The reserve fund was fiction. Now 900,000 condo units owe the bill.

For decades, a Florida condo board could hold a vote and simply decide not to save for its own building's roof, plumbing, or structure.▸ The reserve line existed on paper; owners chose, year after year, to fund less of it or none of it, and monthly dues stayed low. Champlain Towers South did exactly that. When it collapsed in Surfside in June 2021, killing 98 people, its association had roughly $706,000 banked against the nearly $10.3 million in reserves its own engineering study said it needed — 6.9 cents on the dollar. The law Florida passed afterward doesn't forgive that shortfall. It converts it into a bill, due now, split among whoever owns the units today.

Senate Bill 4-D and its 2025 follow-up, House Bill 913, did two things: required every condo building three stories or taller and at least 30 years old to pass a structural inspection, and banned the vote that let boards skip saving for it.▸ Reserves for roofs, load-bearing walls, waterproofing, electrical and plumbing systems are no longer optional line items — for a budget adopted after December 1, 2024, an association subject to a Structural Integrity Reserve Study cannot collect less than the study recommends.

That perimeter is not small.▸ Of Florida's 27,563 condo associations, 16,439 — representing more than 900,000 of the state's 1.53 million condo units — are old enough to fall inside it, per Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation data analyzed by the University of Florida's Bergstrom Real Estate Center. More than 3.3 million Floridians live in a condo unit; roughly a third of them now live in a building whose association is legally required, for the first time, to fully fund the account that pays for keeping the structure standing.

A mandate that arrives with no phase-in for decades of underfunding shows up immediately in monthly dues.▸ Redfin's analysis of 43 U.S. metros — the three months ending July 31, 2024 — found Florida holding five of the six steepest year-over-year HOA fee increases in the country, and the single highest median monthly fee of any metro measured.

Dues are the smooth version of the story.▸ The special assessment — a one-time bill layered on top, due within months — is where the shortfall actually gets collected. At the Cricket Club, a bayfront co-op in North Miami, the board levied a $30 million special assessment that worked out to roughly $134,000 per owner; NBC News found residents listing units for sale at a loss rather than pay it. That is one building. The mandate now covers 16,439 of them.

Fee and fee-growth figures cover the three months ending July 31, 2024, as reported by Redfin; more recent metro-level figures with the same methodology were not available at publication. Association and unit counts reflect 2022–24 data as compiled by Facilities Advisors and the UF Bergstrom Real Estate Center; Florida's Division of Condominiums began collecting its own statewide reserve-status database only in mid-2025, so a fully current statewide compliance count does not yet exist.