Minnesota's new HOA law splits on community type, not building age
Minnesota's new HOA law splits on community type, not building age
2026-09-12 · Minnesota · Compliance
What happened. Minnesota's HOA Bill of Rights applies to communities “created before, on, or after the date of enactment.” That sentence, in section 15 of Laws 2026, ch. 82, has been widely read as meaning the act reaches every Minnesota association. It does not.1
Chapter 82 amends the Minnesota Common Interest Ownership Act. It can only reach as far as MCIOA reaches, and MCIOA's own applicability statute — Minn. Stat. § 515B.1-102 — leaves a large category of Minnesota communities outside it.2
The line, as the statute draws it
Condominiums. Subsection (b)(1)–(2) reaches condominiums created under the older chapters — ch. 515, the Apartment Ownership Act, and ch. 515A, the Minnesota Condominium Act — through a listed set of MCIOA sections. That list includes § 515B.3-102, the powers section Chapter 82 rewrites with the fine cap, and § 515B.3-103, the board section carrying the bidding and meeting rules.
Planned communities and cooperatives. Subsection (b)(3) is the exclusion: MCIOA “shall not apply to cooperatives and planned communities created prior to June 1, 1994,” nor to planned communities created between 1 June 1994 and 1 August 2006 with more than two but fewer than 13 units — except by election under subsection (d).
The consequence, stated plainly
A 1979 condominium is covered by Chapter 82's fine cap. A 1979 townhome development — a planned community — is not, unless it has recorded an election to opt in.
Same vintage, same city, same kind of owner, opposite answers. The variable is community type, not age.
A Minnesota court said so this year
The Court of Appeals restated the rule in April 2026, in a case about whether an association's assessment lien was valid: “The MCIOA generally does not apply to planned communities that, like the association, were created before June 1, 1994. Minn. Stat. § 515B.1-102(b)(3).”3
The decision is nonprecedential — under Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 136.01, subd. 1(c), persuasive authority only. But it is a recent, direct application of the applicability statute in a real dispute.
What governs the excluded communities instead
Not nothing. The same April 2026 decision identified the framework: for a pre-1994 planned community, “governing documents are a contract” between the association and its members, applying Harkins v. Grant Park Association, 972 N.W.2d 381, 388 (Minn. 2022).
So those associations run on common law contract principles plus their own declaration and bylaws, plus Minnesota's nonprofit corporation act, ch. 317A, where the association is incorporated. What they do not have is a statutory $100 fine cap, a statutory hearing right, a three-bid mandate, a 90-day architectural deadline, a 21-day comment period, a retaliation claim, or a right to a free grievance hearing.
Owners in those communities will read about Minnesota's new HOA Bill of Rights and reasonably assume it applies to them. For a substantial share of Minnesota townhome residents, it does not.
How to establish which side a community is on
Three determinations, in order, and all of them documentary:
1. What kind of community is it? Condominium, planned community, or cooperative. The answer is in the recorded declaration and its enabling statute, not in what residents call it. “Townhome” is an architectural description, not a legal category — a townhome development may be a condominium or a planned community, and the two are on opposite sides of § 515B.1-102(b)(3).
2. When was it created? The date of the recorded declaration, not the date of construction and not the date of incorporation. Minnesota has developments built in phases across the 1 June 1994 boundary, where the answer differs by phase.
3. Has it elected in? Subsection (d) permits a community outside the Act to bring itself within it. That election is recorded. An association that does not know whether it has one should check the county records rather than rely on institutional memory.
The elect-in question just changed shape
Opting into MCIOA has always been available and has rarely been attractive: it imported obligations without obvious benefit. Chapter 82 changes the calculation in both directions, and boards in excluded communities should make the decision deliberately rather than by default.
What electing in would bring. A clean statutory framework for fines, hearings, records, meetings and architectural review — in place of arguments about what a forty-year-old declaration means. For an association whose documents are thin or internally inconsistent, that is genuine value.
What it would cost. The bidding mandate above $50,000 with its six-year archive. The 21-day comment period on every rule change. The $100 fine cap, in a community that may currently fine at higher levels. The loss of association authority over parking on publicly maintained streets — which for an older townhome development on city streets is a substantial loss. The three-month delinquency gate before foreclosure.
Neither answer is obviously right. The point is that from January 2027 the two regimes are meaningfully different, and the choice between them is now a real one.
The mixed-portfolio problem
This lands hardest on Minnesota management companies. A manager running twenty communities is, from 1 January 2027, running some under a detailed statutory regime and others under contract law alone — with different fine ceilings, different notice obligations, different procurement duties and different records requirements.
A single compliance checklist applied across the portfolio will be wrong in one direction or the other for a large fraction of it. Applying Chapter 82's constraints to an excluded community is the safer error but gives away enforcement tools the association actually has; assuming exclusion for a covered community is a statutory violation.
The work that has to happen before January is an applicability determination per community, recorded, with the declaration date and community type attached. It is unglamorous and it is the precondition for everything else.
One caution about reading section by section
The applicability statute is not uniform across MCIOA. Section 515B.1-102 works by listing which sections reach which categories, and the lists differ. The resale certificate provisions, for instance, have historically reached planned communities and cooperatives whatever their creation date, while the governance sections do not.
So “is this association covered by Chapter 82?” is not a single question with a single answer. It is a question asked provision by provision against the list in § 515B.1-102.
What to watch next
Nothing pending would extend MCIOA to the excluded communities. The 94th Legislature adjourned 18 May 2026, and no bill in the biennium proposed amending § 515B.1-102(b)(3).
Worth noting separately: Laws 2026, ch. 61 — the technical companion act, in force since 1 August 2026 — did amend § 515B.1-102, adding a new nonresidential exemption and confining MCIOA's construction-defect prerequisites to communities created on or after 1 August 2017. The applicability statute is being actively edited, which is one more reason to read it directly rather than from memory.4
This describes the statute and a nonprecedential decision applying it. It is not a determination about any particular community.
Related Minnesota HOA Topics
- Laws 2026, ch. 82 (S.F. 1750), full session-law text — Minnesota Revisor of Statutes ↩
- Minn. Stat. § 515B.1-102 — applicability of MCIOA by community type and creation date ↩
- Reed v. Highlands of Edinburgh Sixth Ass’n, No. A25-1442 (Minn. Ct. App. 27 Apr. 2026) (nonprecedential) — slip opinion ↩
- Laws 2026, ch. 61 (S.F. 3622), full session-law text — Minnesota Revisor of Statutes ↩
- Madgett Law, LLC, “Minnesota HOA owner rights under ch. 515B” (21 Aug. 2026) — Minneapolis practitioner alert on the applicability split ↩
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