The 115 percent cap that Florida condo owners keep citing does not cover the three things raising their bills

The rule everybody cites does not say what they think it says.

Ask a condominium owner in Collier or Lee County what stops a board from raising assessments without limit, and a good number will name the same protection: the board cannot increase assessments more than 15 percent without giving owners a vote. That rule is real. It sits in section 718.112(2)(e) of the Florida Statutes, and it works roughly the way people describe.

Read one paragraph further and the protection narrows sharply.

What does the 115 percent rule actually require?

If a board proposes an annual budget requiring assessments above 115 percent of the previous fiscal year, it must at the same time propose a substitute budget stripped of discretionary spending that the budget is not required to contain. Owners consider both. A substitute budget passes if a majority of all voting interests approve it, unless the bylaws set a higher bar. If no substitute passes, the board's original budget can be adopted.

That is the mechanism. Now the exclusions.

The statute states that any determination of whether assessments exceed 115 percent of the prior year "shall exclude any authorized provision for required reserves for repair or replacement of the condominium property," along with anticipated expenses the board does not expect on a regular or annual basis for the items listed in paragraph (g), and insurance premiums.

Reserves. Structural items. Insurance.

Those are not incidental categories. In Southwest Florida they are the three lines that have moved most in the past three years, and the statute removes all three from the calculation that triggers the owner vote. A board can raise the total assessment far beyond 15 percent without ever crossing the threshold, provided the increase sits in the excluded categories. Nothing about that is a loophole or a failure of enforcement. It is what the section says.

Which buildings must have a structural integrity reserve study?

A residential condominium association must complete a structural integrity reserve study at least every 10 years after the condominium's creation, for each building on the property that is three habitable stories or higher as determined by the Florida Building Code.

Three stories is a low bar on this coast. It captures the Gulf-front towers, and it also captures a great deal of the mid-rise stock built inland through the 1980s and 1990s that nobody thinks of as a high-rise. If a building has three habitable floors, the requirement applies regardless of how modest the building is.

The study rests on a visual inspection of the property. It must be performed or verified by an engineer licensed under chapter 471, an architect licensed under chapter 481, or a person certified as a reserve specialist or professional reserve analyst by the Community Associations Institute or the Association of Professional Reserve Analysts.

The statute also anticipates the obvious conflict. A design professional or licensed contractor bidding to perform the study must disclose in writing any intent to bid on the maintenance, repair or replacement work the study might recommend. A contractor bidding on recommended work may not hold a direct or indirect interest in the firm that produced the study, or be a relative of somebody who does, unless the relationship is disclosed in writing. The statute defines relative as within the third degree of consanguinity by blood or marriage. Where the disclosure is not made, the services contract is voidable and terminates on written notice from the association.

That is a specific answer to a specific abuse: the firm that tells you what needs fixing should not quietly be the firm that fixes it.

What does the study have to cover?

Eight categories, at minimum, as they relate to the structural integrity and safety of the building:

• The roof
• The structure, including load-bearing walls and other primary structural members and primary structural systems as defined in section 627.706
• Fireproofing and fire protection systems
• Plumbing
• Electrical systems
• Waterproofing and exterior painting
• Windows and exterior doors
• Any other item with a deferred maintenance expense or replacement cost above $25,000, or the inflation-adjusted figure set by the division, where failing to maintain it would negatively affect the categories above

For each inspected item the study must state the estimated remaining useful life and the estimated replacement cost or deferred maintenance expense, then provide a funding plan with a recommended annual reserve amount sufficient to reach that cost by the end of the item's useful life.

There is a floor on how weak that plan may be. The study must include a recommendation based on a baseline funding plan, defined as one where reserve funding in each budget year keeps the reserve cash balance above zero. A study may propose other schedules, provided each is sufficient to meet the association's maintenance obligation.

Some items fall out. Where an estimate of useful life and replacement cost cannot be determined, or where remaining useful life runs beyond 25 years, the study may recommend that no replacement reserves be held, though it may still recommend a deferred maintenance amount. Where a study recommends reserves for something the paragraph does not require, that amount has to be identified separately.

Why can owners no longer vote the reserves away?

For decades, Florida condominium owners could vote to waive reserves or fund them below the statutory calculation. Many did, year after year, and the practice is a large part of why so many buildings entered this decade with reserve balances that bore no relationship to the age of the roof.

The general waiver still exists. Members of a unit-owner-controlled association may vote by a majority of total voting interests to provide no reserves or reduced reserves.

Then comes the carve-out that matters here. For a budget adopted on or after December 31, 2024, the members of a unit-owner-controlled association that must obtain a structural integrity reserve study may not vote to provide no reserves, or fewer reserves than required, for the paragraph (g) items. The exception is narrow: an association operating a multicondominium may still do so if the division has approved an alternative funding method.

So the roof, the structure, the plumbing, the electrical, the waterproofing and the windows are now funded on the study's findings, and the owners of a covered building cannot vote that obligation down. For associations required to have a study, the reserve amount for those items must be based on the findings and recommendations of the most recent one.

There is one other route out, and it is not a comfortable one. If an association votes to terminate the condominium under section 718.117, the members may then vote to waive the reserves the study recommended.

How is an association allowed to pay for it?

Four ways, and the choice has consequences for owners.

Reserves for the paragraph (g) items may be funded by regular assessments, special assessments, lines of credit, or loans. Using a special assessment, a line of credit or a loan requires approval by a majority of total voting interests.

The statute then grants covered associations a specific borrowing power. A unit-owner-controlled association that must have a structural integrity reserve study may secure a line of credit or a loan to fund capital expenses required by a milestone inspection under section 553.899 or by the study itself. That facility must be large enough to cover the cumulative amount of any previously waived or unfunded portion of the required reserve funding, plus what the current study requires. Once in place, the funding must be immediately available to the board for required repair, maintenance or replacement work without further approval from the members.

Read that provision alongside the waiver history and its purpose is plain. Buildings that skipped reserves for twenty years cannot produce two decades of missing money out of a single year's assessment. The statute lets them borrow the gap, and it deliberately removes the need to return to the membership every time the money is drawn.

For an owner, the practical difference between the routes is timing rather than amount. A special assessment arrives as a demand. A loan arrives as a smaller increase in the monthly figure, spread over years, with interest, and it stays attached to the unit through a sale in the sense that the buyer inherits the obligation the association carries.

When do owners actually get to see the number?

Fourteen days. That is the whole window, and most owners spend it on a plane or somewhere north.

Any meeting at which a proposed annual budget will be considered must be open to all unit owners, and may be held by video conference. At least 14 days beforehand, the board must hand deliver the notice and a copy of the proposed budget to each owner, mail it to the address the owner last gave the association, or transmit it electronically to an address the owner supplied for that purpose. Whoever gives that notice has to execute an affidavit evidencing compliance, and the affidavit goes into the association's official records.

The same 14 days applies where a substitute budget will be proposed.

The budget itself has to be detailed. It must show amounts by account and expense classification, including at a minimum the applicable expenses listed in section 718.504(21). Where the association maintains limited common elements whose cost is shared only by the owners entitled to use them, the budget or an attached schedule must show that amount separately. A multicondominium association adopts a separate budget of common expenses for each condominium it operates, plus one for the association itself.

The board must adopt the budget at least 14 days before the fiscal year starts. Miss that deadline twice and the statute treats it as a minor violation, with the prior year's budget continuing until a new one is adopted.

One asymmetry is worth noting, because it cuts against the intuition that developers get the easier deal. Where the developer controls the board, assessments simply may not exceed 115 percent of the prior year unless a majority of all voting interests approve. There is no substitute-budget mechanism to work around, and no exclusion list doing quiet work in the background. The hard cap applies to developer-controlled boards. The softer, exclusion-riddled version applies to the owner-controlled ones.

What this means in Collier and Lee

The population here is unusually exposed to this section, for two reasons that have nothing to do with law.

The first is building stock. Southwest Florida's coastal residential inventory is heavily concentrated in exactly the buildings the statute captures: three habitable stories or higher, on salt water, with waterproofing, exterior painting and window systems that age faster than the same assemblies would inland. Six of the eight mandatory study categories describe components that a marine environment attacks directly.

The second is who owns them. Collier County has the highest per capita income in Florida and a median age in Naples above 66. A large share of these units are held by retired owners on fixed incomes, and a large share are second homes owned by people who vote in association elections by proxy from another state. Neither group is well positioned to absorb a reserve schedule arriving all at once, and the second group is structurally less likely to be paying attention when the budget is adopted.

Here the honesty has to be deliberate: we cannot tell you what this has done to assessments in Naples or Marco Island in aggregate, because nobody publishes that. Florida does not maintain a public dataset of condominium assessment levels by county, association budgets are not filed in any searchable public repository, and the reserve studies themselves are association records rather than public documents. Individual figures surface through litigation, through listing disclosures, and through owners who choose to talk. That is anecdote, and we are not going to dress a set of anecdotes as a trend.

What can be said precisely is what the statute requires, when it started, and which protection does not apply. An owner who wants their own number has one reliable path, and it is not a news article. It is the association's most recent structural integrity reserve study and the current adopted budget, both of which are official records the association is obliged to maintain.

The part worth arguing about

The waiver ban is sound policy badly timed for the people paying for it, and both halves of that sentence are true at once.

Underfunded reserves in aging coastal towers are a genuine safety problem, and the old regime let owners vote to ignore it indefinitely, with each year's membership handing the bill to the next. Closing that is defensible. The specific closure Florida chose, however, lands the entire accumulated shortfall on whoever happens to own the unit when the study is completed, and in this region that is disproportionately a retired owner who did not sit on the boards that took the waivers.

The borrowing provision softens the timing without changing the total. And the 115 percent exclusions mean the owners absorbing it were never entitled to the vote they believe protects them, because the legislature removed reserves, structural items and insurance from that calculation.

None of which is an argument that the reserves should not be funded. The roof is still the roof.