Section 1: Overview, how board elections are governed in New Hampshire

New Hampshire handles condominium board elections one way and everything else another. A detailed condominium statute governs the condominiums. For the non-condominium planned communities, the state leaves elections to the recorded covenants, the bylaws, and general corporate law — there is no comprehensive planned-community statute. The New Hampshire Condominium Act, RSA chapter 356-B, sets the framework: it creates the condominium, the unit owners' association, and the board of directors, and it spells out meetings, quorums, voting, and how to remove a director.¹

Planned communities get no such machinery. Their elections run on the recorded declaration and the association bylaws, and where the association is incorporated, the Voluntary Corporations and Associations statute, RSA chapter 292, supplies the bare corporate scaffolding.²

New Hampshire has not adopted the Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act. The Condominium Act is the state's own work, and it carries none of UCIOA's board-governance or declarant-control features. The court structure stands out too: New Hampshire has no intermediate appellate court, so trial-level disputes move through the Superior Court — with the Circuit Court handling certain civil matters — and appeals go straight to the New Hampshire Supreme Court.

The bottom line: New Hampshire is a condominium-statute state with no comprehensive planned-community statute, so the first move in any board-election question is to figure out which body of law applies. The sections that follow lay out the framework, the mechanics, and the recent activity in the legislature and the courts.

Section 2: The election framework

2A. The New Hampshire Condominium Act and condominium board elections

The Condominium Act controls condominium board elections. It defines the board of directors as the governing body named in the condominium instruments, and it requires the bylaws to cover the election of officers to the board — their qualifications, the manner of election and removal, their powers and duties, and the length of their terms.³

The Act also fixes a few structural rules outright: once declarant control ends, the unit owners must elect a board of at least three members, a majority of them unit owners, and the board elects its officers unless the declaration hands that choice to the owners.⁴

Statute stages the declarant-control period and the moment owners first join the board. The condominium instruments may let a declarant appoint and remove officers and board members, but that authority expires at the time limit set in the instruments, or once units representing three-quarters of the undivided common-area interests have been conveyed — whichever comes first.⁵

RSA 356-B:40 then sets the owner-election milestones. No later than 60 days after one-quarter of the units that may be created are conveyed to owners other than a declarant, those owners must elect at least one member and not less than 25 percent of the board. No later than 60 days after one-half are conveyed, they must elect not less than half the board.

And declarant control ends no later than the earliest of four triggers: 60 days after 60 percent of the units are conveyed, two years after the declarant stops selling in the ordinary course, two years after the last development right is exercised, or a recorded voluntary surrender.⁴

What the Act fixes — minimum board size after the transition, the end of declarant control, default quorums, the removal standard, and the proxy rules — it states as floors or defaults. The rest it leaves to the declaration and bylaws: term length, term limits, staggering, how candidates are nominated, and the vote needed to win.

This is a statute of its own design. It is not UCIOA, and it is not a prescriptive-procedure regime like California's Davis-Stirling Act. It requires no secret ballot, no independent inspector of election, and no fixed timeline for nominating candidates or distributing ballots in a director election.

1. N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. ch. 356-B (Condominium Act) (table of contents), New Hampshire General Court ↩
2. N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. ch. 292 (Voluntary Corporations and Associations) (table of contents), New Hampshire General Court ↩
3. N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 356-B:35 (Contents of the Bylaws), New Hampshire General Court ↩
4. N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 356-B:40 (Members of the Board of Directors and Officers), New Hampshire General Court ↩
5. N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 356-B:36 (Control by the Declarant), New Hampshire General Court ↩
6. N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 292:6 (Bylaws; Organization), New Hampshire General Court ↩
7. N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 292:6-b (Voting), New Hampshire General Court ↩
8. N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 292:8-m (Homeowners' Associations) (added 2023, ch. 114, eff. Jan. 1, 2024), New Hampshire General Court ↩
9. Sanborn v. 428 Lafayette, LLC, 168 N.H. 582 (2016), New Hampshire Supreme Court opinions index ↩
10. N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 356-B:37 (Meetings), New Hampshire General Court ↩
11. N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 356-B:39 (Voting), New Hampshire General Court ↩
12. N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 356-B:39-a (Voting Without a Meeting), New Hampshire General Court ↩
13. N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 356-B:38 (Quorums), New Hampshire General Court ↩
14. N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 356-B:40-b (Removal of Officers and Directors), New Hampshire General Court ↩
15. Laws of 2024, ch. 222 (H.B. 1129), amending N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 356-B:39, IV (eff. Jan. 15, 2025), New Hampshire General Court ↩
16. New Hampshire General Court, Bill Status (H.B. 1645, 2024; H.B. 1523, 2026, signed July 10, 2026 as Chapter 306) ↩
17. N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 292:8-m, Homeowners' Associations, New Hampshire General Court (source note: 2023, 114:1, eff. Jan. 1, 2024; 2026, 306:1, eff. Jan. 1, 2027) ↩
18. 31 C.F.R. § 1010.380, Reports of beneficial ownership information (current text on eCFR) (ecfr.gov) (domestic-entity exemption for entities created by filing with a U.S. secretary of state or similar office). ↩