Illinois HOA Fining Authority

Section 1: Overview — Fining authority in Illinois

Illinois gives associations fining authority through two separate statutes, and both attach the same condition: notice and an opportunity to be heard before the fine takes effect. Condominiums answer to the Illinois Condominium Property Act. Its board-powers provision lets the board, after notice and an opportunity to be heard, levy reasonable fines for violations of the declaration, bylaws, and rules (765 ILCS 605/18.4(l)).¹ Non-condominium common interest communities answer to a different law, the Common Interest Community Association Act, or CICAA, whose board-powers provision grants a parallel power: the board may levy and collect reasonable fines after notice and an opportunity to be heard (765 ILCS 160/1-30(g)).² CICAA doesn't reach every community, though. An association organized under the General Not For Profit Corporation Act of 1986 with 10 units or fewer, or with annual budgeted assessments of $100,000 or less, is exempt unless it affirmatively elects coverage (765 ILCS 160/1-75).³ Elect in, and its fining authority comes from its declaration plus the not-for-profit corporation statute instead. Neither statute puts a dollar figure on a fine; the real limit is reasonableness. But the two tracks part ways sharply once you ask what happens to a fine nobody pays. Condominiums carry a remedy the other track doesn't: an eviction action under the Code of Civil Procedure that can reach unpaid fines directly.⁴ So the question every board eventually faces — can this fine become a lien, support foreclosure, or support a possession action — turns entirely on which statute applies, and Section 3C works through the answer. The Quick-Reference table below lays out the mechanics; Section 3 sources every parameter in it.

Section 2: Quick-Reference Fining Mechanics Table

Here's the fining picture at a glance. The Condominiums column reflects the Condominium Property Act (765 ILCS 605); the Planned Communities column reflects CICAA (765 ILCS 160) for non-exempt communities. Exempt communities fall back on declaration-governed authority, covered in Section 3A. Every value below is sourced in the detailed discussion that follows.

Condominiums column reflects the Condominium Property Act (765 ILCS 605); Planned Communities column reflects CICAA (765 ILCS 160) for non-exempt communities. The Ombudsperson Act (765 ILCS 615) has been repealed and isn't operative. Last verified: July 14, 2026.

Section 3: Fining mechanics in detail

3A. Source and outer limits of fining authority

Start with condominiums. Their fining power comes straight from the board-powers provision of the Condominium Property Act. Section 18.4(l) lets the board of managers impose charges for late payment of common expenses and, after notice and an opportunity to be heard, levy reasonable fines for violations of the declaration, bylaws, and rules and regulations.¹ That power is statutory, but it doesn't run on its own. It only reaches conduct the condominium's own instruments — the declaration, the bylaws, duly adopted rules — actually restrict. And rules don't become enforceable just because the board wants them to. Section 18.4(h) requires a meeting of unit owners called specifically to discuss the proposed rules, with the full text included in the meeting notice.⁸

Non-condominium communities work off a different statute entirely: CICAA. Section 1-30(g) gives the board the power, after notice and an opportunity to be heard, to levy and collect reasonable fines from members or unit owners for violations of the declaration, bylaws, operating agreement, and rules and regulations.² But CICAA doesn't cover every homeowners association in the state. Section 1-75 exempts a common interest community association organized under the General Not For Profit Corporation Act of 1986 if it has 10 units or fewer, or annual budgeted assessments of $100,000 or less — unless a majority of its directors or members affirmatively vote to opt in.³ For an exempt community, the fining authority doesn't come from CICAA at all. It comes from the recorded declaration, backed by the General Not For Profit Corporation Act of 1986.⁵ That distinction has real operational weight: before a manager quotes a CICAA section to a delinquent owner, the first move is confirming the community isn't exempt — or hasn't simply defaulted to declaration-based authority without realizing it.

Keep the two statutes separate — they were never meant to cross over. A condominium's fining authority never rests on CICAA, and a planned community's authority never rests on the Condominium Property Act. Neither one puts a dollar figure on a fine; both settle for the word "reasonable," which means the real ceiling gets tested case by case, against the severity of the violation and how consistently the board has enforced the rule.¹ Everything the statutes leave open — the fine schedule, the cure period, whether violations stack per day or per incident — falls to the declaration and the rules to fill in.

3B. The required fining procedure

Both statutes treat notice and an opportunity to be heard as a precondition to a valid fine, not a courtesy tacked on afterward. Under Section 18.4(l) for condominiums and Section 1-30(g) for planned communities, the board has to give the owner notice of the alleged violation and a chance to be heard before it levies the fine.^1,2 Neither statute puts a number on it — no fixed day-count for the pre-fine notice, no fixed day-count for the hearing. The timing, the content of the notice, and whether the hearing runs before the full board or a committee are all left to the declaration and rules. In practice, Illinois practitioners tend to structure that notice the same way: state the substance of the violation, spell out the right to a hearing before the board, allow the owner to cross-examine whoever reported the violation, and confirm the right to bring counsel, with the hearing itself held at a properly noticed board meeting.⁹

None of that makes the requirement optional just because the statute leaves the deadline blank. The Illinois Appellate Court, First District, Fourth Division, made that clear in Bd. of Directors of Winnitt Park Condominium Ass'n v. Bourdage. A board there scheduled a fine hearing at a time it knew the owner couldn't attend, then went ahead without her — conduct the court said "in no way provided Bourdage with 'notice and an opportunity to be heard' as required by the Condominium Property Act."¹⁰ The board had found seven violations, imposed a $700 fine, banned the owner from using limited common elements for three months, and on top of that, skipped the required 30-day demand. None of it held up. The resulting fine couldn't support the eviction the association went after.¹⁰

Per-day or continuing fines don't appear in either statute at all. Whether one ongoing violation can generate repeated daily charges is entirely a declaration-and-rules question. Counsel at Hirzel Law, PLC advises associations to put a written fine policy or fine schedule in place — one that spells out the process and the exact amount the board may charge — and to give each separately reported occurrence its own hearing. A single continuing condition is different: it can be fined without a fresh hearing for every day it persists, so long as the governing documents allow it.⁹

The practical takeaway is blunt: a fine imposed without that notice-and-hearing step behind it is vulnerable to challenge, and it may not be collectible — including in a later possession or collection action that depends on the fine having been validly imposed in the first place. And there's no state administrative shortcut for resolving a fining dispute. The legislature created one, on paper: the Condominium and Common Interest Community Ombudsperson Act, enacted in 2016. It was never operationalized. Its dispute-resolution function depended on an appropriation that never arrived, no operating office ever opened, and the Act's own text says so plainly: "This Act is repealed on January 1, 2026."¹¹ It isn't a current dispute-resolution channel, and it imposes no current obligation. Fining disputes run through the Illinois Circuit Courts, the same as they always have.

3C. Enforcement of unpaid fines: assessments, liens, foreclosure, and possession

This is where the two statutes pull furthest apart, and where the risk of getting it wrong runs highest. For condominiums, the Condominium Property Act folds an unpaid fine straight into the association's secured balance. Section 9(g)(1) creates an automatic lien on the unit for common expenses and any unpaid fine, plus interest, late charges, reasonable attorney fees, and collection costs. Section 9(h) goes further: once the association records notice of that lien, it can foreclose through an action brought in the board's name, the same way a bank forecloses a mortgage.⁶ So a fine validly levied under Section 18.4(l) doesn't just sit there unpaid — it can be secured by the statutory lien and pursued through foreclosure right alongside unpaid assessments.

CICAA offers nothing comparable. The Common Interest Community Association Act contains no statutory lien or foreclosure mechanism to match Section 9(g).⁷ A planned community can record and foreclose a lien only if its own declaration or bylaws grant that right — the statute won't do it for them. Absent that grant, an unpaid CICAA fine is just a contractual debt. The association has to reduce it to a money judgment and collect like any other creditor; there's no self-perfecting lien waiting in the background. Whether a CICAA fine counts as a common expense, or is lienable and foreclosable at all, comes down to what the declaration says — not what the statute says.

Here's what makes Illinois distinctive: condominiums carry a possession remedy that planned communities simply don't have. Section 9.2 of the Condominium Property Act lets a board maintain an eviction action against a defaulting unit owner under Article IX of the Code of Civil Procedure — the article Illinois renamed from "Forcible Entry and Detainer" to "Eviction."⁴ The operative section, 735 ILCS 5/9-111, names fines specifically. It authorizes a possession order and money judgment where the owner has failed to pay "his or her proportionate share of the common expenses of the property, or of any other expenses lawfully agreed upon or the amount of any unpaid fine," provided the court finds "the expenses or fines are due to the plaintiff."¹² That's a different remedy than the lien-and-foreclosure path. It transfers the right of possession itself, letting the association take the unit and, where appropriate, rent it out to recover what's owed. The Illinois Appellate Court, Second District, confirmed in Bd. of Managers of Inverrary Condominium Ass'n v. Karaganis that an association can pursue a money judgment under this article too, not just possession, and enforce it through the ordinary tools any creditor uses — wage garnishment, bank levies.¹³ Nothing like it exists under CICAA. A planned community's eviction path runs through the general eviction statute instead of the condominium-specific Section 9-111, and CICAA carries no statutory lien to back it up.⁷

One tool Illinois law simply doesn't hand boards: suspending voting or amenity rights as a fining measure. The Condominium Property Act touches arrears only narrowly — an owner behind on regular or separate assessments for 60 days or more doesn't count toward quorum when the association votes on bylaw amendments, though that owner keeps the right to vote on those amendments.¹⁴ That's an assessment-arrears provision, not a fine-enforcement suspension, and it says nothing about cutting off amenity access. Any broader suspension of voting or amenity rights has to come from the declaration, because the statute doesn't provide it.

Section 4: Recent legislative and judicial activity

A. Recent bills

B. Recent appellate rulings

C. Active legislative debates

There's periodic interest in Springfield in reviving a state dispute-resolution office. Legislation has been introduced to reverse the Ombudsperson Act's sunset and push back related repeal dates — SB1383, in the 104th General Assembly, is one example, its committee amendment proposing repeal dates as late as January 1, 2029. But the prior Ombudsperson Act was repealed effective January 1, 2026, and no office is operating today.¹⁸ Beyond that, nothing pending would set a statutory fine cap or a fixed statutory notice period.

Section 5: National positioning and related coverage

Step back, and Illinois lands among the two-statute states — condominiums under the Condominium Property Act, non-condominiums under CICAA. That's a different structure than the unified frameworks used by Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act states like Alaska, Connecticut, and Colorado, and different again from California's largely single-statute Davis-Stirling model. What sets Illinois apart is the pairing: a statute-specific possession remedy for condominiums, alongside mandatory community association manager licensing under the Community Association Manager Licensing and Disciplinary Act, which makes it unlawful to provide community association management services without a current license.¹⁹ Because of the statute split, and CICAA's exemption thresholds, the first move in any fining question is always the same — confirm the community type, and for a planned community, confirm whether CICAA even applies before reaching for any rule inside it. The defining feature of Illinois fine enforcement, measured against its peers, is what happens to a fine once it goes unpaid: a validly levied condominium fine can be secured by an automatic lien, foreclosed, and pursued through a possession action that names fines outright, while a planned community fine carries none of that statutory machinery and depends entirely on what the declaration says.

HOA Weekly updates this Illinois coverage quarterly as the General Assembly and the Illinois courts act. Federal law reaches Illinois associations too, regardless of what the state framework says — the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, which can reach third-party collection of fines, along with the Fair Housing Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, and the OTARD rule governing satellite dishes and antennas. We'll cover those federal frameworks in more detail as we build out our upcoming sections.

1. 765 ILCS 605/18.4(l), Illinois Condominium Property Act, powers and duties of board of managers (Illinois General Assembly) ↩
2. 765 ILCS 160/1-30(g), Common Interest Community Association Act, board duties and obligations (Illinois General Assembly) ↩
3. 765 ILCS 160/1-75, Common Interest Community Association Act, exemptions for small common interest communities (Illinois General Assembly) ↩
4. 765 ILCS 605/9.2, Illinois Condominium Property Act, remedies including eviction action under Article IX of the Code of Civil Procedure (Illinois General Assembly) ↩
5. General Not For Profit Corporation Act of 1986, 805 ILCS 105 (Illinois General Assembly) ↩
6. 765 ILCS 605/9(g)-(h), Illinois Condominium Property Act, automatic lien for unpaid common expenses and fines and foreclosure in the same manner as a mortgage (Illinois General Assembly) ↩
7. Common Interest Community Association Act, 765 ILCS 160 (full act; contains no statutory lien or foreclosure provision comparable to 765 ILCS 605/9) (Illinois General Assembly) ↩
8. 765 ILCS 605/18.4(h), Illinois Condominium Property Act, adoption of rules after meeting of unit owners (Illinois General Assembly) ↩
9. Jeremy Fernando, "Effectively Using Fines to Enforce Illinois Condo & HOA Bylaws," Hirzel Law, PLC (Nov. 7, 2024) ↩
10. Bd. of Directors of Winnitt Park Condominium Ass'n v. Bourdage, 2021 IL App (1st) 192536 (Ill. App. Ct., 1st Dist., 4th Div., May 6, 2021) ↩
11. 765 ILCS 615/70, Condominium and Common Interest Community Ombudsperson Act, repeal effective January 1, 2026 (Illinois General Assembly) ↩
12. 735 ILCS 5/9-111, Code of Civil Procedure, condominium property; eviction order and judgment for common expenses or the amount of any unpaid fine (Illinois General Assembly) ↩
13. Bd. of Managers of Inverrary Condominium Ass'n v. Karaganis, 2017 IL App (2d) 160271, 80 N.E.3d 48 (Ill. App. Ct., 2d Dist. 2017) ↩
14. 765 ILCS 605/18(b)(1), Illinois Condominium Property Act, quorum treatment of owners in arrears 60 days or more on bylaw amendments (Illinois General Assembly) ↩
15. Illinois SB3527, 104th General Assembly, "CONDO-CI COLLECTION POLICIES" (Illinois General Assembly) ↩
16. Kovitz Shifrin Nesbit, analysis of SB3527 collection-policy requirements and legislative vote (2026) ↩
17. Corinthian Condominium Ass'n v. Rao, 2026 IL App (1st) 250627-U (Ill. App. Ct., 1st Dist., 6th Div., May 22, 2026) (unpublished Rule 23 order) ↩
18. Illinois SB1383, 104th General Assembly, bill status (proposed extension of Ombudsperson Act repeal date) (Illinois General Assembly) ↩
19. 225 ILCS 427/15, Community Association Manager Licensing and Disciplinary Act, license required (Illinois General Assembly) ↩