The one sentence to put in the lien file

The affidavit requirement is unchanged and it is express: “Every affidavit to proof of publication shall state that the newspaper in which such notice was published has complied with the provisions of this section.”

That affidavit is the association's evidence that the publication was good. Keep it with the lien file, not with the invoice. A board that forecloses an assessment lien, sells the lot, and cannot later produce proof that the notice was properly published has a title problem it will hear about at the next transfer — and so will the buyer.

What a board and manager can do

1. Ask counsel which paper is being used, and confirm it qualifies under the new test. The relaxation helps, but the requirements did not disappear: periodicals-class admission in the city of publication, one year of regular consecutive publication (or successor or affiliate status), general circulation in the county, and a list of bona fide paying subscribers. All four still apply.
2. Get the affidavit and file it. Every time. It is one page and it is the whole proof.
3. Do not treat the relaxation as a reason to be casual about the rest of the notice. Publication is one requirement among several in a Missouri foreclosure, and the others — the content of the notice, the mailed notices, the timing, the trustee's conduct of the sale — are untouched by this act.
4. Know which remedy you are using. This matters more than usual right now. An assessment lien foreclosure under the declaration and a money judgment enforced by execution are different remedies with different machinery, and Missouri changed the second one substantially this year: from 1 January 2027 the homestead exempt from attachment and execution rises from $15,000 to $40,000, with CPI indexing from 2029. Publication requirements govern the first route; the homestead exemption governs the second.

The change most likely to be misreported

The same bill made changes to public election notices, and they are not association changes. Per the act, notices of public elections may now be sent by email; both notices must be published within six weeks before the election; and candidate filing for political subdivisions moves from the seventeenth and fourteenth Tuesday to the sixteenth and thirteenth Tuesday before the election.

None of that touches an association election. An HOA or condominium board election in Missouri is governed by the declaration and by Chapter 355, the nonprofit corporation law — and no section of Chapter 355 carries a 2025, 2026 or 2027 effective date. Nothing about association notice, quorum, proxies or balloting changed by statute in either session.

If a vendor newsletter has told a board that Missouri now permits electronic notice of elections, that is about public elections held by political subdivisions. Whether an association may give notice by email is a question about its own declaration and bylaws read against Chapter 355.

Where this sits in a year of quiet foreclosure-adjacent changes

None of the 2026 Missouri enactments touching association collections arrived as association legislation. They arrived as general-law changes that happen to land on association operations, and they run in different directions:

• This act makes a published foreclosure notice easier to place validly, and narrows one title-defect attack.
• Senate Bill 973 deleted the two-year delinquency wait before a partial opt-in county's collector may route a parcel into the judicial land-tax process — a sale that can extinguish a junior assessment lien.
• The Uniform Mortgage Modification Act, in force since 28 August 2026, lets a first mortgagee modify its loan and keep recorded priority without recording anything, while expressly excluding association assessment liens from the same protection. The recorded loan amount is no longer a reliable ceiling on the senior encumbrance.
• House Bill 1870 raises the homestead exemption threefold from 1 January 2027 and narrows bank garnishment from 2028, with one improvement for creditors: an unlimited-window debtor examination.

A board that reads only the association-specific news will have seen none of these, because there was no association-specific news — Missouri enacted no homeowners-association governance statute in either session, and Chapters 448, 355 and 429 were not touched at all.

What to watch next

Nothing is pending on this provision. The practical follow-on is local rather than legislative: which newspapers in your county now qualify that did not before, and whether counsel's standing choice of publication venue should change. That is a question for the association's lawyer and the county's legal-notice market, and it is worth asking once rather than assuming the answer is the same paper as always.