What this does and does not do to your CC&Rs

This is the question every Nevada board and owner asks first, and the answer needs to be precise, because the two systems are separate.

AB 396's ADU provisions are zoning law. They amend chapter 278 — the planning and zoning chapter — and they operate on what a county or city may forbid. They do not amend NRS 116, and nothing in section 1 or section 11 of the bill says that a recorded declaration's architectural or use restrictions are void.

A Nevada homeowner in a covenanted community therefore faces two gates, and must pass both:

• The public gate. Does the local ordinance permit it? After July 1, 2026 this gate is open in the large jurisdictions — either because a conforming ordinance was adopted, or because the fallback in section 11(2) opened it wider.
• The private gate. Do the CC&Rs permit it, and will the architectural review committee approve it? AB 396 did not touch this gate.

The practical consequence is a growing gap between what a Nevada city will permit and what a Nevada association will allow — and that gap is where the disputes of the next two years will be.

The fallback clause is the part to understand

“Authorized … without restriction” is unusually strong statutory language, and it is a self-executing penalty aimed at local governments rather than at homeowners. A jurisdiction that adopted no conforming ordinance by the deadline does not merely fail to gain something; it loses the ability to apply its own ADU conditions on residentially zoned parcels.

Whether any of the covered jurisdictions actually missed the date is a question for each jurisdiction's own code. Clark County's Title 30 Unified Development Code has carried posted editions through 2025 and 2026. An owner planning an ADU should confirm the current status of their own city or county's ordinance before relying on either the ordinance or the fallback — this article does not resolve, for any particular jurisdiction, which of the two applies.

Why an HOA audience should care beyond the permit question

Three second-order effects are already visible:

Parking. A statutory limit of one additional space per ADU is a planning assumption, not an observation about how many cars a household has. In communities with narrow streets and guest-parking rules, the pressure lands on the association's parking enforcement, which is a covenant matter the bill does not address.

Rentals. The bill bars an ordinance from prohibiting ADU rental, but expressly excepts short-term and transient rental. Meanwhile the same bill's rewritten NRS 116.335 lets an association restrict leasing by rule where tied to lender or insurer underwriting. An ADU that is lawful to build and lawful under the ordinance to rent may still sit inside an association rental cap.

Assessments and allocated interests. An ADU does not create a new unit in the common-interest community, so it does not change allocated interests or the assessment schedule. The household using the association's amenities gets larger; the contribution does not. Whether that is a problem depends on the community, but it is a board conversation that follows the first ADU, not the tenth.

What a board can do

• Read your own declaration for what it actually prohibits. Many Nevada declarations restrict “single-family residential use” or additional dwellings in terms written long before ADUs were a policy category. Whether that language reaches a permitted ADU is a document question, and the answer will differ community to community.
• Decide before the first application, not during it. An architectural committee improvising a position on the first ADU request is the least defensible posture available.
• Write standards, not a ban, if you want enforceable limits. Height, massing, setback from a rear fence line, exterior materials, and screening are architectural criteria of the kind Nevada associations already apply.
• Check the local ordinance yourself. Your position on what the city permits should not come from a homeowner's contractor.