Where AB 3 does bite for an association

The change is real; it just lands somewhere other than where the headline suggests. The claims that fall outside NRS 38.310 and therefore inside AB 3's expanded program are the ordinary civil disputes an association has with people who are not its members over things that are not the governing documents:

• Personal-injury claims against the association — a slip on a common-element walkway, an injury at the pool.
• Vendor and contractor disputes — a landscaping contract, a roofing invoice, a management-fee claim.
• Employment claims, where an association employs staff directly.
• Property-damage claims against or by the association that do not turn on the CC&Rs.

Any of these up to $100,000 now lands in mandatory nonbinding arbitration, with up to $15,000 of attorney's-fee exposure to the prevailing party and no cap on what the arbitrator is paid. For a mid-size association, that is a meaningful shift in the economics of a dispute it previously expected to litigate or settle.

The program that actually governs HOA disputes, unchanged

For completeness, here is what a Nevada owner or board still faces on a covenant or assessment dispute, none of which AB 3 altered:

• The association's own process first. Where an association provides a scheme of dispute resolution, that procedure must be exhausted before an ADR claim goes to the Division's Office of the Ombudsman.
• Then NRS 38. A written claim must be filed, with a filing fee, and the process completed before a civil action may be taken.
• Mediation is the default. Since October 1, 2013, mediation is the default method where both parties do not agree to the referee program.
• The referee's ceiling is $7,500, and a referee “may not award attorneys' fees.”
• Arbitration under that program is the third track.

So the two systems now sit at strikingly different scales: $100,000 with $15,000 in fees for a slip-and-fall, and $7,500 with no fees for a dispute about whether your association may fine you.

That gap is on the table for 2027

The Nevada Common-Interest Communities Task Force, convened by the Department of Business and Industry, spent its February 25, 2026 meeting on a Real Estate Division proposal to shift the default ADR track away from mediation and toward arbitration — in substance, downgrading or replacing the referee program. The Division's administrator framed the goal as a process that is “convenient, cost effective, and quicker.”²

The task force took no action. The proposal was neither adopted nor rejected. Its April 14, 2026 agenda carried an item for “[r]eview and decision on recommendations for proposed changes for NRS 38,” and as of mid-September 2026 no recommendation or draft language has been voted out of the body in any of its meetings.

The task force's proceedings are reported from its published agendas and minutes and from contemporaneous coverage; the characterisation of what was proposed is drawn from that reporting rather than from a bill text, because no bill exists.

One thing that did change for HOA litigation, from a different direction

In June 2025 the Nevada Supreme Court held that NRS 38.310's pre-suit requirement is a procedural claim-processing rule rather than a jurisdictional bar — so a party who does not raise it in time forfeits it, and a judgment entered without it is not void. That decision changes how the mandatory program is enforced far more than AB 3 does, and it is covered separately.

The practical instruction

If someone tells you Nevada raised the HOA arbitration threshold to $100,000, the correct response is to ask which statute. AB 3 amended NRS 38.250. The HOA program is NRS 38.300 to 38.360. They share a chapter and nothing else.