Overview

Assessments fund everything your HOA does, from insurance premiums and reserve contributions to landscaping, management contracts, and common area repairs. They come in two forms. Regular assessments are the recurring dues you pay monthly or annually, and special assessments are one-time charges HOA boards impose for costs that fall outside the ordinary budgeted or reserved spending.

The Davis-Stirling Act lets your HOA board raise assessments within narrow statutory limits without homeowner approval. Regular assessments may rise modestly each year, and HOA boards may impose special assessments only up to a set share of the annual budget. Anything beyond those limits requires a member vote by secret ballot.

This Fact Sheet explains how these rules work, when your HOA board can raise assessments without a vote, and how homeowners can recognize unlawful increases.

Key Points

The Davis-Stirling Act, not HOA board discretion, sets the outer limits on assessment increases. Those limits come in two layers. The first layer caps how much HOA boards can raise regular and special assessments without a member vote. The second layer imposes procedural requirements that HOA boards have to satisfy before any increase becomes collectible, along with narrow emergency exceptions that come with their own paperwork. Knowing both layers tells you whether the increase in your mailbox is enforceable.

• Regular assessments fund predictable operating costs. Regular assessments cover your HOA’s recurring obligations, including landscaping, utilities, insurance premiums, management contracts, janitorial services, and annual reserve contributions. Under Civil Code 5605, HOA boards may increase regular assessments by up to 20% above the prior fiscal year’s regular assessment without a homeowner vote. For example, if your HOA’s dues last year were $400 per month, your HOA board could raise them to $480 without member approval. Any increase beyond that 20% figure requires approval from a majority of a quorum of homeowners voting by secret ballot. [To read about the legislative effort to lower that 20% ceiling, take a look at my Fact Sheet, “Will California HOA Fee Increases Be Capped at 8%? Inside SB 1007.”]
  • A lower cap applies to deed-restricted affordable housing units in newer HOAs. Civil Code 5605 sets a separate ceiling for one narrow group of homeowners. If your HOA recorded its original CC&Rs on or after January 1, 2025, and you own a deed-restricted affordable housing unit, your HOA board can’t raise your regular assessment by more than 5% plus the regional change in the cost of living, capped at 10%. Several carve-outs pull many HOAs out of this rule entirely, including any HOA consisting of 20 units or fewer and developments where the share of deed-restricted affordable units exceeds what the local zoning ordinance required. Although no California HOA falls under this provision today, that will change as new developments record their CC&Rs.
• Special assessments cover extraordinary or unbudgeted expenses. These are one-time charges that HOA boards impose when unexpected costs arise, such as major roof failures, emergency structural repairs, or costs a court or statute mandates. Under Civil Code 5605, HOA boards may impose special assessments that in the aggregate reach 5% of the HOA’s budgeted gross expenses for that fiscal year without a vote of the members. Any higher amount requires approval from a majority of a quorum of homeowners voting by secret ballot. For example, if your HOA budgeted $600,000 in gross expenses for the current fiscal year, your HOA board can levy up to $30,000 total in special assessments across all members without a membership vote. That doesn’t mean $30,000 per household. It means a total of $30,000 across all the members. [For a fuller treatment of how special assessments work and how to challenge one, read my Fact Sheet, “California HOA Special Assessments: What They Are, When They’re Legal, and How Homeowners Can Challenge Them.”]
• Boards cannot disguise assessments to avoid the law. HOA boards can’t call an assessment a “fee,” “surcharge,” or “emergency contribution” to skirt Civil Code 5605. Any mandatory payment tied to ownership is still an assessment and must follow the statute. The label the HOA board picks has no legal effect. The test looks at whether the charge falls on owners because they own, rather than because they used a service or violated a rule. A $2,000 “capital contribution” charged to every unit is a special assessment, and it counts against the 5% figure no matter what the HOA board called it in the minutes.
• Emergency exceptions exist but they’re narrow. Under Civil Code 5610, HOA boards may exceed the 20% and 5% limits without a member vote only under the three conditions described below. Routine shortfalls, bad management, systemic failures, and poor budgeting don’t qualify as emergencies. If you’d like to do a deeper dive into the emergency exception, watch an episode of my podcast, HOA HELL, entitled “Emergency or Excuse? How HOAs Use “Safety” to Justify Illegal Emergency Assessments.” The three “emergency” exceptions are:
  • An extraordinary expense that a court orders your HOA to pay.
  • An extraordinary expense necessary to operate, repair, or maintain the common interest development, or any part of it that your HOA is responsible for, after a threat to personal health or safety or another hazardous condition or circumstance on the property comes to light. SB 900 broadened this category on January 1, 2025, adding the word “operate” to repair and maintenance and adding hazardous conditions and circumstances alongside threats to personal safety.
  • An extraordinary expense necessary to repair or maintain the common interest development, or any part of it your HOA is responsible for, that your HOA board couldn’t have reasonably foreseen when it prepared and distributed the annual budget report.
• The third emergency category comes with a paperwork requirement. Civil Code 5610 doesn’t let your HOA simply declare an expense unforeseeable and send the bill. Before imposing or collecting an assessment under that third category, the HOA has to pass a resolution containing written findings on two separate points. It has to state why the extraordinary expense was necessary, and why the HOA didn’t foresee it, or couldn’t reasonably have foreseen it, during the budgeting process. The HOA then has to distribute that resolution to the members along with the notice of assessment. [For why operational expenses, such as covering costs of rising insurance premiums, don’t fit into that third category, read my Fact Sheet, “Can My California HOA Charge a Special Assessment for Rising Insurance Costs?”]
• Your HOA can’t raise regular assessments at all unless it delivered the annual budget report. Civil Code 5605 conditions every annual increase in regular assessments on the HOA board having complied with most of the annual budget report requirements found in Civil Code 5300 for that fiscal year (unless your HOA obtains member approval instead). An HOA board that missed the Civil Code 5300 deadline, or that distributed a report missing required contents, can’t raise regular dues by 2% without a member vote, let alone by 20%. Civil Code 5300 requires HOAs to distribute that report 30 to 90 days before the end of the fiscal year, which gives you a date you can check against your own records. This requirement applies to regular assessments only, and thus has no effect on special assessments.
• Notice and disclosure are mandatory. Civil Code 5615 requires individual notice before an increased assessment comes due. Your HOA must deliver individual notice of any increase in regular or special assessments not less than 30 and not more than 60 days before the increased assessment becomes due. Civil Code 5615 sets the timing and the delivery method. An assessment adopted without a Civil Code 5615-compliant notice may not be collected on the noticed due date.
• Large increases require homeowner approval. Any increase beyond the 20% or 5% figures requires approval from a majority of a quorum of members casting ballots under the election rules found in Civil Code 5100 through 5145, which means proper notice, a secret ballot, and an independent inspector of elections. Those rules also close one shortcut. Civil Code 5105 lets HOAs adopt a rule permitting electronic secret ballots for most elections, but it carves out elections regarding regular and special assessments. So your HOA can’t run an assessment vote by an online voting portal no matter what its election rules say.
• If your HOA raised your assessments without a vote and you believe it skipped a step, call the HOA attorneys at MBK Chapman. The HOA attorneys at MBK Chapman are highly adept at forcing HOAs to comply with the Davis-Stirling Act when it comes to raising assessments on members. If your HOA blew past the 20% or 5% figures, mislabeled an ordinary expense as an emergency, or never produced the written findings Civil Code 5610 requires, call MBK Chapman today.

Your HOA can raise regular assessments up to 20% and levy special assessments up to 5% without asking you. Beyond that, it needs a vote of the membership. But the caps are only half of it. Your HOA cannot raise regular assessments at all unless it delivered the annual budget report on time, it cannot collect any increase without noticing you 30 to 60 days ahead, and it cannot collect an emergency assessment for an unforeseen expense until it passes written findings and sends them to you. If your HOA skipped any of that, it cannot collect the increase.

FAQs

About Michael Kushner

Michael Kushner is a California attorney with over 30 years of experience representing homeowners in disputes with their HOAs. He is widely regarded as California’s leading homeowner-side HOA attorney, and has built one of the state’s most prominent law practices dedicated to holding HOAs accountable under the Davis-Stirling Act and California law.

In addition to his law firm’s work, Michael is a recognized lecturer, author, and the host of the hit HOA HELL podcast, where he provides homeowners living in HOA-governed communities with clear, practical strategies for dealing with bad HOAs. He’s also the author of the best-selling book, HOA HELL | California Homeowners’ Definitive Guide to Beating Bad HOAs, which has become a go-to resource for both homeowners seeking real-world solutions to their HOA disputes, as well as those good HOA board members who are interested in doing a good job.

About MBK Chapman Fact Sheets

Homeowners searching for answers online will often come across articles that appear authoritative, but are actually written as search-engine marketing content rather than by an experienced HOA lawyer. These pieces tend to prioritize keyword density over clarity, accuracy, or legal context, which often leaves homeowners more confused than informed.

At MBK Chapman, our Fact Sheets are part of our HOA Law Library and are written by Michael Kushner, an HOA lawyer with decades of hands-on experience representing California homeowners. In fact, Michael Kushner is the HOA lawyer who pioneered the systems and strategies used by some of California’s most successful homeowner-side HOA law firms.

Each Fact Sheet is deliberately concise, statute-based, and designed as a quick-reference guide to help homeowners understand key HOA laws and enforcement rules at a glance.

AND DON’T FORGET TO TUNE INTO MY PODCAST, HOA HELL

YOU CAN ALSO ORDER MY GROUNDBREAKING BOOK

HOA HELL | California Homeowners’ Definitive Guide to Beating Bad HOAs

Amazon  |  Barnes & Noble