Illinois HOA Director Qualifications

Section 1: Overview

Start with where Illinois lands on the spectrum: it is a moderate-touch state. Its two governing statutes set the rules for board elections, removal, and composition — and, for condominiums, they cap how many directors an association may require to be owner-occupants. Everything else about who is eligible to serve, Illinois leaves to each association’s recorded governing documents.¹ Condominiums answer to the Illinois Condominium Property Act (765 ILCS 605), whose board provisions sit mostly in Section 18. Non-condominium common interest communities answer to the Common Interest Community Association Act — CICAA, at 765 ILCS 160 — which exempts the smallest associations unless they choose to opt in.²

The rule that draws the most attention is the 2022 condominium amendment. An association may require that no more than a majority of its board be unit owners who live in their units as a primary residence, and every unit owner stays qualified to serve no matter where they live.¹ Read it carefully: this is a ceiling on what an association may demand, not a residency mandate, and it does not split the membership into two classes. Neither statute requires a director to complete a certification or education course, neither sets a term limit, and neither automatically disqualifies an owner who has fallen behind on assessments or who has a criminal record. That is what separates Illinois sharply from Florida, where a condominium director faces an eight-consecutive-year service limit, a bar for assessment delinquency, and a felony bar unless civil rights have been restored.³ The sections that follow trace where each rule comes from and how it plays out by community type.

Section 2: Where director qualifications come from

2A. The two statutes: the Condominium Property Act and CICAA

Illinois sorts common-interest housing into two statutory tracks, and they are not interchangeable. Condominiums fall under the Condominium Property Act. Its Section 18 tells the bylaws to provide for electing a board of managers from among the unit owners, to expire the terms of at least one-third of the board every year, and to elect all members at large.¹ Non-condominium communities — the typical townhome or single-family-home HOA — fall under CICAA, whose Section 1-25 requires an election from among the membership at least once every 24 months.⁴

CICAA does not reach every non-condominium association. Section 1-75 exempts an association organized under the General Not For Profit Corporation Act if it has either 10 units or fewer or annual budgeted assessments of $100,000 or less — unless a majority of its directors or members votes to opt in.² An exempt association answers to its declaration, its bylaws, and the not-for-profit act, not to CICAA’s board rules.

The 2022 amendment lives on the condominium side alone. Public Act 102-0162 (Senate Bill 636), effective January 1, 2022, rewrote Section 18(a)(1): a new declaration — or an existing association through a post-effective-date amendment — may require that a majority (or fewer) of the board be unit owners who occupy their unit as a primary residence, but it may never require more than a majority.¹ Lawmakers wrote the change to adjust board structure without creating two classes of membership, so every unit owner stays eligible to serve. Neither the Condominium Property Act nor CICAA adds a certification or education prerequisite, a term limit, or an automatic disqualification tied to delinquency or a criminal record. Those screens, where they exist at all, come from the governing documents.

2B. The corporate-law layer: the General Not For Profit Corporation Act

Most Illinois associations incorporate under the General Not For Profit Corporation Act of 1986 (805 ILCS 105/101 et seq.), which supplies the corporate scaffolding wherever the governing statute and the documents fall silent. (Cooperatives may instead organize under the Co-operative Act, 805 ILCS 310.)⁵ The condominium statute keeps this layer in place on purpose: an association holds the powers and responsibilities of the not-for-profit act so long as they do not conflict with the Condominium Property Act or the condominium instruments.⁶

The act’s director provisions set the baselines. A corporation must have a board of three or more directors, with the bylaws fixing the number and free to set a variable range.⁷ The articles or bylaws may prescribe director qualifications, and a director need not live in the state or belong to the corporation unless the articles or bylaws say so.⁸ The act also governs how members remove directors, how vacancies fill, and how conflicts of interest work — each of which the governing documents can adjust within limits.⁹ These defaults fill gaps. They do not override a controlling provision of the Condominium Property Act, CICAA, or a validly recorded declaration.

2C. The declaration and bylaws as the source of other eligibility screens

Beyond the statutory guardrails — the condominium owner-occupant cap and the rule that every unit owner is eligible — candidate eligibility is a documentary question. The recorded declaration and bylaws are where an association sets its good-standing requirements, its residency expectations, an age floor, and similar screens, all of them subject to the owner-occupant ceiling and the every-unit-owner-eligible rule.

The order of precedence depends on the track. For a condominium, it runs from the Condominium Property Act, to the declaration and bylaws, to the General Not For Profit Corporation Act defaults, to board rules. For a non-condominium community, it runs from CICAA where the association is covered, to the declaration and bylaws, to the not-for-profit defaults, to board rules — and for a CICAA-exempt association, the declaration, bylaws, and not-for-profit act govern in CICAA’s place.² So a manager vetting a candidate has to identify the community type first, then (for a non-condominium association) confirm whether CICAA even applies given the small-association exemption, and only then read the governing documents against the statutory guardrails. Skipping that coverage question is the most common way associations get it wrong about who may serve.

Section 3: Director eligibility, disqualification, and tenure rules

A. Eligibility to serve

For condominiums, start with the foundational rule: directors come from among the unit owners, and every unit owner is qualified to serve (Condominium Property Act, Section 18(a)(1)).¹ The 2022 amendment lets an association require, through a properly adopted declaration or amendment, that a majority (or fewer) of its directors be owner-occupants — but it forbids any requirement that more than a majority be owner-occupants. That is a hard statutory guardrail, and a residency screen that reaches past it is unenforceable.¹ Where a single unit has several owners, only one of them may sit on the board at a time.¹

CICAA handles the question in parallel, though not identically: directors come from among the membership, and where a unit has multiple owners, only one may serve at a time unless that owner independently owns another unit (CICAA Sections 1-25 and 1-35).¹⁰ Past membership status and the condominium owner-occupant ceiling, the rest — good standing, age, residency — is documentary, drawn from the declaration and bylaws rather than from either statute. The same goes for how an association treats spouses, co-owners, trustees who hold title in a land trust, and entity representatives: the documents control, and for incorporated associations so does the not-for-profit act’s authority to prescribe director qualifications (General Not For Profit Corporation Act, Section 108.05).⁸

B. Disqualification and removal

Illinois imposes no automatic statutory disqualification — not for falling behind on assessments, and not for a criminal record. Any such bar has to come from the governing documents, in either community type. On removal, the Condominium Property Act requires the bylaws to set out a method for removing board members, but it does not itself fix the member-vote threshold; the balloting mechanics that go with a recall — the petition by 20% of unit owners to call a special meeting, the quorum, the proxy and ballot rules — belong to board-elections coverage, not to director qualifications.¹ CICAA, by contrast, fixes the threshold head-on: two-thirds of the membership may remove a board member at a duly called special meeting (CICAA Section 1-35).¹⁰ For an incorporated association, the not-for-profit act supplies a parallel default wherever members vote for directors — a director may be removed by a two-thirds vote of the votes present and voted, and a court may remove a director for fraudulent or dishonest conduct on a petition by members holding at least 10% of the votes (General Not For Profit Corporation Act, Section 108.35).⁹ Conflict-of-interest limits run through the not-for-profit act and the documents too: a contract in which a director has an interest is not automatically void, but it carries disclosure and fairness conditions (Section 108.60), and both statutes bar an association from contracting with a board member unless it notifies owners and gives them a chance to petition.¹¹

C. Board composition and terms

The Condominium Property Act sets no fixed board size. The bylaws fix the number, bounded by the rule that at least one-third of the terms expire each year and, for incorporated associations, by the not-for-profit floor of three directors (Condominium Property Act Section 18 and General Not For Profit Corporation Act Section 108.10).⁷ Condominium board terms may not run longer than two years, members and officers may succeed themselves, and Illinois sets no statutory limit on the number of terms a director may serve (Condominium Property Act Section 18(a)(11)).¹ Under CICAA, no board member or officer may be elected for a term longer than four years — again with no cap on consecutive terms (CICAA Section 1-25).⁴ On the condominium side, Section 18.2 handles developer control: it holds the board’s powers in the developer until the first unit-owner board is elected, an election that must happen no later than 60 days after the developer conveys 75% of the units or three years after the declaration is recorded, whichever comes first.¹²

D. Onboarding and ongoing qualification duties

Illinois asks no director to complete a certification or an education course before serving. A newly elected director takes office without finishing any state-mandated training. Florida runs the opposite way: Fla. Stat. § 718.112(2)(d)4.b gives a residential condominium director 90 days from election or appointment to sign a written certification and turn in a certificate showing completion of an educational curriculum of at least four hours, with at least one hour of continuing education every year after that — and a director who misses the deadline is suspended until he or she complies.³ In Illinois, conflict-of-interest expectations rest on disclosure and the contracting restrictions noted above, not on a pre-service screen.¹¹ The standard of care is the onboarding fact that actually matters: under Section 18.4 of the Condominium Property Act, board members — whether the developer appointed them or the unit owners elected them — must exercise the care required of a fiduciary of the unit owners.¹³ For incorporated associations, the not-for-profit act adds its own director-conduct standards, and Illinois common law applies the business judgment rule, under which courts will not second-guess a board that informed itself and acted in good faith.⁹

Section 4: Recent legislative and judicial activity

A. Recent bills

On director qualifications, the most directly relevant recent measure is House Bill 3586 of the 104th General Assembly, which would have created a board-member training requirement.

For context beyond the 24-month bill window, the operative recent change to board structure is still Public Act 102-0162 (effective January 1, 2022), which added the owner-occupant board-composition cap to Section 18(a)(1) of the Condominium Property Act.¹

B. Recent appellate rulings

C. Active legislative debates

The board-training idea in House Bill 3586, and earlier proposals to disqualify directors charged with association-related crimes — for example, Senate Bill 3715 of the 103rd General Assembly, which died in committee¹⁶ — remain live ideas that could resurface in a future session. The legislature also recently revisited the Ombudsperson itself: Public Act 104-0377 (Senate Bill 1383, sponsored by Sen. Sara Feigenholtz and Rep. Dan Didech, effective August 15, 2025) pushed the Ombudsperson Act’s repeal date back from January 1, 2026 to January 1, 2029.¹⁷

Section 5: National positioning and related coverage

Illinois is a moderate-touch state for director qualifications. Its two governing statutes supply the rules for board elections, removal, and composition — including the cap that bars a condominium from requiring more than a majority of its board to be owner-occupants — but they leave certification, age, good standing, and the other eligibility screens to the recorded governing documents.¹ That sets Illinois between heavy-touch states such as Florida — which under Fla. Stat. § 718.112(2)(d) bars a board member from serving more than eight consecutive years absent a two-thirds owner vote, disqualifies any owner who is delinquent on assessments, and bars a felon unless civil rights have been restored for at least five years³ — and light-touch states such as Iowa, where eligibility is almost entirely documentary. For a multi-state operator, the first two questions in Illinois are always the community type and, for a non-condominium association, whether CICAA applies given the small-association exemption. Illinois also licenses community association managers under the CAM Act (225 ILCS 427), a regime most states lack — though that governs the managers an association hires, not the directors it elects.¹⁸

HOA Weekly refreshes its Illinois director-qualifications coverage each quarter, as the General Assembly and the Illinois courts act. Federal frameworks rarely dictate director qualifications, but Illinois associations still answer to federal law — the Fair Housing Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, and the OTARD rule — in their broader operations.

Footnotes

1. 765 ILCS 605/18 (Condominium Property Act; contents of bylaws, board election, terms, removal method, and owner-occupant board-composition cap added by P.A. 102-162) ↩
2. 765 ILCS 160/1-75 (Common Interest Community Association Act; exemption for small common interest communities) ↩
3. Fla. Stat. § 718.112(2)(d) (Florida condominium director term limit, assessment-delinquency bar, felony bar, and certification/education requirement; cited for contrast) ↩
4. 765 ILCS 160/1-25 (CICAA; board elections, terms, and vacancies) ↩
5. 805 ILCS 105 (General Not For Profit Corporation Act of 1986) and 805 ILCS 310 (Co-operative Act), Illinois Compiled Statutes, ch. 805 ↩
6. 765 ILCS 605/18.3 (Condominium Property Act; unit owners’ association, powers under the General Not For Profit Corporation Act) ↩
7. 805 ILCS 105/108.10 (General Not For Profit Corporation Act; number, election, and resignation of directors) ↩
8. 805 ILCS 105/108.05 (General Not For Profit Corporation Act; board of directors and qualifications) ↩
9. 805 ILCS 105/108.35 (General Not For Profit Corporation Act; removal of directors) ↩
10. 765 ILCS 160/1-35 (CICAA; member powers, removal of a board member, and multiple-owner eligibility) ↩
11. 805 ILCS 105/108.60 (General Not For Profit Corporation Act; director conflict of interest) ↩
12. 765 ILCS 605/18.2 (Condominium Property Act; administration prior to election of initial board, developer turnover) ↩
13. 765 ILCS 605/18.4 (Condominium Property Act; powers and duties of board, fiduciary standard of care) ↩
14. Illinois House Bill 3586, 104th General Assembly (board-member training; bill status) ↩
15. Cohen v. 175 East Delaware Place Homeowners Association, 2024 IL App (1st) 230516-U ↩
16. Illinois Senate Bill 3715, 103rd General Assembly (condominium board powers and duties; bill status) ↩
17. Public Act 104-0377 (extends Ombudsperson Act sunset to January 1, 2029) ↩
18. IDFPR, Condominium and Common Interest Community Ombudsperson (agency role; manager licensing under the CAM Act, 225 ILCS 427) ↩