2026-09-10 · Kentucky · Courts

What we found. Kentucky's community-association statutes are not being litigated. A sweep of Kentucky appellate decisions rendered in 2025 and 2026 — published and unpublished — turns up no decision construing the Kentucky Planned Community Act (KRS 381.785 to 381.801), none construing the Kentucky Condominium Act (KRS 381.9101 to 381.9207), and none construing the Horizontal Property Law (KRS 381.805 to 381.910).

Every significant Kentucky community-association decision of the period was decided as contract law — the interpretation, enforcement, waiver, abandonment and amendment of recorded covenants — not as statutory law.

The Planned Community Act, unexamined at three

The Act was created by 2023 Ky. Acts ch. 23, effective 29 June 2023. It is Kentucky's first statutory framework for non-condominium associations, and it is substantial: seventeen sections covering the declarant control period, budgets and assessments, open board meetings and standards for directors, financial records and reports, examination of records by owners, notice of charges, the association's continuing lien, and amendment and termination.

Three years on, no Kentucky appellate court has interpreted any of it. Its scope provision, KRS 381.786, is a genuinely difficult piece of drafting — subsection (1) says “all planned communities in this Commonwealth are subject to” the Act while preserving provisions recorded before 29 June 2023, and subsection (3) then says the Act does not apply to developments without a homeowners' association meeting the statutory definition, and that the recording requirement applies only to communities formed after that date. Nobody has asked a court what that means.

The Condominium Act, unexamined for longer

The position for condominiums is starker. The most recent substantive Kentucky appellate authority on condominium declaration amendment remains Tariq v. Worthington Glen Council of Co-Owners, 353 S.W.3d 634 (Ky. App. 2011).

The statutes themselves have been equally still. KRS 381.9197, the condominium records and financial-report section, carries the history note “Amended 2012 Ky. Acts ch. 99, sec. 8, effective April 11, 2012” — unamended for fourteen years. KRS 381.794, its planned-community counterpart, has stood unamended since its creation in 2023.

And the 2026 Regular Session added nothing: the session's official Table of KRS Sections Affected records zero sections of KRS Chapter 381 amended.

1. KRS 381.786, Planned communities subject to KRS 381.785 to 381.801 — Filing of declaration ↩
2. KRS 381.9197, Association records — Financial report; unamended since 2012 ↩
3. KRS 381.795, Examination of records by owner ↩
4. Steele v. SRH, LLC (Ky. App. 21 Aug. 2026) — the period's only published Kentucky community-association decision ↩
5. SB 233 (2026) — the session's only bill written specifically about property owner associations ↩
6. Community Associations Institute, Kentucky Chapter — state-level focus on the Kentucky Planned Community Act ↩