What the exemption is worth, and where it stops

Before July 1, 2025, an association that installed chargers in a common-element garage or clubhouse lot and recovered the electricity cost from residents was arguably operating a public charging station — owing the tax, buying a dedicated meter at its own expense, registering with MDT inside 30 days, and disclosing rates on site under § 15-70-804. That is all gone, for association-owned equipment.

Two limits define the exemption, and both are worth checking before relying on it:

• The carve-out attaches to ownership by the association. A third-party charging vendor operating on association property is not covered by it. An association that has signed a revenue-share or turnkey arrangement where the vendor owns the hardware sits outside the exemption — and the compliance duties, including the meter cost, fall on the equipment owner.
• The definition's own threshold is greater than 25 kilowatts. Most Level 2 amenity chargers in a residential community are well below that, so a good deal of association charging was probably outside the regime even before SB 228. The carve-out matters most for associations that installed, or are considering, DC fast charging.

Two things to revisit if your association acted before July 2025

• An MDT registration. An association that registered its chargers with the Department of Transportation under § 15-70-805 should establish whether that registration still needs to exist.
• Resident charging rates. If the rate charged to residents was built to recover a 3-cent-per-kilowatt-hour tax, the tax component is no longer owed. An association still collecting it is over-recovering, which is a member-relations problem as much as an accounting one.

The definitional detail that makes this broader than it looks

SB 228 imported the § 70-17-901 definition of “homeowners' association” into Montana's tax code. That definition is the one used by the 2019 grandfathering statute, and it covers both covenant-governed associations and “an association of unit owners as defined by 70-23-102 subject to the Unit Ownership Act.” So condominium associations are inside the carve-out, not only planned-community HOAs.²

The drafting is also a small illustration of Montana's larger problem. “Homeowners association” is currently defined six different ways across the Montana code — at §§ 35-2-525, 35-2-550, 70-16-110, 70-17-901, 76-3-103 and 76-25-203 — and used without definition in two more places. That inventory comes from the drafter's own notes on the pending Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act committee draft, which is partly an attempt to fix it.

What did not change: solar

While EV charging got a genuine win, Montana's solar law stood still. The solar easement statutes in Title 70, chapter 17, part 3 were not amended in 2025, and Montana still has no statute voiding an association's solar prohibition. Senate Bill 188, which would have created a shared and community solar framework, was vetoed on June 9, 2025, and the override vote failed on July 14, 2025 — so an association cannot host or subscribe to a shared solar facility under a state program either.⁴

House Bill 760, Chapter 719 of the 2025 Laws, did create a consumer protection worth knowing about: a residential solar buyer now has three business days to rescind an installation contract in writing. Its preamble asserts a “right to install, interconnect, and use energy generation and storage systems,” but that is a WHEREAS clause and not operative law — it preempts nothing and voids no covenant.³