Florida Files More HOA Liens Than Any Other State, and the Reserve Study Explains Why
Homeowner associations filed 284,933 liens against American homeowners last year. That’s up 8.6 percent from 262,446 in 2024. Benutech Data Insights, which pulled the property records for the full calendar year, framed it as one lien every 90 seconds.
Florida filed more of them than any other state, and it wasn’t close. 49,447 liens were recorded here in 2025, 17.4 percent of the national total, up 9.9 percent from 45,012 the year before. Florida, Texas, California, Georgia and Arizona together account for more than half of every HOA lien filed in the country. December was Florida’s outlier month, running 34.4 percent above December 2024.
If you own in an association anywhere in Florida, Jacksonville included, that number is worth having. But the count isn’t the useful part. The useful part is a second study nobody reads, which says where next year’s liens are coming from.
A Lien Is Not a Foreclosure
Worth getting this straight first, because the two words get used as if they mean the same thing.
A lien is a legal claim recorded against a property when an owner falls behind on assessments, fees or fines. It sits there. It doesn’t take the house. In many states it can be enforced through foreclosure later, and the rules for that are state-specific and technical enough that they belong to an attorney, not to me.
What a filing count measures is how many associations stopped asking and started filing. That is a different thing from how many people lost a home, and a different thing again from a delinquency rate. Any one of those three could move without the other two going anywhere.
Where Next Year’s Liens Are Coming From
Association Reserves is an engineering firm that prepares reserve studies. They went back through more than 100,000 of their own studies across all 50 states, covering 1986 through 2025, scored under the Community Associations Institute’s national standards.
Their finding: 74 percent of the associations in that set are less than 70 percent funded.
Seventy percent is the industry line for underfunded. The math behind it is simple. Percent funded is the reserve fund balance divided by what that balance should be, given the wear and tear the buildings have already put on the clock. A community sitting at 30 percent funded has saved thirty cents for every dollar of aging that has already happened. The roof is four years out either way. The money for it isn’t there.
Robert Nordlund, the engineer who wrote it up, put it this way: “74% of associations are teetering on the verge of needing special assessments or loans to perform their major repair or replacement projects in a timely manner.”
One thing to keep straight about that figure. It’s a sample of one firm’s own client studies, not a count of every association in the country. It’s a large sample and it’s the clearest public read I know of on the question, and it still isn’t a census.
Inside their own history, the underfunded share ran between 61 and 73 percent for most of the 39 years they measured. In the most recent two-year window of the study, which covers the high-inflation years and COVID, it reached 82 percent. Highest they’ve ever recorded. That window is a reading on those two years, not on today. They put the rise down to cost inflation and to closer scrutiny of buildings after the Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside in 2021.
Here’s the sequence, and it’s the reason those two studies belong in the same article.
Reserves come up short. The roof still needs replacing. A special assessment goes out. Some owners can’t pay it. And the association can’t absorb the gap the way a mortgage servicer sometimes can, because it has no other revenue and no collateral interest to protect. So it files.
The Estoppel Is Where This Lands on a Sale
If a house in an association is being sold short, the association balance is the line item that kills the file quietly.
The lender is already agreeing to take less than it’s owed. Whatever the association is owed sits on that property too, and it has to be cleared at closing. Assessments, late fees, interest, and once the file has gone to a collections attorney, legal fees on top of all of it.
The document that decides the number is the estoppel. It’s the association’s written statement of what’s owed on the unit as of a specific date. Price can be fine. Buyer can be fine. And the estoppel can come back thousands of dollars higher than anybody budgeted, which sends the file back to the lender for a second approval it probably won’t get on that timeline.
Agents working one of these: might wanna order the estoppel the week the listing goes live instead of the week before closing. Nothing about that document gets easier by waiting.
And if you’re buying into an association, the reserve study and the percent funded figure are fair questions to ask. Most people never think to ask them. The answer tells you a good deal about what the next five years of ownership actually costs.
Ten States Went the Other Way
This isn’t one national wave, and it would be easy to write it as though it were.
Ten states filed fewer liens in 2025 than in 2024. New York was down 18 percent. Missouri down 14.6 percent. And the increases that did happen were lopsided: Louisiana up 178.9 percent, Colorado up 74 percent, Maryland up 29.7 percent.
Benutech’s own read on why the national figure moved is several things at once. A lot of HOA-governed construction went up across the Sun Belt after the pandemic. Non-mortgage housing costs have climbed. Special assessments are landing. And a lot of owners are sitting on mortgage rates they’d never get again, which narrows what they’re willing to do about any of it.
What This Actually Changes for You
Nothing about a national filing count changes the options in front of any one household. It says how common the pressure has gotten, and that’s all it says.
If you’re behind on assessments, the association is a separate creditor from your mortgage servicer, with its own timeline and its own collection process. Falling behind on either one is usually life landing hard on somebody who was doing fine a year ago.
The questions that decide what to do from here, what a lien means for what you’d owe, what happens to it in a sale, where it stands against your mortgage, what any of it does to your taxes, are questions for a Florida attorney and a CPA. I’m neither one. The lien priority question in particular is state law, and the honest answer is that it belongs with somebody licensed to give it.
What I can speak to is how that balance behaves inside a sale, because that part is deal mechanics rather than law.
Jacksonville, Florida is where I work, and distressed property is where most of my time goes. Outside Florida my license doesn’t travel, so those go out through the SFR referral network to somebody whose does.
Ask me whatever you want to ask. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if you’d rather talk than type.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR - Momentum Realty - SFR (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
