Texas caps condominium resale certificate fees at $375
Texas caps condominium resale certificate fees at $375
2026-09-19 · Texas · Compliance
What happened. Texas condominium associations have operated under a statutory ceiling on resale certificate charges since 1 September 2025. Section 4 of Senate Bill 711, 89th Legislature, Regular Session, added a new subsection (f) to Property Code Section 82.157, and it is one sentence long:
“An association may charge a reasonable and necessary fee, not to exceed $375, to furnish a resale certificate under Subsection (a).”1
Two conditions, not one
The sentence imposes a ceiling and a standard at the same time. A charge must be “reasonable and necessary” and it must not exceed $375. A fee below the cap is not automatically compliant, because the reasonableness condition is independent of the number; the cap is the outer bound, not a safe harbour.
The bill passed the Senate 30–0 on 10 April 2025, cleared the House on 29 April, and was signed by the Governor on 13 May 2025 with an effective date of 1 September 2025.2
What the cap does not cover
Section 82.157(f) is tied to “a resale certificate under Subsection (a)” — the condominium resale certificate a unit owner may require the association to furnish under the Texas Uniform Condominium Act. It is not a general cap on transfer-related charges, and the same act makes that separation explicit elsewhere: SB 711 amended Section 82.116(a) to require the management certificate to disclose “the amount and description of a fee or fees charged to a unit seller or buyer relating to a transfer of a property interest in a unit of the condominium.”1
Read together, the two provisions do different jobs. One caps the price of a single statutory document. The other forces every other transfer-related charge onto a publicly recorded instrument that is also filed with the Texas Real Estate Commission. The disclosure duty is broader than the cap.
The Chapter 209 comparison
Non-condominium property owners' associations sit under a different regime. Resale certificates for those associations run through Chapter 207, and Chapter 207 has long set its own framework for what the certificate contains and when it must be produced. SB 711 did not amend Chapter 207, so the $375 figure is a condominium number, not a statewide one. An association operating under Chapter 209 and Chapter 207 does not inherit the cap by analogy.
Where the number bites
The practical effect falls hardest where a management company's published resale-package price had been assembled from stacked line items — a certificate fee, a rush fee, a document fee, an update fee. The statute caps the charge “to furnish a resale certificate,” which is a functional description rather than a label, so renaming a component does not move it outside subsection (f). What sits outside is a charge for something other than furnishing the certificate, and that charge is disclosable under Section 82.116(a)(8).
The separate 2025 bill that did not pass
House Bill 2504 of the same session also proposed a resale-certificate fee limit. It did not reach the Governor. The enacted ceiling is the one in SB 711, and it is the only condominium resale-certificate cap in current Texas law.
What to watch next
The cap is a fixed dollar figure with no indexing mechanism in the statute — no consumer-price adjustment, no biennial review, no rulemaking authority delegated to any agency. It stays at $375 until the Legislature changes it, and the next regular session convenes in January 2027.
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