Missouri Supreme Court: a pre-2023 solar ban in your covenants is unenforceable
Missouri Supreme Court: a pre-2023 solar ban in your covenants is unenforceable
2026-09-12 · Missouri · Courts
What happened. On 23 January 2026 the Supreme Court of Missouri, sitting en banc, held unanimously that Missouri's rooftop-solar statute applies to deed restrictions recorded before the statute existed — and that a homeowners association cannot enforce a covenant banning solar panels no matter how old the covenant is.1
The case is Colleen Eikmeier and William S. Love v. Granite Springs Home Owners Association, Inc., No. SC101152. Judge Robin Ransom wrote; all concur. The court reversed the Greene County Circuit Court and, rather than remanding, entered judgment for the homeowners itself under Rule 84.14.
The statute the court was reading
Section 442.404.3, RSMo, arrived through S.B. 820 and took effect 1 January 2023. The opinion quotes it:
“(1) No deed restrictions, covenants, or similar binding agreements running with the land shall limit or prohibit, or have the effect of limiting or prohibiting, the installation of solar panels or solar collectors on the rooftop of any property or structure.
(2) A homeowners' association may adopt reasonable rules, subject to any applicable statutes or ordinances, regarding the placement of solar panels or solar collectors to the extent that those rules do not prevent the installation of the device, impair the functioning of the device, restrict the use of the device, or adversely affect the cost or efficiency of the device.
(3) The provisions of this subsection shall apply only with regard to rooftops that are owned, controlled, and maintained by the owner of the individual property or structure.”
The circuit court had read that as applying only to associations formed, and covenants recorded, after 1 January 2023. The Supreme Court disagreed in terms:
“This Court finds, based on the express language of the statute, the legislature intended broad applicability, extending to those covenants already in existence.”
Why this is not a retroactive law
The association's constitutional objection was the familiar one: applying a 2023 statute to a covenant recorded decades earlier impairs the obligation of contracts and is retrospective in operation, both barred by article I, section 13 of the Missouri Constitution. The court answered by reframing the timing:
“The statute applies prospectively in the sense that, after January 1, 2023, certain prohibitions will not be enforceable. The statute does not operate retroactively by way of limiting prohibitions before the statute's effective date.”
That distinction is doing the constitutional work. Nothing that happened before 2023 is disturbed; what changes is enforceability going forward.
The sentence associations will be quoting against each other for years
The court accepted that a restrictive covenant is a contract — it said so, citing Trustees of Clayton Terrace Subdivision v. Clayton Terrace, LLC — and accepted that the statute “results in some impairment of contract.” Then it explained why that does not settle the question:
“Under this perspective, a private contractual agreement could override any subsequent legislative determination that certain contractual provisions are contrary to public policy and should not be enforced. This cannot be so.”
The court added, quoting First National Insurance Co. of America v. Clark, that “[t]he Court will not recognize contractual provisions that are contrary to the public policy of Missouri as expressed by the legislature.”
The placement rule failed on the numbers
Granite Springs had not simply banned panels. It also offered a rule allowing them on non-street-facing rooflines, and argued that this was a “reasonable rule” within subsection (2). The homeowners put figures in the record, and the opinion recites them:
“The homeowners' original proposed layout produced 11,492 kWh annually, representing a 92-percent offset of their proposed utility usage. A similar system on the non-street-facing roof would reduce their production to 8,741 kWh, a 24-percent reduction. To achieve a comparable output as the original plan, the system size would have to be increased by 32-percent. From a cost perspective, the additional upfront system cost the homeowners would incur would be nearly $17,000 for the larger system.”
And then the line that decided it:
“The HOA did not counter or challenge this evidence.”
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