The sign window opens in early October
The sign window opens in early October
2026-09-10 · Indiana · Compliance
What happened. Nothing new — and that is the point. Indiana's political-sign statute has been on the books since 2010, the Attorney General's office wrote to Indiana associations about it in 2024, and the protected window for the November 2026 general election opens in the first days of October. Associations that enforce a blanket sign ban are about to enforce it into a statute that forbids exactly that.
What the statute says
IC 32-21-13-4 is short and does not leave much room:
“a homeowners association may not adopt or enforce a rule that prohibits a member … from displaying a sign on the member's property during the period: (1) beginning thirty (30) days before; and (2) ending five (5) days after; the date of the election…”
With the general election on 3 November 2026, the protected period runs from approximately 4 October 2026 through 8 November 2026. The exact dates turn on each association's own election calendar, including any municipal or special elections that carry their own windows.
What an association may still do
The statute preserves real authority, and IC 32-21-13-5 is where it lives. An association may restrict:
- Size — the Attorney General's letter describes this as rules restricting “the size of a sign to be no larger than a typical election sign.”
- Number of signs.
- Placement — but with a hard floor. A restriction “may not prohibit the display of a sign: (A) in a window on the homeowner's property; or (B) on the ground that is part of the homeowner's property.”
So: a rule limiting each lot to one sign of ordinary yard-sign dimensions is defensible. A rule confining signs to a location the owner does not control, or barring them from the yard and the window both, is not.
The candidate-access provision almost nobody knows about
IC 32-21-13-7 reaches beyond signage. As the Attorney General's letter puts it:
“A homeowners association may not adopt or enforce a rule or covenant that prohibits, or has the effect of prohibiting, a candidate, an individual who holds an elected office or their spouse, or a volunteer worker of a candidate or individual who holds an elected office from entering onto HOA property for purposes of conducting political activity.”
That is a canvassing-access rule, and it is the provision most likely to be breached by a gated Indiana community operating a standing no-solicitation policy at the entrance.1
The sentence in the Attorney General's letter that should change behaviour
The 2024 guidance does something unusual for a document of its kind. It tells associations that taking a sign down may not merely be a civil wrong:
The letter warns that an HOA removing a sign without authority “may be criminal conversion under Ind. Code § 35-43-4-3,” citing Buzzell v. State, 636 N.E.2d 158 (1994). It also asserts the office's oversight interest in associations “including for criminal acts, such as conversion, committed against an association's members,” citing IC 32-25.5-4-1.
Whether a given removal would actually be charged is a separate question, and we are not predicting any outcome. What matters operationally is narrower and quite concrete: the self-help remedy that community managers reach for first — sending someone to pull the sign — is the one the state's chief legal officer has publicly flagged as potentially criminal. That is a poor risk to run over a yard sign, and it is avoidable.
A note on the letter's status
Be accurate about what this document is. It is a guidance letter signed by the Attorney General on 4 October 2024 and addressed “To the Homeowners Associations and Management Companies in Indiana.” It is not a numbered formal Official Opinion, and it does not bind a court. We checked the statutes it cites against the code and found no mischaracterisation — the letter describes IC 32-21-13-4, -5 and -7 accurately. Its persuasive weight comes from that accuracy, and from who signed it, not from any independent legal force.
The enforcement posture that survives the window
An association that wants to keep its community tidy through an election season has options that do not run at the statute:
- Publish the window dates in advance. Circulate the opening and closing dates before early October with the size and number limits attached. Most sign disputes are ignorance, not defiance, on both sides.
- Enforce the removal deadline, not the display. Five days after the election, the protection lapses and ordinary covenant enforcement resumes. That is the enforceable edge, and it is where an association's effort is well spent.
- Apply the rule to content-neutral characteristics only. Size, count, placement, duration. An association that enforces against signs for one candidate and not another has a much larger problem than a covenant dispute.
- Never remove a sign yourself. Notice, then the association's dispute process, then counsel. Given the conversion warning above, self-help is the single worst available option.
- Review the entrance policy for canvassers. A standing rule excluding all solicitors will, applied to a candidate or a candidate's volunteer, collide with IC 32-21-13-7.
How the 2026 amendments interact
Indiana's 2026 session added a separate flag-display chapter and, in the same act, restricted associations in other display-adjacent ways. Those are distinct provisions with their own scope, and they do not amend the political-sign chapter at IC 32-21-13 — an association complying with the flag rules has not thereby complied with the sign rules, and vice versa. Treat them as two separate compliance checks.
There is also a structural question worth raising for older associations. Several 2025 and 2026 Indiana appellate decisions turned on the fact that IC 32-25.5 reaches only associations formed after 30 June 2009 unless an older one elected in. The political-sign chapter sits at IC 32-21-13, not in that article, and carries its own applicability language — so the reasoning that excuses a 1990s subdivision from parts of the HOA Act should not be assumed to excuse it here. An association intending to rely on that argument needs advice specific to its documents, not an analogy.
What to watch
Whether the Attorney General's office reissues or updates this guidance ahead of the November election. We found no 2025 or 2026 successor document; the October 2024 letter appears to remain the office's operative statement.
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