California HOA Fine Limit: The $100 Cap (§5850)

The California HOA fine limit changed on 30 June 2025, and a surprising number of associations are still issuing notices as though it had not. If your HOA has fined you $250 for a trash can left out or $500 for the wrong paint colour, the fine is very probably unlawful on its face.

AB 130 amended Civil Code §5850 to cap monetary penalties, and amended §5855 to rewrite the procedure that has to be followed before one is imposed. Together they shifted the balance in homeowners’ favour more than any change to Davis-Stirling enforcement in years, and they did it quietly, inside a large bill that most people read for its housing provisions.

Here is what the cap is, the one exception to it, and the procedural rights that now sit in front of every fine.

What is the California HOA fine limit now?

Section 5850 requires an association that intends to impose monetary penalties to adopt and distribute a schedule of those penalties. That much is long-standing. What AB 130 did was put a ceiling over the schedule.

The penalty an association may impose is now the lesser of two things: the monetary penalty stated in the schedule, or one hundred dollars per violation. The word doing the work is “lesser.” An association cannot raise its schedule to $300 and charge $300, because the statutory figure caps it. Nor can an association charge $100 where its own schedule says $50, because its own schedule binds it too. Whichever number is smaller is the number you owe.

That is a genuine reversal of the position most California homeowners have lived with. Fine schedules running to several hundred dollars a violation, escalating for repeat offences, were common and were generally enforceable so long as the schedule had been properly adopted and distributed. Since 30 June 2025 the schedule is the floor of the analysis rather than the whole of it.

If you are holding a fine notice for more than $100, the first question is not whether the fine is fair. It is whether the association has done the one specific thing that lets it exceed the cap.

The exception, and what the board must do to use it

Section 5850 permits a penalty above the cap where the violation may result in an adverse health or safety impact on the common area or on another association member’s property. That is a real exception and it exists for good reason. A blocked fire lane, an unsafe electrical alteration or a structural modification threatening a neighbour’s unit is not a $100 problem, and the Legislature did not pretend otherwise.

But the exception is procedural as well as substantive. To rely on it, the board must make a written finding specifying the adverse health or safety impact, in a board meeting open to the members. Each element of that sentence is a requirement, and each is a place where associations fail.

The finding must be written, so a discussion that produced a consensus is not enough. It must specify the impact, so a finding that recites the statutory words without identifying what the actual hazard is does not satisfy the section. And it must be made in a meeting open to the members, which means a determination reached in executive session and announced afterwards has been made in the wrong forum.

So when you receive a fine over $100, the question to put to the board in writing is narrow and answerable: at which open meeting was the written finding made, and what adverse health or safety impact does it specify? If the answer is that no such finding exists, the cap applies and the fine should be reduced to the lesser of $100 or the scheduled amount. A California HOA records request will produce the minutes, and the absence of the finding in the minutes is usually the end of the argument.

Boards reading this should treat the finding as a drafting task rather than a formality. A finding that names the hazard, explains why it reaches the common area or another owner’s property, and is recorded in open-meeting minutes will hold. One that says “the board finds an adverse health and safety impact” will not.

Before the fine: your right to cure (§5855)

Section 5855 governs the disciplinary process, and AB 130 added the part that matters most in practice. The member must be given notice at least 10 days before the meeting at which the board will consider discipline, and the member has the opportunity to cure the violation prior to the meeting.

Read that as a sequencing rule. The fine is no longer the opening move; it is what happens if you were given a chance to fix the problem and did not take it. An association that sends a violation notice and a fine in the same envelope has compressed two stages into one, and has skipped the stage the statute now requires.

The section also anticipates the obvious practical objection, which is that some violations cannot be cured in 10 days. Where a cure would take longer than the notice period, the member may instead provide a financial commitment to cure the violation. So the homeowner whose fence needs replacing, with a six-week lead time on materials, is not forced to choose between an impossible deadline and a penalty. A documented commitment to carry out the work is the answer, and it is worth putting in writing before the hearing rather than explaining at it.

Two further rights sit in the same section. The board must hold the hearing in executive session if the member requests it, which matters more than people expect, because these hearings are otherwise conducted in front of neighbours. And the board must notify the member of its decision in writing within 14 days following the action. AB 130 shortened that from 15 days, a small change that nonetheless gives a clean date to work from.

If you are preparing for a hearing, the useful preparation is documentary. Bring evidence of the cure, or of the commitment to cure, and ask in advance whether the board will be relying on the health-and-safety exception, so that you know before you walk in whether you are arguing about $100 or about something larger. Our guide to CC&R violation defense covers the wider enforcement picture, and how to contest an HOA fine covers the mechanics of the challenge.

What the California HOA fine limit does not cover

Section 5850 caps monetary penalties. It does not touch assessments, and the distinction is where most confusion arises when an owner reads a ledger showing a balance far above $100.

Regular and special assessments are not fines. They are the association’s charge for operating the community, they are governed by an entirely separate part of the Act, and nothing in AB 130 limits them. Late charges, interest on delinquent assessments, and the costs of collection including attorney’s fees are likewise not monetary penalties, and they can and do accumulate well past $100 on a delinquent account. If your balance is $2,000, the answer is not automatically that the association has breached the cap. The answer is that you need to see the ledger broken down into its components, because the cap applies only to the fine portion.

Nor does the cap reach the cost of remedial work the association performs and charges back where the governing documents permit it, or damages for harm to the common area. Those are recoveries rather than penalties, though the line between a chargeback and a disguised fine is sometimes worth testing.

One open question deserves flagging honestly. The statute caps the penalty “per violation,” and it does not, on its face, spell out how that applies to a continuing violation charged on a daily or monthly basis. Whether an association may treat each day of a continuing breach as a separate violation attracting its own $100 is not resolved by the text, and it is the point on which we would expect the first serious disputes under AB 130. If your fine is accruing periodically rather than as a single charge, that is a question worth taking advice on rather than assuming either answer.

Finally, a jurisdictional point, because this site covers two states. The $100 cap is Californian. Nevada has its own limit on fines with its own procedure under NRS Chapter 116, and the two are not interchangeable: see HOA fines in Nevada and the statutory cap. If your community is in Las Vegas or Reno, §5850 does not help you.

What to do if you have been fined more than $100

Begin with the schedule. The association is required to have adopted and distributed a schedule of monetary penalties, so ask for it, and compare the amount on your notice against both the schedule and the statutory cap. Your fine cannot lawfully exceed whichever of those two figures is smaller. If the association cannot produce a properly adopted and distributed schedule at all, that is a prior problem, and whether the rule was validly adopted becomes the live question.

Then establish which track the association thinks it is on. If the fine exceeds $100, ask in writing at which open meeting the board made its written finding of adverse health or safety impact and what that finding specifies. Request the minutes. If there is no finding in the minutes, say so, cite §5850, and ask for the fine to be corrected to the capped amount.

Next, audit the procedure that led to the fine. Was there at least 10 days’ notice of the meeting? Were you given the opportunity to cure before it, and did you take it or offer a financial commitment to cure? Did you receive the decision in writing within 14 days? Did you ask for executive session, and were you given it? Each of those is a discrete requirement of §5855, and a fine imposed without them is vulnerable regardless of whether the underlying violation occurred.

Keep the fine question separate from any assessment question. If the association is treating an unpaid fine as a delinquent assessment and adding collection costs on top, that characterisation is worth challenging early, because it is the mechanism by which a $100 dispute becomes a lien. Our guide to assessment disputes deals with that ledger, and the broader HOA fines guide covers the enforcement landscape in both states.

Frequently asked questions

Conclusion

Most fine disputes in California are now decided by two documents rather than by argument about whether the violation happened. The first is the association’s schedule of monetary penalties, which sets a figure the statute will not let it exceed. The second is the open-meeting minutes, which either contain a written finding of adverse health or safety impact or do not. Add the §5855 sequence on top, with its 10 days’ notice, its right to cure and its 14-day written decision, and a properly documented challenge to an over-cap fine is a short letter rather than a case. The associations most exposed here are the ones still working from a schedule adopted before June 2025, and there are a great many of them.