New Jersey bill would cap HOA dues increases at 10 percent, with personal liability
New Jersey bill would cap HOA dues increases at 10 percent, with personal liability
2026-09-15 · New Jersey · Legislation · Pending — not yet law
A pending New Jersey bill would put a hard ceiling on association dues increases and attach an enforcement scheme aimed squarely at individual board members.
A3314, introduced January 13, 2026 by Assemblyman William B. Sampson IV and referred to the Assembly Housing Committee, would bar an executive board or board member from increasing association dues, "severally or in the aggregate, by more than 10 percent over a 12-month period" measured against the prior 12 months.1
Three routes to challenge an increase
A member could request an investigation by the Director of the Division of Consumer Affairs, sue in court, or invoke alternative dispute resolution. That is notable on its own: New Jersey currently gives owners no consumer-protection forum for an assessment dispute, and DCA has said it "has no statutory jurisdiction over the business judgment decisions of association boards relative to… the issuance of assessments to unit owners."
The remedies
On a finding of violation, the director or the court may declare the board's action void, report the violation to the membership, and grant other relief. Board members would be personally, jointly and severally liable, with a $1,000 penalty per violation payable to the plaintiff, plus an order that the association repay the excess dues to the plaintiff. A finding would create a rebuttable presumption of violation in a later unit-owner suit.
The escape valve
A board could petition the Commissioner of Community Affairs for approval to exceed 10 percent. The bill sets a 90-day window for the commissioner to act.
Status
No committee statement, no reprint, no hearing, no vote. No Senate companion. It is the reintroduction of A5744, introduced June 12, 2025 and dead with the 221st Legislature.
The collision with the reserve statute
This is the part that has not been written about, and it is not a subtle problem.
New Jersey's reserve-funding law requires associations to fund a 30-year plan in which the reserve balance never falls below zero. For a community that has underfunded reserves for twenty years — which describes a great many of them — reaching that standard requires increases well above 10 percent. That is precisely why the fee increases now generating headlines are the size they are.
And the 2025 amendment, P.L.2025, c.132, deleted the subsections that had provided a phased cure path for deficiencies requiring more than a 10 percent increase. The statutory cushion that would have made a 10 percent cap survivable was removed a year before this bill was filed.
A board caught between the two would face a statutory duty to fund and a statutory bar on funding, resolved only by a discretionary petition to a commissioner. The bill's own text is silent on what wins.
One drafting point we could not resolve
The bill provides that a board may petition the Commissioner of Community Affairs for approval to exceed the cap, and sets a 90-day period. The statement text available to us truncates on what happens when the commissioner does not act within it — whether the petition is deemed approved or deemed denied.
That default is the whole mechanism. Deemed-approved makes the cap a notice requirement with a waiting period. Deemed-denied makes it an absolute ceiling administered by an agency that has published no rules on associations at all. Anyone writing about A3314 should read the operative section before characterising it, and we are flagging rather than guessing.
Personal liability, again
A3314 and S4104 — the dissolution bill — share a design instinct: make individual volunteer directors personally and uninsurably liable for a procedural failure. A3314 goes further than most, because the $1,000 penalty is payable to the plaintiff rather than to the State, which creates a direct financial incentive for owners to litigate assessments.
For a board, the practical consequence would arrive long before any judgment. D&O carriers price and write around what directors can be held personally liable for, and recruiting volunteers to a board is already the hardest job in New Jersey community-association governance.
What a 10 percent cap does not reach
The bill addresses "association dues." It does not, on its face, address special assessments. An association facing a reserve shortfall and a dues cap would have an obvious route around the cap, and it is the route owners like least: a one-time assessment rather than a phased increase.
That is the standard experience of assessment caps elsewhere. Capping the recurring number without capping the lump sum tends to convert predictable increases into unpredictable ones.
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