Reserve Study Mandates by State: What the Statutes Say

Colorado does not require an association to obtain a reserve study.

That sentence contradicts a list that has circulated in this industry for years. Thirteen states, in most versions. Twelve in others. Colorado appears on nearly every one of them, including the twelve-state list published by Community Associations Institute. Reserve study firms carry it on their state-by-state pages. Some of those pages describe Colorado's requirements using the inspection intervals and building-height thresholds from Florida's structural integrity rules, which apply to condominium and cooperative buildings and have no Colorado counterpart.

The Colorado mandate was vetoed on May 27, 2022.

What Happened to House Bill 22-1387

House Bill 22-1387 would have required Colorado associations to obtain reserve studies. It passed the legislature. It was vetoed by the governor on May 27, 2022, and it did not become law.

A vetoed bill leaves an unusually clean trail — a bill number, a chamber vote, a veto date — and it leaves that trail in the same databases that carry enacted law. A page assembled from bill-tracking results rather than from the statutes will show Colorado as a state that acted on reserve studies in 2022, because Colorado did act. The act failed.

Four years later, that failure is still propagating.

Why the Error Survives

Colorado's statutes give a reader two additional reasons to conclude a mandate exists.

The first is a section heading. C.R.S. §38-33.3-303 carries a heading that names reserve studies. The text beneath it imposes no duty to obtain one. A reader who stops at the heading has read a label, not an obligation.

The second is a real requirement that is easy to mistake for the mandate. Among the responsible governance policies C.R.S. §38-33.3-209.5 requires an association to adopt is one addressing reserve studies — when the association has one prepared, whether there is a funding plan for the work a study recommends, and whether the study rests on a physical and a financial analysis.

That is a duty to have a position on reserve studies. It is not a duty to obtain one, and the statute settles the question in the same subparagraph: "For the purposes of this subparagraph (IX), an internally conducted reserve study shall be sufficient."

A Colorado association may therefore satisfy the section with a policy describing a review its own board members perform. Nothing in it requires a commissioned study, a credentialed preparer, or a funding level.

Since August 12, 2026, Colorado has required one study, and the developer pays for it. Before control of a planned community or condominium passes from the declarant to the association, the declarant must commission and pay for a reserve study that projects costs over a thirty-year period, prepared by an independent reserve study professional or other qualified professional. The association must then make the most recent such study available to owners each year (C.R.S. §38-33.3-209.4(2)(j)). The duty falls on the developer at turnover. Nothing requires the association to commission another.

The Six States That Require a Study

Six of the nine states surveyed here impose an affirmative duty on the association to obtain a reserve study. Each one carries conditions the roster leaves out.

California

California requires a reasonably competent and diligent visual inspection of the accessible areas of the major components at least once every three years, with a review of the study each year (Cal. Civ. Code §5550(a)).

The duty is conditional, and the condition is what the roster drops. It applies where the current replacement value of the major components is equal to or greater than one-half of the association's gross budget, excluding the reserve account for that period. An association below that ratio is outside §5550(a) entirely.

What California does not have is a waiver. Nothing in §5550 permits a membership vote to release the board once the section applies.

Nevada

Nevada requires a study at least once every five years, with an annual review of whether the reserves remain sufficient (NRS 116.31152(1)). It also regulates what happens around the study: the statute sets qualifications for who may conduct it, and a summary must be submitted to the Real Estate Division not later than forty-five days after the executive board adopts the results (NRS 116.31152(4)).

That clock runs from board adoption, not from the day the study is finished, and what goes to the Division is a summary rather than the study.

Whether the mandate reaches a given association is a prior question. Chapter 116 carries its own applicability provisions, and an association's status under them settles whether NRS 116.31152 applies at all. That determination appears on no chart.

Washington

Washington requires an annual update of the reserve study and a site inspection at least every three years (RCW 64.90.545).

The duty has four exemptions, and the governing documents can remove any of them by requiring a study (RCW 64.90.545(2)). It does not apply to communities containing units that the declaration restricts to nonresidential use, to communities with only nominal reserve costs, or when the study or update would cost more than 10 percent of the association's annual budget. Since June 11, 2026, it also does not apply to communities "consisting only of middle housing" that "do not or will not in the future require the construction, operation, and maintenance on-site of any reserve component to manage wastewater."

Owners hold a lever. When more than three years have passed since the last study prepared by a reserve study professional, owners of units to which at least twenty percent of the votes are allocated may demand in a record that the cost of a study go into the next annual budget. The board must include it (RCW 64.90.555(1)).

The remedy is narrower than the duty. A court hearing an owner's enforcement action may order specific performance and award reasonable fees and costs to the prevailing party (RCW 64.90.555(2)). Monetary damages are not available: RCW 64.90.560 shields the association, its officers and board members, and any person who advised or assisted them, from damages for failing to establish or replenish a reserve account, to have a current study prepared, or to make the reserve disclosures. The fee award is the only money that moves.

Non-compliance also does not excuse a unit owner from paying assessments, and it does not invalidate a budget the owners have already ratified (RCW 64.90.555(3)).

Oregon

Oregon requires the board to determine the reserve account requirements annually, by conducting a reserve study or by reviewing and updating an existing one (ORS 94.595(3)(a); ORS 100.175 for condominiums). The annual obligation is a determination, not necessarily a new study.

It also contains a carve-out the roster does not mention. A Class II planned community created on or after January 1, 2002 is governed by the Planned Community Act with ORS 94.595 and 94.604 expressly excepted (ORS 94.570(2)). Section 94.595 is the reserve account, reserve study, and maintenance plan section — so those communities carry no statutory reserve obligation at all, in a state every version of the roster lists as mandatory.

Oregon also writes the study-versus-funding distinction into the statute itself. Following the turnover meeting, the board may elect not to fund the reserve account for the following year, on an annual basis, with the approval of all owners (ORS 94.595(8)(b)).

Virginia

Virginia requires a study at least every five years with an annual review, and it does so twice — once for property owners' associations at Va. Code §55.1-1826(B), and once for condominiums at §55.1-1965(B).

The two are not the same requirement. The association provision opens flatly — "The board of directors shall" — and then lists the duties. The condominium provision opens with "Except to the extent otherwise provided in the condominium instruments," which is an opt-out a declaration can be drafted around. A Virginia condominium whose instruments provide otherwise sits outside the mandate. A Virginia property owners' association has no equivalent escape.

Virginia also separates the duty to study from the duty to fund, in the same section that creates the duty. Section 55.1-1826(D) gives the board discretion to meet repair and replacement requirements through replacement reserves, through additional assessments, or through borrowed funds. The study must be done. What it concludes does not obligate the association to hold cash against it.

Florida

Florida's structural integrity reserve study is the newest of the six. Fla. Stat. §718.112(2)(g) requires a residential condominium association to complete a SIRS at least every ten years for each building on the property that is three habitable stories or higher, as determined by the Florida Building Code.

Florida is also the only state here that specifies what the study must cover: roof; structure, including load-bearing walls and other primary structural members; fireproofing and fire protection systems; plumbing; electrical systems; waterproofing and exterior painting; windows and exterior doors; and any other item whose deferred maintenance or replacement cost exceeds $25,000 — inflation-adjusted annually by the division — where failing to maintain it would affect one of the named items.

That is a specification, not a category. Florida's homeowners' associations are governed by a different chapter entirely, and the roster does not carry the distinction.

Florida Has Three Obligations, Not One

Chapter 720 — the homeowners' association chapter — carries no reserve study mandate at all. Section 720.303(6) requires reserves to appear in the proposed budget, and once reserve accounts are established the membership may vote to provide for no reserves, or less reserves than the section requires, by majority vote at a meeting at which a quorum is present.

Chapter 718 moved the opposite way. For a budget adopted on or after December 31, 2024, the members of a unit-owner-controlled association that must obtain a SIRS may no longer vote to provide no reserves, or less reserves, for the items paragraph (g) names (Fla. Stat. §718.112(2)(f)). One state, two chapters, and reserves that a majority can waive in one are beyond a unanimous vote in the other.

So a Chapter 720 board reading a compliance page written for Chapter 718 concludes it owes a structural integrity study it does not owe, and never reads the section that actually governs its reserves.

There is a second confusion. Section 553.899, the milestone inspection statute, is a separate requirement with separate triggers. A milestone inspection is not a SIRS, and completing one does not satisfy the other. Both can apply to the same building on different intervals.

Three obligations, three chapters, one line on a state-by-state chart.

The Tell: Statutes That Anticipate Zero

Colorado, Texas, and Pennsylvania impose no obligation on an association to obtain a reserve study.

Proving that is harder than proving the opposite, and the confident way to do it is not to search for a mandate and fail to find one. It is to find the place where the legislature wrote down what happens when there is nothing there.

Each of the three has one.

Texas requires a resale certificate to state the amount of reserves, if any (Tex. Prop. Code §82.157(a)(5)).

Colorado uses the same construction about the study. Among the records an association must make available for inspection is "the association's most recent reserve study, if any" (C.R.S. §38-33.3-317(1)(k)).

Pennsylvania writes it out twice. Its public offering statement provisions require a statement of the reserve amount "or a statement that there is no amount," and then require a description of any reserve provisions "or, if no provision is made for reserves, a statement to that effect" (68 Pa.C.S. §3402(a)(6)(i)-(ii), with the parallel provisions for planned communities at §5402(a)(7)(i)-(ii)).

A legislature that required every association to hold reserves would not draft a box for "none" — and it would not draft one twice.

Pennsylvania's provisions carry a second signal. Both sit in the public offering statement, the document a declarant delivers when selling units in a new community. That is a developer's disclosure duty at the front end, not a continuing obligation of the association afterward, and the chapter provides no ongoing counterpart.

What the Roster Costs

The error runs in two directions, and they do not cost the same.

A board that believes it is under a mandate when it is not pays for a study it was free to skip, and treats the expense as non-discretionary. Colorado boards do this. So does an Oregon Class II community working from a chart that lists Oregon as mandatory. That is real money, and it is the smaller loss.

The larger one is the board that reads the chart and stops there. The Florida Chapter 720 case above is one: money budgeted against the wrong chapter, and §720.303(6) — which lets the membership vote reserves away entirely — never reached. A Virginia condominium relying on a mandate its own instruments already contracted around is another. In both, the chart produced confidence and the chapter went unread.

And a duty to study is mostly not a duty to fund. Virginia lets the board meet the need with borrowed money. Florida is the exception, and became one only recently: since December 31, 2024, the reserves a SIRS calls for can no longer be voted away. Even there the money may come from a line of credit or a loan.

How to Check a State

Five questions separate a mandate from a label. They are the questions this survey ran on each of the nine.

Read the body, not the heading. Colorado's §38-33.3-303 is headed with reserve studies and creates no obligation to get one.

Confirm the bill became law. A bill that passed a legislature and was vetoed leaves the same footprint in bill-tracking databases as one that was signed. Check the disposition, not the existence.

Find the chapter's scope. Florida, Virginia, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Texas each govern condominiums and planned communities under separate chapters, and a requirement in one gets quoted as though it applied to both. California and Washington run unified acts, so the question there is which sections reach which community type.

Find the exemption class. Class II in Oregon. Building height in Florida. A ratio of component value to gross budget in California. Chapter applicability in Nevada. Every mandate in this survey has a boundary, and the boundary is where a great many associations actually sit.

Separate the duty to study from the duty to fund. They are different obligations, they appear in different subsections, and a state can require the first while expressly permitting the second to be met with borrowed money.

The Nine States

This survey covers nine states. The roster covers twelve or thirteen. The other states are absent here rather than cleared — they have not been read against primary sources, and listing a state either way without reading it is the practice this piece is about.

What a Board Should Do With This

Find the chapter that governs the association. Read the section, not the chart. Check whether the association sits inside the exemption class. Then decide what to fund, which is the separate question none of this answers.

Boards in Washington, Oregon, and California can go a level deeper on how the requirement operates in practice — update cycles, percent-funded mechanics, and the mistakes that recur — in Reserve Study Requirements: Washington, Oregon, and California Compared.

A reserve study is worth commissioning in Colorado. The reason is not that Colorado requires an association to commission one.