New Jersey bill would let towns exempt duplexes from condo structural inspections
New Jersey bill would let towns exempt duplexes from condo structural inspections
2026-09-15 · New Jersey · Legislation · Pending — not yet law
A pending New Jersey bill would push part of the decision about which buildings get structurally inspected down to town hall.
S4365, introduced May 28, 2026 by Senator Raj Mukherji, would widen the "excluded structure" definition in the 2023 structural-integrity law so that a duplex, or a townhouse within a row of three townhouses, can be exempted from the structural inspections the law otherwise requires.1
The exemption is not automatic
This is the bill's defining feature. The exclusion applies only if the municipality adopts an ordinance establishing it. Absent local action, nothing changes for any building.
That distinguishes S4365 from every other pending reserve-and-inspection bill, all of which operate statewide by their own force. Under S4365 an identical duplex would be inspected in one town and exempt in the next.
What is already excluded
Single-family dwellings are already outside the statute automatically, as are non-condominium rental buildings and structures whose primary load-bearing system is combustible frame construction. What S4365 adds is a discretionary local carve-out for the smallest attached forms.
Status
Referred to the Senate Community and Urban Affairs Committee. No further action, no committee statement, no reprint, no vote. There is no Assembly companion. It is new in the 222nd Legislature.
Its statewide predecessor died and was never refiled
The idea of exempting small buildings is not new, and its earlier form was considerably broader.
A5631, introduced May 8, 2025 by Assemblywoman Jessica Ramirez, would have amended P.L.2023, c.214 so that any residential condominium or cooperative building with four or fewer dwelling units became an excluded structure — automatically, statewide, with no municipal involvement.
It never moved out of the Assembly Housing Committee and died with the 221st Legislature on January 13, 2026. Nobody reintroduced it. We searched the 222nd session and found no successor.
So the small-building exemption survives only in Mukherji's narrower, opt-in form. A board in a four-unit building that read about the 2025 bill and assumed relief was coming should know that the bill it read about is gone, and that the one still standing covers duplexes and three-unit townhouse rows, not four-unit buildings, and only where the town acts.
Why the municipal-ordinance design is unusual here
New Jersey's construction and safety codes are, by design, uniform. The Uniform Construction Code exists precisely so that a building is built to the same standard in Hoboken and in Manchester Township. Delegating a safety-inspection exemption to individual municipalities cuts against that architecture.
There is a practical wrinkle too. DCA has told local enforcing agencies that they "do not enforce this law but may start to receive reports regarding covered buildings," which are to be kept in the building file. Under S4365 a municipality that does not enforce the statute would nonetheless decide who is subject to it.
What it would and would not reach
Note what the bill addresses: structural inspections. The capital reserve study and funding duties sit in a different part of the law — PREDFDA, at N.J.S.A. 45:22A-44.2 and 44.3 — and DCA has been explicit that "the capital reserve study requirements apply to all PRED associations and not just those associations that are covered buildings."
A duplex association exempted by municipal ordinance under S4365 would therefore still owe a capital reserve study and a funding plan, unless it fell under the separate exemption for associations with less than $25,000 in total common area capital assets. For very small associations, that second exemption is the one that matters, and this bill does not touch it.
The pattern across all eight bills
Read together, the pending bills reveal a Legislature that has not decided what problem it is solving. Some treat the 2023 law as over-inclusive by building type. Some treat it as over-demanding on timing. One treats it as a matter for case-by-case administrative relief. S4365 treats it as a matter of local preference. Reconciling those is committee work, and no committee has taken any of it up.
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