A whole Wisconsin biennium, and not one bill to amend the Condominium Act
A whole Wisconsin biennium, and not one bill to amend the Condominium Act
2026-09-21 · Wisconsin · Legislation · Did not pass
The 2025-26 Wisconsin Legislature met for fourteen months and enacted 247 acts. Not one bill introduced in that biennium proposed to amend Wis. Stat. ch. 703, the Condominium Ownership Act.
That is not an inference from a keyword search. The Legislature's own 2025 Subject Index to Legislation has no condominium heading. The letter-C section of the index does not contain the word “condominium” anywhere — not as a heading, and not as a cross-reference to one. The session's condominium-adjacent bills are indexed under other subjects entirely.1
The three bills that mention condominiums
A full sweep of the session turns up exactly three, and none of them is a governance bill.
AB 455 / SB 481, the WHEDA condominium-conversion grant programme, mentions condominiums only by borrowing the definition: “‘Condominium’ has the meaning given in s. 703.02 (4).” It passed the Assembly on October 7, 2025 and died in a Senate committee that had already held its hearing.
AB 661 / SB 643, the fire-sprinkler audit, would have had the Department of Safety and Professional Services count how many condominium and townhouse buildings of eight or more units have sprinklers. Neither house held a hearing.
AB 42, the backyard-fowl bill, contains a single condominium sentence, which is examined below.
The only bill that would have amended § 710.18, the lone statute directed at Wisconsin residential planned communities, was AB 365 — the accessory-dwelling-unit bill that would have voided covenants retroactively. It died without a hearing, a committee vote or a floor vote.
The rewrite that was registered and never written
The Wisconsin chapter of the Community Associations Institute registered with the Wisconsin Ethics Commission in February 2025 on a subject listed without any bill number: “Matters relating to Chapter 703 pertaining to condominiums,” registered for the development and drafting of a proposal.2
No such bill was ever introduced. The condominium-law rewrite the state's own community-association trade body set out to draft never reached a bill number. Its reported lobbying expenditures through mid-2026 were $54,116.20, spent on the other items on its list.
What the chapter still does not contain
The consequence of a biennium of silence is that a list of absences from 2024 reads identically in 2026. Chapter 703's table of contents runs § 703.01 to § 703.38 and contains no structural-inspection, milestone-inspection, façade-inspection or structural-integrity-reserve-study section.
Wisconsin's reserve statute, § 703.163, remains opt-out with no funding level and with an express immunity at subsection (10) for the decision not to fund. There is no Wisconsin planned community act — ch. 703 applies only to condominiums, and non-condominium associations are governed by their recorded declarations and by ch. 181, the Nonstock Corporations chapter. Nothing in ch. 703, ch. 710 or ch. 181 licenses or registers a community association manager; § 703.10(2)(d) merely lets the bylaws state “whether or not the board may engage the services of a manager or managing agent.” There is no Wisconsin statutory right to install an electric-vehicle charger in a condominium or planned community.
And there is no regulator. Section 710.18(3) requires filings with the Department of Financial Institutions, but the consequence of not filing is self-executing — the association simply loses the power to charge late fees and transfer fees, and prohibited charges are “void and unenforceable” — and the Department is given no investigative or adjudicative role anywhere in the section.
The bill that turned out to protect boards
AB 42, the fowl bill, is the counter-intuitive item on the list, because it was widely tracked as a threat to association authority and does the opposite. Its whole operative text, new Wis. Stat. § 66.0443:
“(2) No local governmental unit may prohibit the keeping of 4 or fewer fowl by any of the following on a property zoned for residential use: (a) The owner of the property. A local governmental unit may prohibit any keeping of fowl that is inconsistent with the condominium's declarations, bylaws, and rules on a property that is a condominium. (b) A lessor of the property if the property is owner-occupied.”3
The carve-out is a grant of power to the municipality to enforce a condominium's own ban. The bill contains no reference to covenants, homeowners associations, planned communities or deeds — a full-text search returns zero hits for each. Its companion, AB 41 on vegetable gardens, creates § 66.04075 and provides that “[a] political subdivision may not require a permit for or prohibit the cultivation of a vegetable garden on property not owned by the political subdivision,” with “political subdivision” defined as a city, village, town or county. It never reaches private covenants either.
Both died on March 23, 2026. A Wisconsin association's fowl ban and garden ban were never at risk from them. Our Wisconsin pet restrictions and water and conservation pages cover where those rules actually live.
How the session ended
The last general-business floorperiod adjourned March 19, 2026. Everything still alive was disposed of on March 23, 2026 with a standard line in each journal: a bill that never passed a house reads “Failed to pass pursuant to Senate Joint Resolution 1,” and one that passed a single house reads “Failed to concur in pursuant to Senate Joint Resolution 1.”
Four bills that did pass both houses were vetoed and all four override attempts failed on May 13, 2026: the emotional-support-animal bill that named condominium associations (vetoed December 5, 2025), the foreign-adversary land bill (March 20, 2026), the residential lease and Wisconsin Consumer Act bill (March 27, 2026), and the manufactured-home titling bill (March 27, 2026).
What to watch next
The Joint Legislative Council establishes interim study committees each summer, and those committees are the usual route by which a technical area of Wisconsin law gets a comprehensive rewrite. The seven committees established for 2026 are district attorney funding formula, cryptocurrency, floodplain restoration, artificial intelligence in health care, state veterans' benefits, cemeteries, and state-tribal relations. None touches housing, condominiums, property law, manufactured housing, insurance or local land use.
So chapter 703 gets no interim review before the 2027-28 Legislature convenes in January 2027, and any condominium reform then would have to start as an individual legislator's bill without a study committee's drafting support. Wisconsin does not pre-file; cosponsorship memos for the new biennium circulate from December 2026 after the November 3 election.
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