What a board has to decide before January

The Act does not ask an association to do one thing. It asks it to make a sequence of decisions, most of which have a wrong answer that is expensive.

• Register, or elect not to. Section 43-17A-2(a)(2)(B) lets an entity that would otherwise be an owners' association give the Secretary of State written notice electing not to register. The consequences differ sharply from simply failing to register, and the difference is not what most summaries say it is.
• Find ten years of records. Section 43-17A-2(g) requires an association to maintain, for not less than ten years, at an office in Georgia, all records — “including electronic records and records in any other format” — relating to any assessments, fines, fees, liens and foreclosures. Associations that have changed management companies twice in a decade frequently cannot produce five.
• Fix the payment-application clause. Section 43-17A-8(a) dictates the order in which owner payments are applied, and it is the reverse of the clause in many Georgia declarations.
• Stop accelerating. Section 43-17A-8(b)(2) flatly prohibits assessing or collecting accelerated assessments. Acceleration is a standard remedy in Georgia declarations and it is simply gone.
• Re-paper the collections file now. Section 7 is already in force.

What the Act does not contain

This is worth stating plainly, because the volume of coverage invites the opposite assumption. Reading the enacted text end to end, the Georgia Property Owners' Bill of Rights Act contains:

• No cap on assessments. Nothing limits how much a Georgia association may charge.
• No cap on fines. The Act constrains what fines can be used for — they cannot count toward a foreclosure threshold, and they sit last in the payment-application order — but it sets no ceiling on the fine itself.
• No reserve study or reserve funding requirement. Reserves appear once, inside the definition of “regular assessments” in § 43-17A-1(8), as a permissible use of operating-budget money. Nothing is mandated.
• No board training requirement. A separate bill would have required four hours; it never got a hearing.
• No manager licensing change. The Act regulates the association, not the community association manager.

The only substantive change to Georgia association law this session

One more fact establishes the scale of this Act by showing what surrounds it. Searching the Legislative Counsel's index of every Code section amended in the 2026 session, the Condominium Act and the Property Owners' Association Act are touched by exactly two bills: SB 406, and HB 1268 — the annual reviser's bill, which the Legislative Counsel describes as making “extensive editorial amendments… to correct typographical, stylistic, capitalization, punctuation, and other errors and omissions.”¹

HB 1268 does touch §§ 44-3-71, 44-3-80, 44-3-112, 44-3-162, 44-3-221, 44-3-225, 44-3-226 and 44-3-234, effective 1 July 2026. Those are editorial corrections, not policy. So for Georgia community associations, SB 406 is the whole of the 2026 session's substantive output — and the first meaningful change to the Property Owners' Association Act in many years.

What to watch next

Section 43-17A-9 is one sentence: “The Secretary of State shall adopt such policies, rules, regulations, and procedures as are necessary to implement this chapter.” It carries no deadline. The registration form, the filing portal and the first registration deadline all live inside rules that have not been written yet, for a chapter that switches on in under four months.