Every Georgia HOA bill that did not pass is now dead for good
Every Georgia HOA bill that did not pass is now dead for good
2026-09-10 · Georgia · Legislation · Did not pass
What happened. The Georgia General Assembly's 2026 regular session adjourned sine die on the fortieth legislative day, Thursday 2 April 2026, with the gavel falling in the early hours of 3 April. With it, the 158th General Assembly's two-year term ended.
That is not an ordinary adjournment. Georgia legislates in biennia: a bill introduced in the first year survives into the second without being refiled, but a bill alive at the end of the second year dies permanently. There is no carryover into 2027, because November's election seats a new General Assembly.
What that means concretely
Every Georgia community-association bill except SB 406 is now extinguished. Not paused, not pending, not on a calendar somewhere — gone. To return, each must be:
- drafted again and given a new bill number;
- introduced by a member of the new Assembly, seated after 3 November 2026;
- referred to committee again, with none of the committee progress it earned;
- reported out again;
- and passed by its originating chamber before Crossover Day all over again.
Bills that had already been favourably reported out of committee — HB 1035, HB 1221, HB 1222 and SB 230 among them — get no credit for it.
The bills that expired
From the House's own Session Final composite status report and CAI's end-of-session tracking, the community-association measures that died on 2 April include:1
- HB 1035 — would have made association assessments unsecured debts, ending foreclosure. Favourably reported; never called in Rules.
- HB 1036 and HB 1219 — two separate routes to dissolving an association by owner vote.
- SB 230 — condominium insurance deductibles. Passed the Senate; no House floor vote.
- SB 393 — mandatory board training. Tabled on Crossover Day.
- SB 107 and SB 108 — an HOA ombudsman inside the Department of Community Affairs, and mandatory dispute resolution before a lien.
- SB 361 — the original registration vehicle, parked in Senate Rules for a year.
- HB 62, HB 403, HB 415, HB 512, HB 1115, HB 1221, HB 1222, HB 1251, HB 1252 — the transparency, records and account-statement cluster.
- HB 389 — solar access. Shelved in committee.
- HB 664 — POA Act affirmative election. Passed the House; died in Senate Judiciary. Its text became law anyway, inside SB 406.
- HR 1675 and SR 445 — the two attempts to create an HOA study committee.
Almost none of them was defeated
This is the part worth understanding, because it changes what the list means. Scarcely any of these bills received an adverse floor vote. They died of the clock and the calendar — a committee that never scheduled a hearing, a Rules Committee that never put a reported bill on a calendar, a second chamber that ran out of days.
A bill that dies unheard tells you nothing about whether the chamber supported it. It tells you what the chamber found time for.
What the calendar looks like from here
Three dates govern what happens next, and the first is closer than most Georgia boards realise.
3 November 2026 — the general election. All 236 seats are on the ballot: 180 in the House and 56 in the Senate. Ballotpedia counted 538 candidates, the most since 2010, against a 2010-2024 average of 429, with 30 open seats.2
15 November 2026 — pre-filing opens. Under O.C.G.A. § 28-1-17, measures may be pre-filed with the Secretary of the Senate or the Clerk of the House from 15 November. Only members who will be eligible to consider the measure may pre-file — so the first HOA bills of the 2027 session will be filed by legislators who have just been elected or re-elected, twelve days earlier.
The second Monday in January 2027 — the session convenes. Under the Georgia Constitution, Art. III, Sec. IV, Para. I, the General Assembly meets on the second Monday in January for no more than 40 days in the aggregate.
As of today there are no pre-filed 2027 Georgia bills of any kind, because the window has not opened. Anyone reporting a pre-filed 2027 Georgia HOA bill right now is mistaken.
The turnover that matters for HOA policy
The Senate is losing an unusual amount of seniority from exactly the committees where community-association bills live. Seven senators are departing to seek higher office: Blake Tillery, Greg Dolezal, Steve Gooch and Josh McLaurin for lieutenant governor; Brian Strickland and Bill Cowsert for attorney general; Emanuel Jones for Congress.3
Cowsert is a long-serving Judiciary figure, and Senate Judiciary is where SB 406 originated and where HB 664 died. A committee that loses its institutional memory of a subject in the same cycle that the subject's landmark statute takes effect is a committee that will be relearning it.
Senator Matt Brass, SB 406's author, is not on the departure list and sought re-election in the May primary.
Why the reset is more consequential this cycle than usual
In an ordinary biennium, the reset is a procedural nuisance. This one lands differently, for a reason specific to Georgia's situation.
Chapter 43-17A takes effect on 1 January 2027. The General Assembly convenes roughly ten days later. The first legislature with the power to fix anything in Georgia's new community-association statute will be a substantially new legislature, arriving days after the statute goes live, with no interim study committee record to work from — because Georgia created none.
The 2026 interim study-committee roster runs to 24 committees covering health care, criminal post-conviction litigation, nuclear power, kratom, foster care and family farms. Not one of them touches homeowners associations, condominiums, housing affordability, property insurance or short-term rentals.
What this means for a board
Two practical points.
First, do not plan around a dead bill. Georgia associations spent part of 2026 preparing for possibilities — a condominium deductible change, a board-training mandate, a dissolution mechanism — none of which is law or pending. The only Georgia community-association statute that changed is SB 406.
Second, the 2027 agenda is genuinely open. With no study committee, no pre-filed bills and no published agenda from either the industry or homeowner advocates, what arrives in January will be shaped between now and 15 November. That is a nine-week window in which almost nothing is publicly decided.
What to watch next
Pre-filings from 15 November, and in particular whether anything appears that would clean up the drafting problems in Act 715 — the registration opt-out, the arbitration promised in the caption but absent from the text, and the Section 7 cross-reference. A statute of this size switching on ten days before a session opens is the classic setup for a technical-corrections bill, though no Georgia legislator has announced one.
Related Georgia HOA Topics
- 2026 Composite Status Report, Session Final, Georgia House of Representatives (14 May 2026) ↩
- “Record number of candidates running for the Georgia General Assembly in 2026” — Ballotpedia News ↩
- 2026 Georgia State Senate election — retirements and seats ↩
- “Sine Die signals end of a legislative session” — Atlanta News First, 2 April 2026 ↩
- 2026 Georgia End of Session Report — Community Associations Institute Advocacy ↩
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