South Carolina HOA Director Qualifications

Key Findings

• The Horizontal Property Act creates a condominium regime only when an owner opts in by recording a master deed. It then directs that the recorded bylaws govern administration, but it never says who may serve as a director.
• The Homeowners Association Act, effective May 17, 2018, is a disclosure law. It makes governing documents enforceable only once they are recorded, requires 48 hours’ notice before a budget-increase meeting, extends the nonprofit access-to-documents rules, and bars any reading that conflicts with the Nonprofit Corporation Act. It sets no director eligibility.
• The Nonprofit Corporation Act of 1994 carries the weight here, because most associations incorporate as nonprofits and the property statutes are thin. It requires directors to be natural persons, sets a three-director minimum, caps any single term at five years (one year by default), and supplies the rules for removal, the standard of care, and conflicts of interest.
• The Department of Consumer Affairs collects HOA complaint data and answers questions, but the statute bars it from writing regulations or guidelines and from arbitrating disputes. It is not a regulator, and it is not a source of director qualifications.
• No bill enacted in the past 24 months changed director qualifications, board composition, or director removal, and no published appellate decision in the past 36 months squarely addresses HOA director eligibility, removal, board composition, or the director standard of care.

Section 1: Overview

Start with the source of the rule. South Carolina sets director qualifications through an association’s own governing documents and the South Carolina Nonprofit Corporation Act of 1994 — not through its two property statutes. As a result, the state requires no director certification, sets no term limit, and disqualifies no one automatically for falling behind on assessments or for a criminal record.¹ The condominium statute — the South Carolina Horizontal Property Act (S.C. Code Ann. §§ 27-31-10 et seq.) — is a traditional act. It creates a horizontal property regime once an owner records a master deed, and it directs that the recorded bylaws govern the administration.^{2, 3} The South Carolina Homeowners Association Act (§§ 27-30-110 et seq.), enacted in 2018, focuses on disclosure: it governs recording and disclosure, not who may serve as a director.⁴ Because both property statutes say so little, director eligibility rests on the declaration, covenants, and bylaws, read together with the Nonprofit Corporation Act (§§ 33-31-101 et seq.), which supplies the corporate-law defaults.⁵ That places South Carolina well apart from heavy-touch states such as Florida, where the condominium statute imposes director certification, screens out delinquent owners as candidates, and caps service at eight years.⁶ The sections that follow show where each rule comes from, what it actually says, and what recent action in the legislature and the courts has changed.

Section 2: Where director qualifications come from

2A. The two property statutes

South Carolina has two property statutes that touch associations, and neither sets director eligibility. The Horizontal Property Act governs condominiums, which it calls horizontal property regimes. A regime comes into being only when an owner expressly opts in by recording a master deed that sets out the particulars the statute requires.² Once a regime exists, the Act directs that administration “whether incorporated or unincorporated, shall be governed by bylaws which shall be inserted in or appended to and recorded with the master deed or lease.”³ The Act requires those bylaws to provide for a form of administration, “whether this shall be in charge of an administrator or of a board of administration, or otherwise, and specifying the powers, manner of removal,” but it does not itself say who may serve.⁷

The Homeowners Association Act, enacted by 2018 Act No. 245 and effective May 17, 2018, is a disclosure statute.⁴ Its central mechanic: an association’s governing documents “must be recorded in the clerk of court’s or register of deeds office in the county in which the property is located in order to be enforceable.”⁸ It adds a budget-meeting notice rule, requiring notice “at least forty-eight hours in advance of a meeting in which the board may take action to increase a homeowner’s annual assessment.”⁹ It extends the Nonprofit Corporation Act’s access-to-documents provisions (§§ 33-31-1602 through 33-31-1605) to associations not otherwise subject to that act.¹⁰ And it includes a construction rule: “no provision of this article may be construed to be in conflict with the provisions of the South Carolina Nonprofit Corporation Act.”¹¹ What neither property statute does is set director eligibility, a term limit, a certification requirement, or an automatic disqualification. The Act’s companion article created a complaint-intake role at the South Carolina Department of Consumer Affairs, but that department is “prohibited from: (1) promulgating regulations or issuing guidelines concerning homeowners association administration, governance, or governing documents; or (2) serving as an arbiter in disputes,” so it is not a regulator and not a source of director qualifications.¹²

2B. The corporate-law layer: the South Carolina Nonprofit Corporation Act

Most South Carolina associations organize as nonprofit corporations, which makes the South Carolina Nonprofit Corporation Act of 1994 the principal statutory source of director-qualification rules.⁵ The Act handles the matters the property statutes leave open. It sets a baseline qualification to serve.¹ It fixes the minimum board size.¹³ It caps director terms and supplies a default term.¹⁴ It lays out the mechanics for member and board removal of directors.¹⁵ And it sets the standard of care and the conflict-of-interest framework that govern sitting directors.^{16, 17} Because the property statutes supply so little, the Nonprofit Corporation Act, read with the governing documents, is the operative scaffolding for director qualifications in South Carolina. It is corporate law, not an HOA statute.

2C. The declaration, covenants, and bylaws

The governing documents are the operative source of any candidate eligibility screen. The order of precedence runs like this: the applicable property statute on matters it actually addresses, then the declaration, covenants, master deed, and bylaws, then the Nonprofit Corporation Act defaults, then board-adopted rules. Because the Horizontal Property Act and the Homeowners Association Act say almost nothing about director eligibility, the practical work falls to the documents. A manager confirming who may serve reads the bylaws and declaration against the Nonprofit Corporation Act, because that is where any membership, residency, good-standing, or similar screen will appear — if it appears at all. The manager also confirms that the governing documents have been recorded, because under the Homeowners Association Act unrecorded documents are not enforceable.⁸

Section 3: Director eligibility, disqualification, and tenure rules

A. Eligibility to serve

The one statutory eligibility rule in South Carolina is that “all directors must be natural persons”; the Nonprofit Corporation Act then provides that “the articles or bylaws may prescribe other qualifications for directors.”¹ Source layer: the Nonprofit Corporation Act, which applies to associations organized as nonprofit corporations. The statute does not require a director to be a member or owner, a resident, or of any minimum age, and it sets no good-standing condition. Any such requirement is documentary — it appears in the declaration or bylaws, or not at all. That has direct consequences. Where co-owners, spouses, a trust, or an entity hold a unit or lot, the natural-person rule means the entity itself cannot sit on the board; a human representative must serve, and whether that representative must personally be a member turns on the governing documents, not the statute.¹ For horizontal property regimes, the Horizontal Property Act adds nothing on eligibility beyond directing that the bylaws specify the form of administration and its powers.⁷

B. Disqualification and removal

South Carolina has no statutory bar that disqualifies a candidate or a sitting director for assessment delinquency or for a criminal record. Any such disqualification is documentary — the opposite of the Florida approach.⁶ The Nonprofit Corporation Act and the governing documents control removal of a sitting director. Under the Act, the members may remove a director they elected, with or without cause, but only “at a meeting called for the purpose of removing the director,” with notice stating that purpose, and only if the votes cast to remove “would be sufficient to elect the director at a meeting to elect directors.”¹⁵ A director the board elected “may be removed without cause by the vote of two-thirds of the directors then in office or such greater number as is set forth in the articles or bylaws.”¹⁵ The vote-count mechanics of a removal election fall under the board-election rules rather than the qualification rules; the point on the qualification side is that removal authority and thresholds come from the Nonprofit Corporation Act and the documents, not from the property statutes. Conflict-of-interest limits come from the Nonprofit Corporation Act too: a transaction in which a director has a direct or indirect interest “is not voidable or the basis for imposing liability on the director if the transaction was fair to the corporation at the time it was entered into,” or if the disinterested directors approve it after disclosure by a majority.¹⁷

C. Board composition and terms

Board size and terms come from the Nonprofit Corporation Act default, read against the governing documents. The Act provides that “a board of directors must consist of three or more directors, with the number specified in or fixed in accordance with the articles or bylaws,” and that the number may drop only “to no fewer than three.”¹³ On tenure, the Act provides that “except for designated or appointed directors, the terms of directors may not exceed five years,” that “in the absence of a term specified in the articles or bylaws, the term of each director is one year,” and that “directors may be elected for successive terms.”¹⁴ Read the five-year figure carefully: it caps the length of a single term, not the number of terms a person may serve. South Carolina imposes no statutory term limit, so any cap on consecutive terms is documentary.¹⁴ The Act separately allows staggered terms if the articles or bylaws provide for them.¹⁸ Developer or declarant board representation and the transition to owner control are matters the property statutes do not spell out, so the declaration and bylaws govern them.⁷

D. Onboarding and ongoing qualification duties

South Carolina requires no director certification and no director education. This is the clearest contrast with Florida, where within 90 days of election a residential condominium director “shall certify in writing to the secretary of the association that he or she has read the association’s declaration of condominium, articles of incorporation, bylaws, and current written policies,” or complete an approved educational course.⁶ A South Carolina director takes office subject to the Nonprofit Corporation Act’s standard of conduct: a director must discharge his duties “in good faith,” “with the care an ordinarily prudent person in a like position would exercise under similar circumstances,” and “in a manner the director reasonably believes to be in the best interests of the corporation.”¹⁶ A director who meets that standard, and who may rely on competent reports from officers, counsel, accountants, and board committees, is not liable for a decision that turns out badly.¹⁶ Conflict-of-interest disclosure is the practical onboarding duty: the Act expects an interested director to disclose the material facts so the disinterested directors can act.¹⁷ None of this amounts to a certification regime; it is a fiduciary baseline. Trial-level disputes over these duties proceed through the Court of Common Pleas, with the magistrates court holding concurrent jurisdiction over qualifying monetary disputes.¹⁹

Section 4: Recent legislative and judicial activity

A. Recent bills

No bill enacted in the past 24 months amended the Horizontal Property Act, the Homeowners Association Act, or the Nonprofit Corporation Act to change association director qualifications, board composition, or director removal. According to the Community Associations Institute’s 2026 South Carolina End of Legislative Session Report, CAI “tracked nearly 60 bills in South Carolina with the potential to impact community associations across the state, including 40 bills introduced in 2025,” but every comprehensive reform proposal that touched governance stayed a proposal rather than becoming law.²⁰ The accurate statement of the period is this: no qualifying enacted activity on director qualifications, composition, or removal.

B. Recent appellate rulings

No published opinion of the South Carolina Court of Appeals or the South Carolina Supreme Court in the past 36 months squarely addresses HOA or condominium director eligibility, director removal, board composition, or the director standard of care. The association decisions in this window concern developer turnover, construction defects, covenants, and assessments rather than director qualifications. The accurate statement of the period is this: no qualifying appellate activity on director qualifications, composition, or removal.

C. Active legislative debates

In the 2025-2026 session the General Assembly considered broad HOA proposals. H.5204 would have added association dissolution procedures, election procedures, and additional meeting requirements; according to CAI, it “died in committee.”²¹ H.4006 would have required “all meetings of the board of a homeowners association, including any subcommittee or other committee of the board, where the business of the association is discussed or transacted to be open to all members of record,” and it did not pass.²² A separate proposal, H.3350, would have required associations to adopt internal dispute-resolution processes, and it did not advance out of committee.²³ None of these would have set director eligibility, certification, or a statutory term limit.

Section 5: National positioning and related coverage

South Carolina is a moderate-touch state for director qualifications. Its statutory weight sits in disclosure and recording under the 2018 Homeowners Association Act and in a traditional horizontal-property condominium statute, while director eligibility comes from the governing documents and the Nonprofit Corporation Act — with no statutory certification, term limit, or automatic disqualification.^{1, 8} That contrasts sharply with heavy-touch states such as Florida, whose condominium statute provides that “a person who has been convicted of any felony...is not eligible for board membership unless such felon’s civil rights have been restored for at least 5 years,” disqualifies delinquent owners as candidates, and limits service to eight consecutive years.⁶ South Carolina sits closer to disclosure-focused states such as New Mexico, where the statutory emphasis falls on recording and transparency rather than on screening candidates. For a multi-state operator, the practical implication is plain: South Carolina’s statutory obligations are about recording and disclosure, while director eligibility is documentary and must be read out of each association’s declaration and bylaws. South Carolina imposes no director certification or term-limit requirement.¹

HOA Weekly refreshes its South Carolina director-qualifications coverage each quarter, as the General Assembly and the South Carolina courts act. Federal frameworks rarely dictate director qualifications, but South Carolina associations still answer to federal law — the Fair Housing Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, and the OTARD rule — in their broader operations.

Recommendations

1. Start with the documents, not the statute. For any South Carolina association, confirm director eligibility by reading the declaration and bylaws first, then the Nonprofit Corporation Act. The only statutory screen is that directors must be natural persons; membership, residency, age, and good-standing requirements exist only where the governing documents create them.
2. Verify recording before you rely on any eligibility screen. Because the Homeowners Association Act conditions enforceability on recording, a bylaw that disqualifies delinquent owners or non-residents binds only if the document containing it has been recorded in the county land records. Confirm recording before a board acts on a documentary screen.
3. Do not import Florida or California rules. Counsel and managers working across states should not assume a certification duty, an automatic delinquency or felony bar, or a statutory term limit in South Carolina. None exist. Any such rule must come from the association’s own documents.
4. Run removals through the correct layer. Member removal requires a purpose-stated meeting and a vote large enough to have elected the director; board removal of a board-elected director requires a two-thirds vote. Confirm which layer applies before you schedule, and check the vote mechanics under the election rules.
5. Treat the Department of Consumer Affairs as an information channel, not an authority. Do not seek or expect a governance ruling from the department; it cannot issue regulations or arbitrate. Disputes over eligibility or removal are resolved in the Court of Common Pleas, or in magistrates court for qualifying monetary disputes.

Benchmarks that would change this guidance: the General Assembly enacts a bill adding a statutory director certification or education requirement, a statutory candidate eligibility screen (delinquency or criminal history), or a statutory term limit; or a published South Carolina appellate opinion construes §§ 33-31-802, 33-31-803, or 33-31-808 through 33-31-810 in the association context. Re-verify each quarter against scstatehouse.gov and sccourts.org.

Caveats

• This page states the rules as of June 24, 2026. The South Carolina General Assembly runs a two-year cycle (2025-2026), and bills not enacted in 2025 carried into 2026; statuses change, so verify the current status on scstatehouse.gov before relying on any proposal.
• The conclusion that South Carolina imposes no statutory certification, term limit, or automatic disqualification reflects the absence of those provisions in the Horizontal Property Act, the Homeowners Association Act, and the Nonprofit Corporation Act as published in the official Code of Laws. It says the statutes are silent, not that a rule was repealed.
• The natural-person requirement and the removal, term, and conflict provisions cited here apply to associations organized as nonprofit corporations — the typical but not universal form. An association not incorporated under Title 33 may be governed differently, mainly by its recorded documents.
• The finding of no on-point published appellate decision in the past 36 months rests on review of the official sccourts.org opinions and South Carolina case-law databases; a definitive citator run on the relevant sections through a paid legal database would be the conclusive confirmation.

Footnotes

1. S.C. Code Ann. § 33-31-802, Qualifications of directors (“All directors must be natural persons. The articles or bylaws may prescribe other qualifications for directors.”); see also § 33-31-140(10) ↩
2. S.C. Code Ann. § 27-31-30, Establishment of horizontal property regime (South Carolina Horizontal Property Act) ↩
3. S.C. Code Ann. § 27-31-150, Administration of property; bylaws ↩
4. S.C. Code Ann. § 27-30-110, Short title (South Carolina Homeowners Association Act; 2018 Act No. 245, eff. May 17, 2018) ↩
5. S.C. Code Ann. § 33-31-101, Short title (South Carolina Nonprofit Corporation Act of 1994) ↩
6. Fla. Stat. § 718.112(2)(d) (2025), condominium director certification, candidate eligibility, felony disqualification, and term limit ↩
7. S.C. Code Ann. § 27-31-160, Provisions required in bylaws; modification of system of administration ↩
8. S.C. Code Ann. § 27-30-130, Enforceability of governing documents; recording requirements ↩
9. S.C. Code Ann. § 27-30-140, Annual budget increases; notice requirements ↩
10. S.C. Code Ann. § 27-30-150, Application of access to documents provisions (§§ 33-31-1602 through 33-31-1605) ↩
11. S.C. Code Ann. § 27-30-170, Construction of article ↩
12. S.C. Code Ann. § 27-30-320, Department of Consumer Affairs prohibitions on rulemaking and arbitration ↩
13. S.C. Code Ann. § 33-31-803, Number of directors ↩
14. S.C. Code Ann. § 33-31-805, Terms of directors generally ↩
15. S.C. Code Ann. § 33-31-808, Removal of directors elected by members or directors ↩
16. S.C. Code Ann. § 33-31-830, General standards for directors ↩
17. S.C. Code Ann. § 33-31-831, Director conflict of interest ↩
18. S.C. Code Ann. § 33-31-806, Staggered terms for directors ↩
19. S.C. Code Ann. § 27-30-160, Jurisdiction of magistrates court ↩
20. Community Associations Institute, 2026 South Carolina End of Legislative Session Report ↩
21. S.C. General Assembly, 2025-2026 Bill 5204 (Homeowners Associations) ↩
22. S.C. General Assembly, 2025-2026 Bill 4006 (Homeowners Associations; open meetings) ↩
23. S.C. General Assembly, 2025-2026 Bill 3350 (Internal dispute resolution) ↩