Tennessee bill to void HOA child care bans died twice
Tennessee bill to void HOA child care bans died twice
2026-09-19 · Tennessee · Legislation · Did not pass
A bill that would have made a Tennessee declaration's restriction on licensed home child care void and unenforceable failed in two consecutive sessions, the second time without ever receiving a recorded committee vote. With the 114th General Assembly gone, both versions are dead and anything similar has to be filed afresh.1
This was the most contested association-governance question in Tennessee over the two-year assembly, and it is the clearest illustration of how such questions fared: a private-property-use proposal, an organised opposition, and a quiet death in subcommittee.
What the 2026 version would have done
HB 2306, filed by Representative Carringer, and SB 2282, filed by Senator Briggs, would have added a new part to Title 66, Chapter 27. The operative provision turned entirely on licensure:
“If a current or prospective family child care home or group child care home obtains the necessary license from the department of human services and any necessary permits or license from the local government entities with jurisdiction over the location … then any restrictions on the operation of a family child care home or group child care home that may be in a declaration applicable to the property … are void, of no effect, and must not be enforced by the homeowners' association or unit owners' association.”
Two features made the 2026 bill broader than its predecessor. It reached group child care homes as well as family ones, and it reached unit owners' associations — condominiums — as well as homeowners' associations. It also added a remedy the earlier version lacked: an association that “willfully violates this section” would be liable to the provider for actual damages plus punitive damages capped at $1,000.
A third provision limited its reach sharply. The section would have applied “to new declarations created, or existing declarations amended, on or after the effective date of this act” — so an existing covenant, unamended, would have survived it untouched.
Section 2 carried a parallel rule into landlord-tenant law, barring a landlord from refusing to rent because the tenant operates a licensed child care home, subject to five permitted conditions covering notice, liability insurance, additional-insured status, structural changes and shared-space rules.
How each version ended
The 2025 version was HB 1069, filed by Representative Glynn, and SB 1013, filed by Senator Oliver. It was narrower — family child care homes only, homeowners' associations only, no damages remedy. On March 11, 2025 the Senate bill failed in Senate Commerce and Labor for want of a second; no member would move it. The House companion was taken off notice in the Cities and Counties Subcommittee the following day.2
The 2026 version went the other way — not a vote, but a series of postponements. HB 2306 was placed on the subcommittee calendar twice, deferred on March 11, and on March 18, 2026 deferred “to January 2027 Calendar.” SB 2282 was deferred five consecutive times before being assigned to the General Subcommittee of Senate State and Local Government on March 24, 2026.3
Why a deferral to January 2027 is a death
The March 18 action on HB 2306 reads like a postponement. It is not one, and the distinction is the single most consequential piece of Tennessee legislative procedure for anyone tracking these bills.
Tennessee runs a two-year General Assembly. Bills introduced in the first regular session carry over to the second. Nothing carries over past the end of the assembly itself. The 114th General Assembly adjourned sine die on April 23, 2026; the 115th was seated after the November 2026 elections and convenes in January 2027 as a different body. A subcommittee that defers a bill to a 2027 calendar is deferring it to a calendar that will not exist, because the subcommittee itself ceases at sine die.
The Senate's device was different in form and identical in effect. Assignment to a “General Subcommittee” in the Tennessee Senate is the standard mechanism for ending a bill's progress without a recorded vote against it. Neither chamber ever voted on the merits of the 2026 bill.
The opposition campaign, in numbers
The Community Associations Institute's Tennessee Legislative Action Committee opposed both versions and listed the 2026 bill first among its priority legislation. Its end-of-session report records the campaign against it: 1,170 messages to 9 legislators, from 98 advocates, with 58 percent of participants having never taken part in a CAI advocacy campaign before.4
Against the 2025 version the same organisation generated 25 messages from 24 people to 6 legislators. The forty-seven-fold increase between the two sessions is the clearest available measure of how the second bill was received by the association sector.
CAI states its general position in the same report: it “recognizes the right and the obligation of community associations to regulate certain activities within their communities.” The organisation cites figures of roughly 765,000 Tennesseans living in 315,000 homes across more than 5,500 community associations.
What the law is, with the bills gone
Tennessee has no general planned-community statute, so a restriction on home occupations or on child care in a residential subdivision is governed by the recorded declaration and by ordinary covenant-construction rules, alongside whatever the local zoning ordinance permits. Where the community is a condominium, the Condominium Act of 2008 governs the association's authority and the declaration supplies the use restrictions.
Neither body of law was amended. A licensed family or group child care home in a Tennessee community remains subject to whatever the declaration says about business or commercial use, and the Department of Human Services licence that would have been decisive under the failed bill has no effect on the covenant. The interaction between a use restriction and a state-licensed activity is a question of covenant interpretation in Tennessee, not of statutory preemption.
What to watch next
The question has now been filed in two consecutive sessions by different sponsors in both parties, which is the usual signature of a proposal that returns. The 2026 version's expansion — group homes, condominiums, a damages remedy — shows the direction of travel between drafts.
Any 2027 bill starts from nothing: a new number, a new first reading, a new committee referral. The prospective-application clause is the provision to watch, because it is what determined the 2026 bill's practical reach. A version without it would operate on declarations already recorded, and that is a materially different proposal from the one that died.
Related Tennessee HOA Topics
- HB 2306 / SB 2282 as introduced, 114th General Assembly — full text (Tennessee General Assembly) ↩
- SB 1013 / HB 1069 bill history — the 2025 version (Tennessee General Assembly) ↩
- SB 2282 / HB 2306 bill history and committee actions (Tennessee General Assembly) ↩
- “2026 Tennessee End of Legislative Session Report,” Community Associations Institute Advocacy ↩
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