A New Hampshire rule with no expiration date may still expire
A New Hampshire rule with no expiration date may still expire
2026-09-15 · New Hampshire · Regulation
What happened. New Hampshire's Division of Administrative Rules, in the Office of Legislative Services, changed how it prints source notes. The change applies to rules certified after April 28, 2025, and the Division said plainly that it is not retrofitting the rest.1
The notice, verbatim
"Please be advised the Division of Administrative Rules has decided to add expiration dates to our source notes to make it easier for members of the public to discern the difference between effective and expired rules. While expiration dates will appear on source notes on rules certified after April 28, 2025, we are not going back to add expiration dates to every currently effective rule. We have neither the capacity nor desire to take on such a project."
Why a formatting change is worth a board's attention
Because it creates a reading error that looks like a fact.
New Hampshire administrative rules expire. Most run an eight- or ten-year clock from adoption; some categories, such as mandatory rules of practice and procedure under RSA 541-A:17, II, do not expire at all. After April 28, 2025, the source note tells you which. Before it, the source note is silent either way.
So the absence of an expiration date in a New Hampshire source note means one of two entirely different things: the rule genuinely does not expire, or the rule predates the new convention. There is no way to tell from the note itself.
Where this bites in practice
An association, a manager or a board's counsel checking whether a rule still governs is exactly the kind of reader the Division had in mind, and the trap is specific: pulling up a chapter, seeing no expiration date, and concluding the chapter is permanent.
Take the two chapters that matter most to a New Hampshire condominium. Jus 1300, the Land Sales Full Disclosure rules, and Jus 1400, the Condominium rules, were both adopted as Documents #12909 and #12910 effective October 24, 2019 — and both carry "EXPIRES: 10-24-29" in the filing history. Those are dated, and they will need readoption before October 2029.
By contrast the Real Estate Commission's rules of practice and procedure, Document #14228, effective March 19, 2025, carry "DO NOT EXPIRE" — because RSA 541-A:17, II exempts mandatory rules of practice and procedure from the clock. Two rules, both current, two entirely different lifespans, distinguishable only by reading the filing history rather than the rule.
The second caveat on the same page
The Division's index carries a related warning: "An effective rule will not appear on this web site until the agency certifies the rule after editing."
In the filing history that shows up as an asterisk. An entry with an asterisk has been certified and its text is online; an entry without one has been filed and may be effective, but its certified text is not yet published. That gap is real and it is current — the Department of Environmental Services' Alteration of Terrain filing #14656, effective August 6, 2026, carried no asterisk when we checked.
For anyone permitting work under that chapter right now, the operative rule is in force and the published text is the prior version. That is not a theoretical problem.
How to check a New Hampshire rule properly
Three steps, and they take about two minutes.
Open the agency's filing history rather than the rule chapter, and find the most recent document number for the chapter you care about. That tells you when it was adopted, whether it expires, and whether the certified text is online.
Then open the chapter text and read the source note at the end of the section you are relying on. Sections within a chapter can have different histories — a chapter readopted in 2026 may contain sections substantively unchanged since 2016, and the source note says so.
Finally, if the entry has no asterisk, assume the published text is behind the operative rule and ask the agency.
What to watch next
Nothing, in the sense that this is not going to change again. It is worth knowing rather than tracking.
The practical horizon for associations is October 24, 2029, when both the condominium and land-sales chapters expire and have to be readopted. That readoption is the natural moment for the Attorney General's Bureau to reconcile its rules with whatever the legislature's Condominium Act review produces, and it is the next scheduled point at which New Hampshire's condominium registration regime is opened up.
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