Washington HOA Director Qualifications

1. Overview

Washington runs its newer condominiums and homeowners associations under one statute: the Washington Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act, or WUCIOA, codified at RCW 64.90. It governs communities created on or after July 1, 2018.¹ Three older acts still govern the communities that came before, and they stay in force until a phased repeal finishes on January 1, 2028. Across every one of these acts, the statute supplies an executive board, declarant control, and — since a 2024 reform — election-qualification rules. What it does not supply is a director certification requirement, a statutory term limit, or any automatic disqualification of owners who fall behind on dues or of people with criminal histories.

Take the older acts in turn. WUCIOA itself is the modern statute, built on the 2008 Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act. The three predecessors are the Washington Condominium Act (RCW 64.34),² the Horizontal Property Regimes Act (RCW 64.32),³ and the Homeowners’ Associations Act (RCW 64.38).⁴ Which act controls a given community depends on when it formed and what type it is.

A phased reform is now rewriting that map. Engrossed Substitute Senate Bill 5796, passed in 2024, extends certain WUCIOA sections to most pre-2018 communities on January 1, 2026, and on January 1, 2028 it repeals the three predecessor acts — at which point WUCIOA governs nearly every condominium and homeowners association in the state, whatever its formation date.⁵

That approach sets Washington apart from the heavy-touch states. Florida imposes statutory director certification or education, caps service at eight years, and automatically disqualifies delinquent owners and certain felons.⁶ California, by statute, disqualifies non-members and term-limited candidates.⁷ The sections that follow trace where Washington’s director qualifications actually come from, how eligibility and removal work, what the Legislature and the courts have done lately, and where the state lands nationally.

2. Where director qualifications come from

2A. The layered statutes and the phased reform

Four property statutes form the base layer, and the controlling one turns on formation date and community type. WUCIOA (RCW 64.90), drawn from the 2008 Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act, took effect July 1, 2018. It applies in full to common interest communities — condominiums, plat communities, and cooperatives — created on or after that date, and specified sections reach back to pre-2018 communities for events that occur afterward.¹ The Washington Condominium Act (RCW 64.34) governs condominiums created on or after July 1, 1990 and before July 1, 2018.² The Horizontal Property Regimes Act (RCW 64.32) governs condominiums created before July 1, 1990.³ The Homeowners’ Associations Act (RCW 64.38) governs homeowners associations created before July 1, 2018.⁴ So a property manager pins down the controlling act by reading the declaration’s recording date and the community type.

The phased reform is the piece that keeps moving. ESSB 5796 (chapter 321, Laws of 2024) repeals RCW 64.32, RCW 64.34, and RCW 64.38 effective January 1, 2028. After that, WUCIOA governs all condominiums and homeowners associations regardless of formation date, subject to a few narrow exceptions in RCW 64.90.360, RCW 64.90.365, and RCW 64.90.375.^{5, 8} A 2025 follow-on, ESSB 5129 (chapter 119, Laws of 2025), accelerates a defined set of WUCIOA sections to most pre-2018 communities beginning January 1, 2026 — including the open-meeting provision (RCW 64.90.445) and parts of RCW 64.90.405.⁹ WUCIOA does not yet govern every community: the January 1, 2026 phase is partial, and the full retrofit waits until January 1, 2028. On the board itself, WUCIOA supplies the executive board and its powers (RCW 64.90.405, RCW 64.90.410),^{10, 11} declarant control and transition (RCW 64.90.415),¹² an election-qualification notice (RCW 64.90.518),¹³ and secret-ballot requirements (RCW 64.90.455).¹⁴ None of the four acts imposes director certification, education, a statutory term limit, or an automatic disqualification of delinquent or criminally convicted candidates.

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

Most Washington associations are nonprofit corporations, organized under the Washington Nonprofit Corporation Act, RCW 24.03A, which took effect January 1, 2022 and replaced the former RCW 24.03 (repealed by chapter 176, Laws of 2021).¹⁵ Some older associations sit under RCW 24.06, the Nonprofit Miscellaneous and Mutual Corporations Act, instead. This is the corporate scaffolding beneath the property act. RCW 24.03A supplies the default rules on directors whenever the property act and the governing documents stay silent: qualification of directors (RCW 24.03A.500), the number of directors (RCW 24.03A.505), terms (RCW 24.03A.515), and removal (RCW 24.03A.530). Under RCW 24.03A.500, a director need not be a state resident or a member of the corporation unless the articles or bylaws say so, and the articles or bylaws may add other qualifications.¹⁶ Under RCW 24.03A.515, the default term runs one year and an elected director’s term may not exceed five — a cap on how long a term lasts, not on how many terms a director may serve.¹⁷ The Nonprofit Corporation Act is not an HOA statute. It furnishes corporate formalities that operate alongside RCW 64.90 and the predecessor acts, and any citation should point to the current RCW 24.03A, not the repealed RCW 24.03.

2C. The declaration and bylaws

Within the framework the applicable property act sets, the declaration and bylaws do the close work — they fix the candidate eligibility screens such as owner-or-member status, residency, and good standing. The order of precedence runs from the applicable property act (WUCIOA or a predecessor), to the declaration and bylaws, to the Nonprofit Corporation Act defaults, and finally to association rules. WUCIOA expects document-based qualifications: the election-notice provision (RCW 64.90.518) tells the association to state “the qualifications to be a board candidate, if any,” which signals that any candidate qualification comes from the documents, not the statute.¹³ In practice, a manager first determines which act applies by formation date and type — tracking the phase-in as it proceeds — then applies that act’s board provisions, then reads the declaration and bylaws for the screens that govern a particular candidate. Because the predecessor acts disappear on January 1, 2028, a document review, and possibly a restatement, is the practical move that lines older communities’ eligibility screens up with WUCIOA.

3. Director eligibility, disqualification, and tenure rules

A. Eligibility to serve

WUCIOA does not require a director to be a unit owner. It does require that the board as a whole be majority-owner. Under RCW 64.90.410(2)(a), effective at the transition meeting, the board must seat at least three members, a majority of them unit owners, though the board need not be larger than the number of units in the community (source layer: WUCIOA; applies to RCW 64.90 communities — currently those formed on or after July 1, 2018, and all communities at the 2028 retrofit).¹¹ WUCIOA imposes no residency, age, or good-standing screen on individual candidates; those come from the declaration and bylaws, consistent with the “qualifications, if any” language of RCW 64.90.518 (source layer: declaration and bylaws within the WUCIOA framework).¹³ At the corporate-default layer, RCW 24.03A.500 confirms that a director need not be a member or a resident unless the documents require it (source layer: Washington Nonprofit Corporation Act; applies to associations incorporated under RCW 24.03A).¹⁶ For condominiums under the Condominium Act, RCW 64.34.308(7) likewise requires an owner-elected board of at least three members, a majority of them unit owners (source layer: RCW 64.34; condominiums created July 1, 1990 to June 30, 2018).¹⁸ For pre-2018 homeowners associations, RCW 64.38.030 directs the bylaws to set the number, qualifications, terms, and manner of electing and removing directors, leaving the specific screens to the documents (source layer: RCW 64.38; HOAs created before July 1, 2018).¹⁹ Treatment of co-owners, spouses, trustees, and entity representatives is documentary; where an entity or trust owns a unit, the governing documents and the association’s records decide which individual may stand for and hold a seat.

B. Disqualification and removal

WUCIOA hands owners a direct removal power. Under RCW 64.90.520(1), unit owners at a meeting with a quorum may remove any board member or elected officer, with or without cause, by the lesser of a majority of the votes held by owners entitled to vote on that seat or two-thirds of the votes cast at the meeting — provided the removal appeared in the meeting notice. A declarant-appointed member cannot be removed by owner vote during declarant control (source layer: RCW 64.90.520; WUCIOA communities).²⁰ Separately, RCW 64.90.520(4) lets the board itself remove a member or elected officer, without an owner vote, only where that person is more than 60 days delinquent in assessments and has not cured within 30 days after notice of intent to remove.²⁰ Under the Condominium Act, RCW 64.34.308(8) lets owners remove a non-declarant director by a two-thirds vote, with or without cause (source layer: RCW 64.34; 1990 to 2018 condominiums);¹⁸ under the Homeowners’ Associations Act, RCW 64.38.025(5) lets owners remove any director by a majority of the voting power present, with or without cause (source layer: RCW 64.38; pre-2018 HOAs).²¹ At the corporate layer, RCW 24.03A.530 lets members remove elected directors with or without cause unless the documents require cause, and lets the board remove a director only in narrow circumstances — a court finding of a breach of duty, say, or a failure to meet a documented qualification (source layer: RCW 24.03A).²² The candidacy side of WUCIOA matters here too: RCW 64.90.518 requires pre-election notice of the number of positions, the candidate qualifications “if any,” and the nomination process, and it requires the board to tell a disqualified nominee the basis for the decision and the appeal procedure.¹³ RCW 64.90.455 requires that director elections and board removals run by secret ballot, and it bars incumbents and candidates from touching ballots until they are counted.¹⁴ One point controls the rest: neither delinquency nor criminal history operates as an automatic statutory bar to candidacy or continued service in Washington. The only statutory delinquency mechanism is the board’s discretionary removal of a sitting member under RCW 64.90.520(4); any candidate disqualification, for delinquency or anything else, must rest on the declaration or bylaws, not on a statute (source layer: documentary, within the applicable act’s framework).

C. Board composition and terms

The number of directors comes from the governing documents within each act’s framework, subject to statutory floors. WUCIOA requires at least three members with a majority of unit owners (RCW 64.90.410(2)(a)), and the Condominium Act sets the same three-member, majority-owner floor (RCW 64.34.308(7)) (source layers: RCW 64.90 for post-2018 communities; RCW 64.34 for 1990 to 2018 condominiums).^{11, 18} Term length, staggering, and any term limit are documentary; Washington imposes no statutory term limit on association directors under any of the four property acts. At the corporate-default layer, RCW 24.03A.515 sets a one-year default term and caps an elected director’s term at five years — again, a maximum term length, not a limit on the number of terms (source layer: RCW 24.03A).¹⁷ Declarant control and the handoff to an owner-elected board are statutory. Under RCW 64.90.415, declarant control ends no later than the earliest of several defined milestones; owners start electing a minority of the board as conveyances cross 25 percent and 50 percent; and a transition meeting follows. After declarant control, appointed members may not make up more than one-third of the board (RCW 64.90.410(7)) (source layer: WUCIOA).^{11, 12} The Condominium Act runs a parallel transition in RCW 64.34.308 (source layer: RCW 64.34; 1990 to 2018 condominiums).¹⁸

D. Onboarding and ongoing qualification duties

Washington requires no director certification and no education. There is no Washington equivalent of Florida’s rule, under Fla. Stat. §718.112(2)(d)5.b., that a newly elected or appointed director must, within 90 days, certify in writing that they have read the association’s declaration, articles, bylaws, and current written policies — or complete an approved education course of at least four hours — on pain of suspension. A Washington director’s only entry requirement is to meet whatever screens the declaration and bylaws impose (source layer: the absence of any certification or education provision in RCW 64.90, RCW 64.34, RCW 64.32, and RCW 64.38).⁶ Conflict-of-interest disclosure lives at the corporate layer: WUCIOA directs that officers and board members answer to the conflict-of-interest rules and immunities under RCW 24.06, and the Nonprofit Corporation Act handles conflicting-interest transactions for RCW 24.03A entities. The fiduciary and standard-of-care baseline is statutory. Under RCW 64.90.410(1)(b), officers and board members must exercise the care and loyalty a corporate officer or director owes, answer to the conflict-of-interest rules, and may claim the immunities available under RCW 24.06 — and these standards hold regardless of how the association is organized (source layer: WUCIOA).¹¹ The Nonprofit Corporation Act states the parallel standards of conduct for directors at RCW 24.03A.495 and addresses director liability at RCW 24.03A.540 (source layer: RCW 24.03A).^{23, 24} The Homeowners’ Associations Act (RCW 64.38.025(1)) and the Condominium Act (RCW 64.34.308) both tie the director standard of care to the nonprofit-corporation standard.^{18, 21}

4. Recent legislative and judicial activity

A. Recent bills

Two bills in the relevant window bear on board composition, director qualifications, or removal.

B. Recent appellate rulings

No qualifying published Washington appellate decision in the past 36 months (June 2023 to June 2026) squarely addresses director eligibility, director removal, board composition, or the director standard of care. The in-window appellate decisions that touch association boards have been unpublished or have turned on other subjects — assessments, covenants, adverse possession. The nearest published statement on the standard governing association board decisions is the Washington Supreme Court’s ruling in Surowiecki v. Hat Island Community Association, 199 Wn.2d 795 (2022),²⁵ which falls outside the 36-month window and concerns board discretion in setting assessments rather than director qualifications. A one-line summary therefore beats a padded entry: no qualifying appellate activity on director qualifications in the period.

C. Active legislative debates

The main ongoing development is the WUCIOA phase-in itself. The January 1, 2026 acceleration under ESSB 5129 and the January 1, 2028 repeal of the three predecessor acts under ESSB 5796 will keep changing which board and director-qualification rules apply to any given community.

5. National positioning and related coverage

Washington is an upper-moderate-touch state for director qualifications. A 2008-uniform-act statute — WUCIOA — supplies an executive board, declarant control, an election-qualification notice, and secret-ballot rules, and it is phasing in over the three predecessor acts. Yet it leaves director certification, term limits, and the substantive eligibility screens to each community’s declaration and bylaws. That puts Washington alongside other 2008-uniform-act states such as Vermont and Connecticut, ahead of light-touch states such as Wyoming, where eligibility is essentially documentary, and well short of heavy-touch Florida, which under Fla. Stat. §718.112(2)(d) makes new directors certify in writing that they have read the governing documents or complete an approved four-hour course, caps service at eight consecutive years absent a two-thirds owner vote, and bars delinquent owners and certain felons from candidacy.⁶ California’s screens are statutory too: Cal. Civ. Code §5105 disqualifies non-members and candidates who have served the maximum allowed terms, though California sets no director-education or certification requirement.⁷ For a multi-state operator, the practical implication is plain — in Washington the controlling act depends on formation date and type, and the WUCIOA phase-in is shifting that over the next several years, so the first compliance step is always to identify the applicable act. Washington imposes no director certification requirement and no statutory term limit.

HOA Weekly’s Washington director-qualifications coverage updates quarterly as the Legislature and the Washington courts act and as the WUCIOA phase-in proceeds. Federal frameworks rarely dictate director qualifications, but Washington associations remain subject to federal law — the Fair Housing Act, the ADA, the FDCPA, the SCRA, and OTARD — in their broader operations.

Footnotes

1. Chapter 64.90 RCW, Washington Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act (WUCIOA) ↩
2. Chapter 64.34 RCW, Condominium Act (effective until January 1, 2028) ↩
3. Chapter 64.32 RCW, Horizontal Property Regimes Act (effective until January 1, 2028) ↩
4. Chapter 64.38 RCW, Homeowners’ Associations Act (effective until January 1, 2028) ↩
5. Engrossed Substitute Senate Bill 5796 (chapter 321, Laws of 2024) ↩
6. Fla. Stat. §718.112(2)(d), Florida Condominium Act (director certification, eight-year service cap, delinquency and felony disqualification) ↩
7. Cal. Civ. Code §5105, Davis-Stirling Common Interest Development Act (candidate disqualifications) ↩
8. RCW 64.90.365, Common interest communities—Exceptions (see also RCW 64.90.360 and 64.90.375) ↩
9. Engrossed Substitute Senate Bill 5129 (chapter 119, Laws of 2025) ↩
10. RCW 64.90.405, Powers and duties ↩
11. RCW 64.90.410, Board members, officers, and committees ↩
12. RCW 64.90.415, Period of declarant control—Transition ↩
13. RCW 64.90.518, Board members—Election—Notice ↩
14. RCW 64.90.455, Unit owner voting (secret ballot) ↩
15. Chapter 24.03A RCW, Washington Nonprofit Corporation Act (effective January 1, 2022) ↩
16. RCW 24.03A.500, Qualification of directors ↩
17. RCW 24.03A.515, Terms of directors, generally ↩
18. RCW 64.34.308, Board of directors and officers (effective until January 1, 2028) ↩
19. RCW 64.38.030, Association bylaws ↩
20. RCW 64.90.520, Officers and board members—Removal ↩
21. RCW 64.38.025, Board of directors—Standard of care—Restrictions—Budget—Removal from board ↩
22. RCW 24.03A.530, Removal of directors ↩
23. RCW 24.03A.495, Standards of conduct for directors ↩
24. RCW 24.03A.540, Liability of directors ↩
25. Surowiecki v. Hat Island Community Ass’n, 199 Wn.2d 795, 511 P.3d 1257 (2022) (Washington Supreme Court; opinions index, courts.wa.gov) ↩