Two wrinkles that widen the gap

New buildings can be legally pre-1982. Subsection (a)(3): “A condominium created as an additional phase by amendment of a condominium created prior to July 1, 1982, if the original declaration contemplated the amendment, shall be deemed to be a condominium created prior to July 1, 1982.” A phase built in 2005 under a 1979 declaration that contemplated it is on the old side of the line.

There is a third date. Subsection (a)(4) gives the foreclosure section its own rule: § 34-36.1-3.21 applies to condominiums created before June 19, 1991 “only with respect to events and circumstances occurring after June 18, 1991”, and applies in all respects to condominiums created after June 18, 1991.

What the old act supplies instead, and what it demands be disclosed

The pre-1982 buildings are governed by chapter 34-36, the Condominium Ownership Act, whose § 34-36-39 both closes the door and requires a warning. The chapter “shall not apply to new declarations of condominiums filed after July 1, 1982”, and any public offering statement or sales contract for an old-act condominium must carry, in bold-faced type:

“This condominium is not covered by the Rhode Island Condominium Act of 1982.”

That sentence is a disclosure Rhode Island wrote into its statute books more than forty years ago. Whether buyers understand what it means is a different question. Our Rhode Island governing statute page sets out the two-chapter structure.

The legislature has been closing the gap one section at a time — and stalled in 2026

This is the live part. The retroactivity list is not static; the General Assembly adds to it.

In 2025 it added two things. P.L. 2025 chs. 123 and 136 (S 0509 Substitute A and H 5156 Substitute A, both enacted June 24, 2025) added § 34-36.1-3.08 — meetings and notice — to the list, and in the same act authorised electronic meetings. The Legislative Council's own explanation says so: the act “would provide that the 'meetings' requirements from § 34-36.1-3.08 be applicable to condominiums created before July 1, 1982, and would permit remote participation in condominium meetings.” And P.L. 2025 chs. 177 and 178 (H 5585 and S 0507, same date) added “34-36.1-3.13(d) and (k) (unit owner responsibility for master policy deductibles)”.²

So pre-1982 buildings gained statutory meeting-notice rules and a master-policy deductible allocation in June 2025. They still have no statutory quorum, no statutory proxy rule, no board-election rule and no budget ratification vote.

The 2026 session tried to add more and failed. Both H 7851 (reserve studies) and H 7852 (insurance) would have extended further sections back to pre-1982 condominiums — § 2.19(b) on mortgagee approval, § 3.06(c) and (d) on bylaws, and a further reach on § 3.13. Both died in House Corporations. Nothing in the 2026 session amended the Rhode Island Condominium Act at all.

A drafting defect on the face of the statute

Worth flagging because it has never been fixed. Section 34-36.1-3.16(a) makes charges under “§ 34-36.1-3.02(a)(10) — (12)” enforceable as assessments. But the retroactivity list in § 1.02(a)(2) extends only § 3.02(a)(1)–(6) and (11)–(17) to pre-1982 condominiums — subdivision (a)(10) is not among them. For an older building, the lien section cross-references a power the association does not statutorily hold. Whether that matters in practice is an open question; the mismatch is on the page.

What an owner or board in an older Rhode Island condominium should actually do

Establish your date, and write it down. Not the building's construction date — the date the declaration was recorded, and whether any later phase was added under a declaration that contemplated it. Everything in this article turns on that one fact and most associations have never formally determined it.

Read the bylaws as the whole of your governance law. For a pre-1982 building, quorum, proxies, notice content beyond § 3.08, elections and budget approval come from the documents alone. If the bylaws are silent on quorum, there is no statutory default to fall back on.

Do not assume a rule you read about applies to you. The Rhode Island provisions most often written about — the budget that is deemed ratified unless a majority of all owners rejects it, the twenty-percent quorum, the one-year proxy limit — are all in sections that do not reach pre-1982 buildings.

Do assume the collections provisions apply. The six-month super-priority lien, the sixty-day certified-mail notice, the fine caps and hearing requirement, the thirty-day records deadline and the ten-day resale certificate all reach back. The parts of the Act with teeth are the parts that apply to you.

What to watch next

The sixteen-member condominium law commission created in June 2026 reports by December 31, 2027 and was directed to identify constraints in current law that impede participation in condominium governance. The pre-1982 list is the most obvious such constraint in the statute, and whether the commission recommends collapsing the two-chapter structure altogether — rather than continuing to move sections across one session at a time — is the question its report will answer.