In Florida, Your HOA Payment Goes to Interest and Attorney Fees Before It Touches Your Dues

You can send your association money and watch the balance climb anyway. That isn’t a billing error and it isn’t the association being difficult. It’s written into the statute, and most owners find out about it after they’re already in it.

Where Your Money Actually Goes

Florida Statute 720.3085(3) covers homeowner associations. Section 718.116(3) covers condominiums. Same structure in both.

A payment the association receives gets applied first to any interest that has accrued, then to the administrative late fee, then to any costs and reasonable attorney fees incurred in collection, and then to the delinquent assessment itself.

Both sections say that order holds notwithstanding any restrictive endorsement or instruction written on the check. So “July assessment only” in the memo line does nothing. The statute already decided where the money lands.

Stack the other two numbers on top of that. Where the declaration or bylaws don’t set a rate, the statute allows 18 percent a year in simple interest. 720.3085(3) does say compound interest may not accrue, so that’s a real limit. Then an administrative late fee up to the greater of $25 or 5 percent of each late installment.

So somebody who falls behind, then starts paying again, can be current on cash flow every month and still losing ground on the balance. And once a collections attorney is in the file, those fees join the same stack and get paid before the assessment does.

That’s the part nobody explains until the letters start.

These Balances Start Smaller Than People Think

National Mortgage News reported in April on a 2025 count of HOA liens and put the amounts owed on them between $200 and $1,000.

Not a missed mortgage payment. A few hundred dollars in dues that got behind and then went to work on itself.

Cotality, the data firm that used to be CoreLogic, published its own analysis of HOA lien and foreclosure records on August 6. One finding in it is worth sitting with. The share of HOA liens that go on to a foreclosure filing held steady at roughly one in nine from 2022 through 2025. It didn’t spike. Associations aren’t pulling the trigger on a higher percentage of liens than they used to. There are just a lot more liens.

By Cotality’s count, Florida recorded 9,531 HOA foreclosure filings in 2025. Florida, Texas, Nevada, California and Arizona together accounted for 85.2 percent of every HOA foreclosure filing in the country that year.

A filing isn’t a lost house. It’s the start of a case. It’s also well past the warning-letter stage, and by the time one is filed the fee stack has been running a while.

Florida Builds Two 45-Day Notices Into the Process

720.3085(4)(a) says an association may not record a claim of lien until it has sent the owner a written notice of intent giving them 45 days to pay. The form of that notice is printed in the statute itself.

720.3085(5) says a suit to foreclose that lien may not be brought until 45 days after a second notice, this one a notice of intent to foreclose. And the second notice can’t go out until the first 45 days have run.

Two notices, both carrying language the statute spells out, before an HOA foreclosure suit can even be filed.

Condominiums run differently. 718.116(6)(b) requires 45 days written notice before a foreclosure judgment may be entered. And under 718.116(5)(b), a condo claim of lien expires one year after it’s recorded unless an action to enforce it has been started.

I’m not an attorney and none of that is advice about anybody’s particular file. What it does say is that the mail matters. Those notices carry statutory language and real dates on them, and they’re the record of where a file actually stands rather than where somebody remembers it standing.

The Estoppel Binds Them, and It Has a Clock

Florida Statute 720.30851 covers HOAs and 718.116(8) covers condos, and they read close to parallel.

The association has ten business days to issue an estoppel certificate after a written or electronic request from the owner, the owner’s designee, the mortgagee or the mortgagee’s designee. It’s effective for 30 days if hand delivered or sent electronically, 35 by regular mail. The fee is capped at $250 where nothing is delinquent, up to $150 more where there is a delinquency, and $100 more for delivery inside three business days. Those figures get adjusted every five years by CPI, with DBPR publishing the adjusted numbers.

Three provisions in there are worth knowing cold, and both statutes carry them.

The certificate binds the association. It waives the right to collect any money owed above the amounts specified on the certificate from anyone who relies on it in good faith, and from that person’s successors and assigns. 720.30851(3) and 718.116(8)(c).

Miss the ten business days and the association can’t charge the fee at all. 720.30851(4) and 718.116(8)(d).

The collection attorney’s contact information has to appear on the certificate, and no fee is permitted for providing it. 720.30851(1)(e).

On a short sale, that number is the line item that ends files quietly. The lender is already agreeing to take less than it’s owed. Whatever the association is owed still has to clear at closing, and by then that’s assessments, late fees, interest and legal fees in one figure. Price can be fine, buyer can be fine, and the estoppel still comes back thousands of dollars above what anybody budgeted.

Agents working one of these: might wanna order it the week the listing goes live rather than the week before closing. The effective window is 30 days and the itemized amount binds them, so an early one is worth something a late one isn’t.

The State Counted Its Condo Inspections and Came Up Short

Different problem, same paperwork.

OPPAGA, the Florida Legislature’s own Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability, published Report 26-04 in July. It’s the first statewide look at how the milestone inspection law passed after Surfside is actually running. It got picked up by Florida outlets at the end of the month, and it’s worth reading rather than reading about.

Building officials reported 8,736 completed phase one inspections and 1,575 completed phase two inspections across 2024 and 2025, plus 1,587 extensions granted on initial deadlines. Ninety percent of the 2024 extensions and 98 percent of the 2025 extensions went to coastal counties and municipalities, with officials pointing at how hard it is to find an engineer and how backed up the ones they find already are.

Then the repair bills. Officials reported 903 permit applications for repairs identified in phase two inspections, running in value from under $1,000 to $30 million. The average permit value was $496,236 in 2024 and $337,229 in 2025. Concrete, electrical, structural.

Milestone inspections identified 30 buildings in 2024 and 24 in 2025 as unsafe or uninhabitable, across eight counties. Of the 30 in 2024, officials who answered indicated 5 were vacated.

Here’s the gap, and OPPAGA states it plainly rather than burying it. DBPR received 2024 data from 71 percent of the 389 local enforcement jurisdictions OPPAGA identified, and 2025 data from 64 percent. In the three counties with the most at stake, the counties reported and a lot of the cities inside them didn’t. 23 percent of Broward’s municipal building officials didn’t report. 21 percent of Miami-Dade’s. And 44 percent of Palm Beach’s.

OPPAGA also names a hole in the law itself. Section 553.899 doesn’t define “unsafe” and doesn’t define “uninhabitable.” The Florida Building Code defines unsafe and leaves uninhabitable alone. So officials used whatever they had, some the Building Code definition, some a local ordinance, some the engineer’s own call. Which means those unsafe-building counts aren’t counted the same way from one county to the next.

Every number in that report is a floor rather than a total, and OPPAGA says so on its own pages.

What You Can Actually Ask For

So the state database isn’t a due diligence source right now. The inspection itself is.

Section 553.899 requires the association to distribute a summary of the inspection to every unit owner, post it on the property, and publish the full report on the association website. It exists and it’s yours to ask for. Phase one report, phase two report if there is one, and the permit if repairs came out of it.

A phase two repair permit carrying a six-figure value is a special assessment that hasn’t been voted on yet. That’s not a prediction about any particular building. It’s just what that document is.

And if you’re already behind on assessments, the association is a separate creditor from your mortgage servicer, running its own clock and its own collection process. Falling behind on either one is usually life landing hard on somebody who was fine a year ago.

What a lien does to what you’d owe, where it stands against your mortgage, what any of it does at tax time, those are questions for a Florida attorney and a CPA. I’m neither. Where I’m useful is the sale itself, because how an association balance behaves in a closing is deal mechanics rather than law, and that part I do every week.

Northeast Florida is where I’m licensed and distressed property is the bulk of what I work. If you’re reading this from another state, a Florida license stops at the state line, so those questions go back out through the SFR referral network to somebody licensed where you are.

Whatever the question is, ask it. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if talking beats typing.

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.