Massachusetts condo owners' rights bill died twice in one session
Massachusetts condo owners' rights bill died twice in one session
2026-09-10 · Massachusetts · Legislation · Did not pass
What happened. The most ambitious rewrite of the Massachusetts Condominium Act in years did not pass. It was filed twice, under two bill numbers, in two different committees — and both copies are now out of time. Formal sessions of the 194th General Court ended on 31 July 2026.
S.980, An Act relative to the condominium owners' rights, was filed by Senator Lydia Edwards and reported favorably out of the Joint Committee on Housing on 23 October 2025, landing in Senate Ways and Means.1 It never came out.
The second vehicle
The same eight sections were refiled in the House on 7 August 2025 as H.4826, sponsored by Representative Meghan K. Kilcoyne. That copy took an unusual route: House Rules reported it on 1 December 2025, the rules were suspended, and it was referred not to Housing but to the Joint Committee on the Judiciary, with the Senate concurring on 8 December 2025.2
Judiciary held its hearing on 7 April 2026, from 1:00 to 5:00 PM in Room A-2. Nothing has happened since.
What the bill contained
Eight sections, all amending or adding to M.G.L. c. 183A:
- §§2–3 — statutory deadlines for producing association records, a per-day fine for missing them, and mandatory disclosure of engineering studies and architectural reports
- §4 — a minimum annual reserve contribution and a ten-year capital reserve study for larger associations
- §6 — a new c. 183A §10A: internal dispute procedures, a fixed board meeting cadence, open-meeting standards and minutes retention
- §7 — an Office of Condominium Ombudsman inside the Attorney General's office
- §8 — a c. 183A §24 authorising remote meetings and electronic voting under specified security standards (a section number the Affordable Homes Act had already filled in August 2024)
Any one of those would have been the largest change to Massachusetts condominium governance in a decade. None of them is law.
What actually changes for a Massachusetts board today
Nothing. That is the operative point, and it is worth stating plainly because a bill that gets two hearings and two favorable-looking committee actions generates a great deal of secondhand commentary that reads as though something passed.
Concretely, as of today:
- There is no statutory deadline in Massachusetts for an association to produce records to a unit owner. M.G.L. c. 183A §10(c) requires records to be “available for inspection”; it sets no clock and carries no per-day penalty.
- There is no statutory reserve funding requirement and no mandatory reserve study, at any association size.
- There is no state ombudsman for condominium disputes and no state agency with general oversight of associations.
- Remote meetings and electronic voting are already governed by statute — but by c. 183A §24, enacted in August 2024 as part of the Affordable Homes Act, not by anything in this package. Section 8 of the bill would have re-legislated ground that was already covered.
Boards that spent the last eighteen months preparing for a records clock or a reserve mandate have not wasted the effort, but they are operating on their own documents and their own judgment, not on a legal requirement.
Why two committees, and why it matters
The double filing is the detail most worth understanding. Reporting a bill favorably out of the Joint Committee on Housing moves it to Ways and Means, which in Massachusetts is where contested housing legislation most often stops — not by a vote against it, but by the absence of any vote at all.
The House refile appears to have been an attempt to route around that. Suspending the rules to send a condominium governance bill to Judiciary rather than Housing put the text in front of a different set of members, on a different calendar. It produced a hearing in April 2026 and then the same result.
The practical lesson for anyone tracking this subject: in Massachusetts, a favorable committee report is not a signal that a bill is close. Two of them, in two chambers, were not enough.
What to watch next
The 194th General Court remains in informal session until the 195th convenes in January 2027. In informal session a single objection from any member blocks a bill, which is why contested legislation does not move there. Treat both S.980 and H.4826 as finished.
The live question is refiling. The bill's sections are severable in a way that matters: the records provisions, the reserve mandate and the ombudsman have each been filed separately in past sessions, and a sponsor who concludes the eight-section package was too large has an obvious path to breaking it up. Bill filing for the 195th General Court opens after it convenes in January 2027.
We are describing the legislative record, not predicting an outcome. What can be said from the record is that this text has now been in front of three Massachusetts committees across two filings and has never received a floor vote in either branch.
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