, separate metering, owner-paid costs, and insurance naming the association as an additional insured.

These features place Florida among the more protective states for condominium installations, alongside California and Colorado, though Florida's HOA track runs markedly weaker, and its mechanics are its own. The sections below work through the statutory framework, what associations can and cannot do, and recent legislative activity, reflecting the statutes as currently amended through the 2025 legislative session.

Section 2: The statutory and regulatory framework

2A. EV-charging-specific law in Florida

Florida addresses EV charging directly for condominiums and not at all for homeowners' associations. The condominium provision, Fla. Stat. § 718.113(8), declares a legislative finding that EV use serves an important public interest, then provides that a declaration of condominium or restrictive covenant may not be enforced to prohibit a unit owner from installing a charging station within the owner's limited common element or exclusively designated parking area.¹ A companion subsection, § 718.113(9), separately authorizes a condominium board to install and operate charging stations on the common elements, and states that doing so isn't a material alteration.² This page cites the current text of both subsections by subsection.

Chapter 720, the Homeowners' Association Act, contains no EV-charging provision. The prohibited-clauses list at § 720.3075 doesn't mention electric vehicles or charging stations, and no other Chapter 720 section grants a right to install one.³ As a result, an HOA parcel owner's charging request gets governed by the recorded declaration and the association's architectural review authority under § 720.3035, plus Chapter 720's general covenant-enforcement provisions.⁴ The two chapters stay separate, and the condominium rule doesn't carry over to HOAs. Cooperatives sit under a third track, Chapter 719, not addressed here.

No bill in the 2026 regular session amends § 718.113(8)-(9) or adds an EV-charging right to Chapter 720. Recent EV-related bills, including CS/SB 680 (2026) on sales-tax treatment and CS/HB 1217 / SB 7046 (2026) on whether station electricity is a retail sale, concern utility ratemaking and taxation rather than community association authority.

2B. Condominiums: Section 718.113(8) and the rest of Chapter 718

Under § 718.113(8)(a), a condominium board may not prohibit a unit owner from installing a charging station within the owner's limited common element or exclusively designated parking area.¹ The installation right is mandatory, but the statute conditions it. Section 718.113(8)(h) permits the association to require the owner to comply with bona fide safety requirements consistent with applicable building codes, to comply with reasonable architectural standards governing dimensions, placement, or external appearance — provided those standards can't prohibit installation or substantially increase its cost — and to engage a licensed and registered firm familiar with the work.¹

The owner bears the financial burden. Section 718.113(8)(e) makes the installing owner responsible for the costs of installation, operation, maintenance, and repair, including hazard and liability insurance. Section 718.113(8)(c) requires the electricity to be separately metered or metered by an embedded meter and paid by the owner. Section 718.113(8)(b) bars any installation that would cause irreparable damage to the condominium property, and § 718.113(8)(f) makes the owner responsible for removal costs once the station is no longer needed.¹ The association may enforce these costs the same way it would an assessment under § 718.116.⁵ Section 718.113(8)(h)4.-5. requires the owner to provide a certificate of insurance naming the association as an additional insured within 14 days of approval, and to reimburse any increased premium.¹

The association's own authority to install common-element stations comes from § 718.113(9), which lets the board make available, install, or operate stations and set charges or payment terms, and treats that work as not a material alteration, removing the membership-approval hurdle that otherwise applies under § 718.113(2).² The mandatory elements are the no-prohibition rule and the owner's cost and insurance obligations; the association's discretion lies in the specific reasonable standards it adopts and in whether to build common stations.

2C. Homeowners' associations, cooperatives, and corporate law

For homeowners' associations, the governing instrument is the recorded declaration of covenants, applied through the architectural review framework in § 720.3035. That section permits architectural review only to the extent authority is stated or reasonably inferred in the declaration, and, as amended by HB 1203 in 2024, requires that an association or its architectural committee "reasonably and equitably apply and enforce" its standards on all parcel owners.⁴ A denial must be delivered in writing, stating with specificity the rule or covenant relied on. No HOA equivalent of the condominium no-prohibition rule exists, so an HOA may lawfully restrict or condition a charger installation in ways a condominium couldn't, provided it acts within its covenants and applies its standards consistently.

Cooperatives fall under Chapter 719, a separate track that borrows the condominium dispute-resolution process but doesn't fold into either the condominium or HOA analysis here.

Most Florida associations organize as nonprofits under the Florida Not For Profit Corporation Act, Chapter 617, which supplies corporate-formality scaffolding — board governance, meetings, voting mechanics — but grants no EV-specific authority.⁶ Within each track, the order of precedence runs from the controlling statute, Chapter 718 or 720, to the recorded declaration, to the bylaws and rules. Where both the statute and the documents stay silent, general Florida contract and property doctrine governs interpretation and enforcement of the covenants.

Section 3: What HOAs can and cannot do regarding EV charging

A. Installation rights and prohibitions

For condominiums, § 718.113(8)(a) provides that a declaration or restrictive covenant "may not prohibit or be enforced so as to prohibit" a unit owner from installing a charging station within the owner's limited common element or exclusively designated parking area, and the board "may not prohibit" such an installation.¹ For HOAs, Chapter 720 grants no comparable right, so authority to permit or deny turns on the CC&Rs and § 720.3035.⁴ The dividing line for condominiums: a reasonable condition — safety, appearance, licensed installer — is permitted, but an outright denial of a compliant request in the owner's own parking area isn't.

B. Conditions an association may impose

A condominium association may require bona fide safety and building-code compliance, reasonable architectural standards that neither prohibit installation nor substantially increase its cost, and a licensed and registered installer, under § 718.113(8)(h)1.-3.¹ It may require a certificate of insurance naming the association as an additional insured within 14 days, and reimbursement of any increased premium, under § 718.113(8)(h)4.-5.¹ The statute sets no approval deadline and no deemed-approval mechanism, so any timeline is a matter of association rule rather than statute. HOAs impose conditions through their covenants and architectural standards under § 720.3035.⁴

C. Cost, metering, and maintenance allocation

For condominiums, the installing owner is responsible for installation, operation, maintenance, repair, and removal, and for hazard and liability insurance, under § 718.113(8)(e)-(f).¹ Electricity must be separately metered or metered by an embedded meter and paid by the owner under § 718.113(8)(c); where a board installs common stations under § 718.113(9), it may set charges for users.² On the utility side, § 366.94(1) provides that "[t]he provision of electric vehicle charging to the public by a nonutility is not the retail sale of electricity for the purposes of this chapter" and that such services "are not subject to regulation under this chapter" — the section preempts EV-charging-station regulation to the state, so an owner charging on a private meter is generally not reselling utility service.⁷ HOA cost allocation follows the CC&Rs.

D. Dispute resolution and enforcement

For condominiums, § 718.1255 requires that certain disputes proceed through mandatory nonbinding arbitration administered by the DBPR Division of Florida Condominiums, Timeshares, and Mobile Homes, or, alternatively, presuit mediation, before litigation — election and recall disputes are excluded.⁸ For HOAs, § 720.311 requires presuit mediation for covenant-enforcement and use disputes, including disputes over changes to a parcel, before suit.⁹ The DBPR Division regulates condominiums and cooperatives; its authority over HOAs stays narrower, limited largely to education, recordkeeping, and election matters even after HB 1203's 2024 expansion.¹⁰ Trial-level disputes proceed in the Florida Circuit Courts, with appeals to the District Court of Appeal for the relevant district.

Section 4: Recent legislative and judicial activity

A. Recent bills

B. Recent appellate rulings

No published opinion from any Florida District Court of Appeal or the Florida Supreme Court in the past 36 months touches EV charging under § 718.113(8) or (9), or an HOA EV-charging dispute. Condominium EV disputes route to DBPR arbitration or presuit mediation, which don't generate published appellate opinions, so the area remains judicially untested. Because Florida added a Sixth District Court of Appeal — created by CS/HB 7027, signed June 2, 2022, effective January 1, 2023, covering the Ninth, Tenth, and Twentieth Judicial Circuits and headquartered in Lakeland — and realigned districts, identify any future ruling by its current district.¹³

C. Active legislative debates

During the 2026 session, lawmakers considered EV-related bills addressing whether charging electricity counts as a retail sale for tax and utility purposes, including CS/HB 1217 / SB 7046 — providing that station electricity "shall be considered the retail sale of electricity," laid on the table March 11, 2026 — and SB 680, a sales-tax exemption for station electricity. None of them would amend the community-association EV provisions in Chapter 718 or 720.

Section 5: National positioning and related coverage

Florida sits among the more protective states for condominium EV charging, alongside California, under Civil Code § 4745, and Colorado, under C.R.S. § 38-33.3-106.8, because § 718.113(8) bars condominium associations from prohibiting owner installations in a designated parking area. Its HOA track differs sharply: Chapter 720 grants no charging right, so Florida fits the middle of three national categories, between mandate states that protect both housing types and states with no EV-charging statute at all. Its mechanics — separate metering, the 14-day insurance timeline, the board's common-element installation authority — are its own, and shouldn't be conflated with the California or Colorado models. For a multi-state operator, the practical implication is that Florida protects condominium installation but leaves HOA charger requests to the covenants, so a single national policy won't fit both housing types.

HOA Weekly's Florida EV Charging coverage updates quarterly as the legislature and courts act, and we re-verify § 718.113(8) and the Chapter 720 position against current text each cycle. Federal incentives may affect installation economics, but no federal law mandates HOA EV charging access.

Footnotes

1. Fla. Stat. § 718.113(8) (2025), Maintenance; limitation upon improvement (electric vehicle charging stations) ↩
2. Fla. Stat. § 718.113(9) (2025), association installation on common elements ↩
3. Fla. Stat. § 720.3075 (2025), prohibited clauses in association documents ↩
4. Fla. Stat. § 720.3035 (2025), architectural control covenants; parcel owner improvements ↩
5. Fla. Stat. § 718.116 (2025), assessments; liability; lien and priority ↩
6. Fla. Stat. Chapter 617 (2025), Florida Not For Profit Corporation Act ↩
7. Fla. Stat. § 366.94 (2025), electric vehicle charging stations ↩
8. Fla. Stat. § 718.1255 (2025), alternative dispute resolution; mediation; nonbinding arbitration ↩
9. Fla. Stat. § 720.311 (2025), dispute resolution; presuit mediation ↩
10. CS/CS/HB 1203 (2024), Chapter 2024-221, Laws of Florida ↩
11. CS/CS/HB 913 (2025), Chapter 2025-175, Laws of Florida ↩
12. CS/CS/SB 630 (2021), Chapter 2021-99, Laws of Florida ↩
13. Florida Sixth District Court of Appeal (created effective January 1, 2023) ↩