New Hampshire HOA Records Inspection
Section 1 — Overview
New Hampshire treats condominiums and planned communities very differently, and an owner's records rights depend entirely on which kind of community the owner lives in. For condominiums, the New Hampshire Condominium Act (RSA 356-B) governs, and it sets out a clear records provision: RSA 356-B:37-e, which covers disclosure of financial information and meeting minutes to unit owners. The minutes rule in RSA 356-B:37, VI backs it up, and RSA 356-B:15 enforces the whole chapter. Many people assume New Hampshire applies a soft reasonableness test. It does not. The Condominium Act sets a fixed clock. An association must give a unit owner access to its financial information within 15 days of a request, and the board must answer a written request for minutes within 15 days. Planned communities stand on a different footing. They have no HOA statute. Their owners rely on recorded covenants, on their bylaws, and on the nonprofit corporate form under RSA 292, the Voluntary Corporations and Associations chapter. RSA 292 no longer contains a member records-inspection section, because the legislature repealed the old RSA 292:11 (Records) in 1985. New Hampshire runs its courts on a single appellate tier. Trial-level disputes go to the Superior Court, smaller civil matters go to the Circuit Court, and appeals go straight to the New Hampshire Supreme Court, because the state has no intermediate appellate court. All of this places New Hampshire among the hard-clock statutory-deadline states for condominiums — though it reaches less far than Florida or California — while it leaves planned communities to corporate and contract law. The table and the sections below lay out the mechanics, the exemptions, and the remedies.
Section 2 — Quick-Reference: New Hampshire HOA Records Inspection
| Field | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Governing provision(s) | Condos: the NH Condominium Act, RSA 356-B, principally RSA 356-B:37-e (financial information and minutes) and RSA 356-B:37, VI (minutes), enforced through RSA 356-B:15.1,2,3 Planned communities: no HOA statute; recorded covenants and bylaws plus the nonprofit corporate form under RSA 292, which contains no current records-inspection section (the former RSA 292:11 was repealed in 1985).4,5 |
| Community types covered | Condominiums created on or after September 10, 1977 fall under RSA 356-B; pre-1977 condominiums fall under RSA 479-A plus parts of RSA 356-B.6 Planned communities: no comprehensive statute. |
| Who may inspect | Condos: each unit owner; a prospective purchaser receives a resale package (RSA 356-B:58).1,7 Planned communities: members, as the covenants and bylaws define them. |
| Proper-purpose requirement | Condos: No; RSA 356-B:37-e imposes no proper-purpose condition.1 Planned communities: the statute does not specify; the declaration and bylaws govern, and common-law corporate inspection may require a proper purpose. |
| Form of request | Condos: financial information by request, with no statutory form or content specified (RSA 356-B:37-e, II); minutes by written request (RSA 356-B:37, VI).1,2 Planned communities: the statute does not specify; the covenants and bylaws govern. |
| Response or production deadline | Condos: 15 calendar days for financial information (RSA 356-B:37-e, II) and 15 days to respond to a written request for minutes (RSA 356-B:37, VI); the annual profit-and-loss statement must be available 30 days before the annual meeting (RSA 356-B:37-e, I). This is a fixed statutory clock, not a reasonableness standard.1,2 Planned communities: no fixed statutory deadline; the covenants and bylaws govern. |
| Inspection method and location | Condos: the statute frames the right as access and production rather than on-site-only review; the association may provide minutes electronically or post them on its website (RSA 356-B:37-e, V).1 Planned communities: the statute does not specify. |
| Copying and labor fees | Condos: for records within the last 3 fiscal years the statute specifies no fee; the association may charge a fee for information requested beyond the last 3 fiscal years (RSA 356-B:37-e, IV), and it sets no cap.1 Planned communities: the statute does not specify. |
| Records expressly subject to inspection | Condos: the association's financial information (books, contracts, mortgages, loans, debts, account balances), employee names and salaries, and minutes (RSA 356-B:37-e); the unit owners list and notice affidavit (RSA 356-B:37, I); and retained proxies (RSA 356-B:39).1,2,8 Planned communities: the statute does not specify; the covenants and bylaws define them. |
| Records exempt or withholdable | Condos: individual unit-owner accounts, unless a lien has been recorded (RSA 356-B:37-e, II); time-sharing employee salaries, which stay confidential absent board and manager consent (RSA 356-B:37-e, III); and unapproved minutes and executive-session matters, which the board need not circulate (RSA 356-B:37-c, IV; RSA 356-B:37-d).1,9 Planned communities: the statute does not specify. |
| Membership or owner list | Condos: the unit owners list is available for inspection at a noticed meeting and stays available for inspection for at least 3 years (RSA 356-B:37, I); the current statute imposes no commercial-use restriction.2 Planned communities: the statute does not specify. |
| Records-retention requirement | Condos: minutes for at least 3 years (RSA 356-B:37-e, V; RSA 356-B:37, VI); the notice affidavit and unit owners list for at least 3 years (RSA 356-B:37, I); proxies for not less than 3 years (RSA 356-B:39); the statute specifies no general financial-records retention period.1,2,8 Planned communities: the statute does not specify. |
| Electronic records | Condos: the association may provide minutes electronically or post them on its website (RSA 356-B:37-e, V).1 Planned communities: the statute does not specify. |
| Remedies for noncompliance | Condos: one or more aggrieved unit owners may bring a civil action for damages, injunctive relief, or any other remedy at law or in equity (RSA 356-B:15, I), and the prevailing party recovers costs and attorneys' fees (RSA 356-B:15, II); the statute provides no per-day penalty and no statutory damages for records noncompliance.3 Planned communities: general civil remedies under contract and corporate law; no HOA-statute remedy. |
| Enforcement forum and process | Superior Court (smaller civil matters in the Circuit Court); appeal directly to the NH Supreme Court (no intermediate appellate court).10,11 There is no agency records-complaint pathway; the NH DOJ Consumer Protection and Antitrust Bureau handles condominium registration, not owner records disputes. |
Section 3 — The records-inspection framework in detail
3A. Records subject to inspection
For condominiums, the records right is statutory and fairly specific. RSA 356-B:37-e, II gives each unit owner access to all of the association's financial information — its contracts, its mortgages, its loans and their terms, and any outstanding debts and account balances it holds.1 RSA 356-B:37-e, III adds the names of association employees and the salaries the association pays them, including through third-party service arrangements, subject to a confidentiality carve-out for time-sharing condominiums.1 RSA 356-B:37-e, I requires the association to make an annual profit-and-loss statement, in a constant format, available 30 days before the annual meeting, and to send each owner a year-end accounting within 90 days of the close of the fiscal year.1 Both RSA 356-B:37-e, V and RSA 356-B:37, VI cover meeting minutes.1,2 Other parts of the Act make related records inspectable: the notice affidavit and unit owners list under RSA 356-B:37, I, and the proxies retained under RSA 356-B:39.2,8 The split between community types is sharp. Condominiums created on or after September 10, 1977 fall under RSA 356-B; pre-1977 condominiums stay under RSA 479-A, the Unit Ownership of Real Property Act, plus the administration and enforcement portions of RSA 356-B.6 Non-condominium planned communities have no records statute at all. RSA 292, the Voluntary Corporations and Associations chapter that supplies the corporate form most associations use, no longer contains a member records-inspection section: the legislature repealed the old RSA 292:11 (Records) in 1985.5 The 2023 addition of RSA 292:8-m dealt with super-majority voting and dissolution hearings for homeowners' associations, not records.4 So a planned-community owner's inspectable records come from the recorded covenants and bylaws and from background corporate and contract law — not from a state HOA statute.
3B. The request-and-response sequence
In a condominium, every unit owner has standing, and the Act attaches no proper-purpose condition: RSA 356-B:37-e simply says a unit owner "shall have access."1 The form of the request depends on the record. For financial information, RSA 356-B:37-e, II refers to "the unit owner's request" without prescribing a written demand or any required content. For minutes, RSA 356-B:37, VI requires a written request.1,2 The response clock is the highest-value point on this page, and it counts days rather than measuring reasonableness. The association must provide financial information within 15 days of the request, and the board must answer a written request for minutes within 15 days of receiving it; in any event, it must make copies of minutes available within 60 days of the meeting or 15 days of board approval, whichever comes first.1,2 The annual profit-and-loss statement runs on its own 30-day pre-meeting timeline.1 On method, the statute builds the right around production rather than supervised on-site review, and it expressly lets the association provide minutes electronically or post them on the association website and tell owners where to find them.1 On charges, RSA 356-B:37-e, IV permits a fee only for information an owner requests beyond the last 3 fiscal years; for records within the prior 3 fiscal years it specifies no fee, and it sets no cap on the charge for older records.1 For planned communities, the covenants and bylaws govern every one of these mechanics — standing, form, deadline, location, and charges — because RSA 292 supplies no inspection procedure. A separate provision, enacted in 2015, requires a managing agent to return all association records to the board within 30 days of a written request, no matter what a management contract says; but that duty runs from the manager to the association, not from the association to the owner.12
3C. Withholding, confidentiality, and the membership or owner list
The Condominium Act names a short list of records an association may withhold or redact. It excludes individual unit-owner account records from a financial-information request unless the association has recorded a lien for nonpayment, in which case it discloses that account.1 In time-sharing condominiums, employee salaries stay confidential unless the board and the condominium manager agree to disclose them.1 The board also need not circulate unapproved minutes or materials headed for executive session under RSA 356-B:37-c, IV and the executive-session provision, RSA 356-B:37-d.9 The Act does not write an attorney-client-privilege or pending-litigation exemption into a records demand; those protections come from general evidentiary and common-law principles, not from RSA 356-B, so a page that claimed a statutory privilege carve-out would overstate the law. On the membership list, RSA 356-B:37, I requires the association to attach a list of unit-owner addresses to the notice affidavit, make it available for inspection by owners who attend a noticed meeting, and keep it available for inspection for at least 3 years; the current statute contains no commercial-use restriction and no opt-out.2 For planned communities, the statute addresses neither proper-purpose conditions nor membership-list protections; the covenants and bylaws control, because RSA 292's former records section was repealed and never replaced.5
3D. Remedies and enforcement for noncompliance
A condominium owner whose records request goes unanswered turns to the courts, not to a regulator. RSA 356-B:15, I makes any failure to comply with the Act or the condominium instruments grounds for an action — to recover sums due, to win damages, to obtain injunctive relief, or to pursue any other remedy at law or in equity — and one or more aggrieved unit owners may bring it on their own behalf or as a class action.3 RSA 356-B:15, II gives the prevailing party all costs and attorneys' fees, a two-way fee-shift that, since a 2014 amendment, runs to a prevailing owner and not only to the association.3 The Act sets no per-day penalty and no fixed statutory-damages figure for records noncompliance, so an owner's monetary recovery rests on proven damages plus fees. For planned communities, the remedy is the general civil action under the covenants and under corporate and contract law; there is no HOA-statute remedy and no cost-shift. Either way, the forum is the Superior Court — smaller civil matters go to the Circuit Court — and any appeal goes straight to the New Hampshire Supreme Court, because the state has no intermediate appellate court.10 The New Hampshire Department of Justice's Consumer Protection and Antitrust Bureau runs condominium and subdivision registration and developer-conduct enforcement under RSA 356-B:48 and the sections that follow, but it is not a records-complaint channel for owner-versus-board disputes.11
Section 4 — Recent legislative and judicial activity
A. Recent bills
One bill in the current session would reshape records access for planned-community HOAs — the kind of community New Hampshire has long left to private covenants.
HB 1523 · 2026 Regular Session
HB 1523 amends RSA 292:8-m to give homeowners' associations organized under that chapter a set of transparency duties they have never had by statute. It would require associations to retain accounting records, meeting minutes, and a member list; let members reach specified records on five days' notice; cap copy fees; bar members from using the information for commercial purposes; limit executive sessions; and hand enforcement to the Department of Justice. Under the bill, records "shall be available for examination and copying by a shareholder or member ... during reasonable business hours or at a mutually convenient time and location; and ... upon 5 days' notice in a record reasonably identifying the specific records of the association requested." The copy fee "may not exceed the charge for copying a governmental record as provided for in RSA 91-A:4, IV(d)," which ties the HOA rate to New Hampshire's Right-to-Know Law. Section V gives administration and enforcement to the Consumer Protection and Antitrust Bureau at the Department of Justice, and the Legislative Budget Assistant's fiscal note estimates the DOJ would need two unclassified attorneys and one paralegal, at roughly $365,000 in fiscal year 2027. If it becomes law, HB 1523 would, for the first time, give non-condominium HOA members a statutory records-inspection right instead of a purely contractual one. The House passed the bill in February 2026, the Senate passed an amended version in May 2026, and the House concurred; the most recent docket action is the adoption of Enrolled Bill Amendment 2026-2168e on June 4, 2026. Readers should confirm the final disposition on the General Court's bill-status page.13
| Property managers | If it is signed, managers of RSA 292 HOAs will need a records-retention and 5-day production workflow like the one condominiums already require. |
| HOA board members | Planned-community boards would lose the discretion their covenants now allow and would take on a statutory records-access duty plus executive-session limits. |
| Community association attorneys | Track enrollment and advise HOA — not just condominium — clients on retention, the RSA 91-A:4, IV(d) copy-fee cap, and the new DOJ enforcement role. |
| Homeowners | Planned-community owners would gain a statutory right to obtain records on 5 days' notice, narrowing the current gap with condominium owners. |
B. Recent rulings
No New Hampshire Supreme Court decision from mid-2023 through June 2026 interprets the condominium records provisions (RSA 356-B:37-e) or a unit owner's right to obtain association financial records or minutes. The only recent published Supreme Court decision involving a condominium association in that window concerns the association's authority to buy land, not records, and appears here for context.
AZNH Revocable Trust & a. v. Spinnaker Cove Yacht Club Association, Inc.
The Court affirmed the dismissal of unit owners' challenge to an association's purchase of land outside the condominium, holding that under RSA 356-B:42, I an association may acquire and hold real property funded through assessments. The opinion says nothing about records inspection, RSA 356-B:37-e, minutes, or financial-record access — so the 15-day statutory clock continues to stand on its own text.14
| Property managers | The decision changes nothing about records practice; it concerns association property-acquisition powers, not document production. |
| HOA board members | Boards gain no new records guidance here; the 15-day statutory clock under RSA 356-B:37-e remains the operative rule. |
| Community association attorneys | Note the continuing absence of appellate construction of RSA 356-B:37-e, and rely on the statute's plain text. |
| Homeowners | The ruling does not touch an owner's records rights; those still rest on RSA 356-B:37-e and RSA 356-B:15. |
C. Active legislative debates
The live debate is HB 1523, which would extend a statutory records-access and retention regime to planned-community HOAs and add a copy-fee cap and DOJ enforcement. No pending proposal would change the condominium 15-day clock or add a per-day penalty for condominium records noncompliance.
Section 5 — National positioning and related coverage
New Hampshire is best understood as a condominium-statute state that leaves planned communities to covenants plus corporate law. For condominiums, the Condominium Act is more specific than its reputation suggests. It sets a fixed 15-day production clock for financial information and for minutes, under RSA 356-B:37-e and RSA 356-B:37, VI, rather than a soft availability standard — though its catalog of inspectable records runs narrower than the omnibus records sections in the comprehensive Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act states and in hard-clock regimes such as Florida, where Fla. Stat. § 718.111(12)(c) sets a 10-working-day deadline and minimum damages of $50 a calendar day, up to $500, once an association fails to produce records. For planned communities, New Hampshire sits at the other end of the spectrum: no HOA statute and no current RSA 292 inspection section, so the right is contractual and corporate. The state's appellate structure is single-tier — there is no intermediate appellate court, and appeals from the Superior Court go straight to the New Hampshire Supreme Court. The momentum toward a broader planned-community framework is real but incremental, advancing through targeted RSA 292 amendments such as HB 1523 rather than through a single comprehensive planned-community act.
HOA Weekly's New Hampshire Records Inspection coverage updates quarterly as the legislature and the New Hampshire courts act. Federal frameworks — the Fair Housing Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, and the FCC's OTARD rule — also apply to New Hampshire associations regardless of the state framework.
- N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 356-B:37-e, Disclosure of Financial Information and Meeting Minutes to Unit Owners (N.H. General Court) ↩
- N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 356-B:37, Meetings, and § 356-B:39, Voting (N.H. Condominium Act, merged chapter, N.H. General Court) ↩
- N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 356-B:15, Compliance With Condominium Instruments (N.H. General Court) ↩
- N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 292:8-m, Homeowners' Associations (Voluntary Corporations and Associations, merged chapter, N.H. General Court) ↩
- N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. ch. 292 table of contents, showing § 292:11 (Records) repealed 1985 (N.H. General Court) ↩
- N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 356-B:2, Application (N.H. Condominium Act, merged chapter, N.H. General Court) ↩
- N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 356-B:58, Resale by Purchaser (N.H. Condominium Act, merged chapter, N.H. General Court) ↩
- N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 356-B:39, Voting; proxy retention for inspection (N.H. Condominium Act, merged chapter, N.H. General Court) ↩
- N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 356-B:37-c, Meetings of the Board of Directors and Committees (N.H. General Court) ↩
- New Hampshire Judicial Branch (Superior Court, Circuit Court, and Supreme Court structure) ↩
- N.H. Department of Justice, Condominium and Subdivision Registration (Consumer Protection and Antitrust Bureau) ↩
- 2015 N.H. Laws ch. 131 (H.B. 158), Return of Unit Owners' Association Records From a Managing Agent (N.H. General Court) ↩
- H.B. 1523 (2026), An Act Relative to Disclosure Requirements for Condominium Associations, bill text and status (N.H. General Court) ↩
- AZNH Revocable Trust & a. v. Spinnaker Cove Yacht Club Ass'n, Inc., No. 2021-0385 (N.H. Aug. 3, 2023) (N.H. Judicial Branch) ↩