On May 12, 2026, Governor Kemp signed SB 406 — the Georgia Property Owners' Bill of Rights Act. It creates a new Chapter 17A in Title 43 of the Georgia Code, hands the Secretary of State regulatory authority over community associations for the first time, and ties an association's power to fine to a piece of paper it has never had to file before.
Most of what the act does takes effect January 1, 2027. One section is already in force. And unlike Minnesota's HOA Bill of Rights, which capped fines and left rental enforcement uncapped, Georgia's version doesn't touch leasing rules at all. What it touches is the machinery every leasing rule depends on: registration, records, payment order, and the process behind every fine.
Is registration mandatory?
Technically, no. Practically, yes.
The act lets an association operate as a "non-registered owners' association" by written notice. What it takes away is the reason to exist: a non-registered association may not assess or collect fines or fees against any owner, and may not collect accelerated assessments. Georgia practitioners read the act as also foreclosing lien and foreclosure rights for the unregistered* — but even on the narrowest reading, an association that skips registration has a leasing rule with no consequence attached to it.
There is no grace period. An association whose registration lapses on December 31 has no fine authority on January 1.
Who has to register
The act reaches further than the Property Owners' Association Act ever did. An "owners' association" is any nongovernmental association of owners of residential property in a delineated area governed by recorded covenants — which sweeps in POAA communities, common-law HOAs that never opted into the POAA, condominiums, and co-ops. If your community has recorded covenants and collects money from owners, assume it's covered.
That matters for leasing in particular, because Georgia's non-POAA communities have historically operated with the least statutory structure. They now share the same registration duty as everyone else.
The filing checklist
Effective January 1, 2027, and by December 31 of every year after, a covered association must file with the Secretary of State:
- A $100 filing fee. Same amount for the initial registration and each renewal. The Secretary may revoke a registration for failure to pay within 30 days.
- A registration statement with the association's name, address, and current officers.
- A complete copy of the governing documents — declaration, bylaws, and recorded amendments. For a community that has amended its leasing covenants, this is the first time a state agency will hold the amended text on file.
- A financial statement not more than one year old.
- The address where records are kept, if it differs from the registered address.
Registration expires every December 31. Any change in the association's name, address, or officers — or "any other change that materially affects the business and control" of the association — requires an amended registration within 30 days. An association that turns over its board at an annual meeting in March has until April to tell the state.
The Secretary of State has the authority to deny, suspend, or revoke a registration, to limit the fines or fees an association may collect, and to bar individual officers or directors from serving where the act's standards aren't met. The implementing rules haven't been written yet — the act directs the Secretary to adopt them — so expect the filing mechanics to firm up over the fall.
The ten-year records rule
From January 1, 2027, every association must keep, for at least ten years, all records relating to:
- regular, special, and specific assessments, per owner;
- fines and fees;
- liens filed and released;
- foreclosures.
The records must be kept at an office in Georgia or at the association's principal office, in electronic and any other format in which they exist, and the Secretary of State may inspect them. Owners separately gain a statutory right to inspect the association's accounting records — finalized balance sheet, budget, profit-and-loss statements, and bank statements — for the last three years.
For a rental program, this is the provision with teeth. Every rental fine the association issues over the next decade is a record the state can ask to see, alongside the covenant it enforced, the notice the owner received, and the payment history behind it. A fine the board can't reconstruct isn't a fine — it's a complaint waiting to be filed.
The complaint process, and what it does to a rental fine
Starting January 1, 2027, any person residing in the community — owner or tenant — who claims to have been damaged by an association's action or inaction may file a complaint with the Secretary of State within 180 days. A hearing officer investigates, may order a formal hearing, and issues findings. The parties then have 15 days to satisfy those conclusions before enforcement can be pursued in court. The non-prevailing party pays a $100 administrative fee; either side may appeal to magistrate or superior court within 20 days.
The provision that boards enforcing leasing rules should read twice is the stay: the filing of a complaint automatically prohibits the association from collecting, or attempting to collect, any fine or fee that is the subject of or related to the complaint until the hearing officer's conclusions issue, with a possible 15-day extension.
Put a rental violation through that process. A board fines an owner for an unregistered tenant. The owner — or the tenant, who now has standing — files a complaint. Collection of that fine stops on the day of filing. What decides the matter is the file: the recorded leasing covenant, evidence that the home was in fact rented, the dated notice, and the owner's response. A board that can produce all four in the first week has a short complaint. A board that can't has a stayed fine and a hearing officer looking at ten years of its records.
The payment order — where rental fines now sit
The act fixes the order in which an association must apply any payment it receives from an owner, and boards don't get to choose:
- regular assessments, until current;
- special assessments, until current;
- specific assessments, until current;
- other fees and fines.
An association may not refuse a partial payment, and may not accelerate assessments. In practice this means a rental fine is the last dollar collected from any owner who is also behind on dues. For POAA associations, fines and fees are also excluded from the foreclosure threshold, which rises on January 1 to the lesser of $4,000 or twelve months of regular assessments (never less than $2,000), with a 60-day certified-mail notice replacing the old 30. Rental fines don't foreclose. They collect, in order, against an owner who is otherwise current — or they sit on the ledger.
What's already in force: the attorney-fee notice
Section 7 of the act took effect July 1, 2026, and applies to actions filed on or after that date. Before a POAA association may collect or be awarded attorney's fees on outstanding fines or delinquent fees, it must send an initial written notice by certified mail or statutory overnight delivery identifying the amounts owed, with an itemized list of the attorney's fees claimed. The owner has 30 days from receipt to pay. A judge hearing the matter must review the fee claim for reasonableness and say so in the order before awarding it.
If your association has sent a rental-violation file to counsel since July 1, that certified notice — with the itemization — should already be in it.
What the act says about leasing rules: nothing
SB 406 does not restrict rentals, cap rentals, or change who may adopt a leasing amendment. Georgia's leasing rules still come from the same places they did last year: the recorded covenants, the O.C.G.A. § 44-3-226 grandfathering rule for POAA communities, and the POAA-versus-common-law distinction that decides which owners a new restriction binds.
Two provisions touch leasing at the edges:
- Household composition. Owners gain a right to be free from governing documents that "interfere with the freedom of residents to determine the composition of their household," subject to occupancy limits, single-housekeeping-unit requirements, and parking rules Georgia and federal law permit. Our reading is that this speaks to who may live in a home, not whether an owner may lease it — a leasing restriction applied to the owner is a different thing from a rule about who shares the tenant's roof.*
- Amendment thresholds. The act allows governing-document provisions that require more than 80 percent owner approval to be reduced to 80 percent. For communities whose declarations set leasing amendments at 90 percent, or unanimity, this may lower the bar to adopting a rental cap — though the act's interaction with the consent rule Georgia courts apply to non-POAA leasing restrictions is untested.*
The board checklist
Before January 1, 2027, an association that enforces leasing rules — or intends to — should have the following in place:
- Calendar the registration. $100, registration statement, governing documents, and a financial statement under a year old, filed with the Secretary of State by December 31. Then every year. Assign an officer to it and put the renewal on the annual-meeting agenda.
- Assemble the governing-document set now. The filing requires the complete documents — including every recorded leasing amendment. If the association can't locate a recorded amendment, it can't file it, and it shouldn't be enforcing it either.
- Adopt a 30-day change procedure. New officers, new address, new management company: amended registration within 30 days, every time.
- Set the ten-year retention policy and decide where the records live. Assessment ledgers, fine files, lien filings and releases, foreclosure files — in Georgia, retrievable, in every format they exist.
- Rebuild the fine file around the complaint process. For every rental fine: the recorded provision violated, the evidence the home was rented, the dated notice, the owner's response, and the payment application. That's the packet a hearing officer will ask for, and the stay ends when the packet is convincing.
- Update the attorney-referral template to include the Section 7 certified notice and fee itemization. This one is already required.
- Reconcile the ledger to the payment order. Any owner with a rental fine and an assessment balance should show the fine applied last. If the association's software applies payments differently, fix it before the first complaint tests it.
- Know the actual rental picture. Registration, records, and process only enforce the leasing rules the association knows are being violated — and in a typical community, a large share of rentals are unregistered. Georgia's grandfathering registry under § 44-3-226 depends on the same fact base.
For the statutory detail behind Georgia's leasing rules themselves — the § 44-3-226 registry, the POAA distinction, and the records a board has to be able to produce — see our Georgia HOA rental compliance guide.
The bottom line
Georgia didn't weaken leasing enforcement. It made enforcement conditional: on a registration that expires every December, on records that reach back ten years, on a payment order that puts fines last, and on a complaint process that freezes any fine the board can't immediately justify. Boards that file on time and keep a complete file for every rental violation will find their leasing rules work in 2027 the way they did in 2026. Boards that don't will find out, one stayed fine at a time, that the rule was never the problem — the paperwork was.
Getting the rental picture current, verified, and documented is where that file starts. We're Georgia-based, and it's what we do.
* Our reading of the statute, not a settled rule — validate with your association's HOA attorney before relying on it.
This article is general information for community associations, not legal advice. Registration, record-retention, and enforcement decisions under SB 406 should be reviewed with your association's attorney, and the Secretary of State's implementing rules were still pending at the time of writing.