Arkansas HOA laws & resources.

Laws & regulations impacting Arkansas associations.

Arkansas has no planned community or property owners' association act. There is one community-association statute — the Horizontal Property Act, for condominiums — and beyond it your rights come from your recorded bill of assurance or declaration, the nonprofit corporate code, and provisions scattered across other chapters, together with the federal laws that apply nationwide. HOPB hosts the full text of every one of these Arkansas statutes, each with a plain-language guide.

Arkansas HOA Law Guide Browse every statute we host in full — the Horizontal Property Act, both Nonprofit Corporation Acts, the Civil Rights and Fair Housing Acts, and the Collection Agencies chapter with the Arkansas FDCPA — grouped by role, with the official text and a plain-language guide for each.

Three things are worth knowing about how Arkansas's HOA law works:

• Your recorded documents are usually the whole of the law. The Horizontal Property Act is the only community-association statute Arkansas has, and it is opt-in: a horizontal property regime is created “only by recording a master deed” executed by all persons holding an interest in the property to be conveyed to unit owners (§ 18-13-103(a)). No master deed, no Act — whatever the property looks like. For everyone else, the governing instrument is the recorded declaration or bill of assurance, and one general provision decides whether it binds you at all: a restrictive covenant is not effective unless the instrument was executed by the owners and recorded (§ 18-12-103(b)). Read that section together with a second trap in the same place — where a covenant has separate duration and amendment clauses, they are read independently, so a “runs until 2035” clause does not stop an amendment (§ 18-12-103(c)). Both are on the related-laws page.
• Your association probably has no statutory lien — and cannot foreclose on you under the foreclosure act. This surprises almost everyone. Across the entire Horizontal Property Act the word “lien” appears in one place, the list of charges that outrank unpaid assessments, and “foreclosure” does not appear at all. What § 18-13-116 gives an association is a priority out of the sale proceeds when a unit is sold — behind past-due property taxes and recorded mortgages (§ 18-13-116(c)) — plus joint and several liability for the purchaser for what the seller owed up to conveyance (§ 18-13-116(d)), which is why you ask for a written account statement before you close. Separately, the Statutory Foreclosure Act is closed to associations: its procedures “shall apply only if the mortgagee or beneficiary is a mortgage company as defined in § 18-50-101 or is a bank or savings and loan” (§ 18-50-116(c)(1)) — and a “mortgage company” is an entity that in the usual course of its business is the mortgagee or beneficiary of a mortgage or deed of trust (§ 18-50-101(5)), which a homeowners’ association is not. If a demand letter claims a statutory lien or a power of sale, ask which statute — then read it. Which corporate code supplies the rest turns on a single date: the Nonprofit Corporation Act of 1993 governs associations incorporated on or after 1 January 1994, while older ones stay under the 1963 Act unless they made an irrevocable election in (§ 4-33-1701).
• The remedies that do exist are specific, and two of them have short clocks. Arkansas has no state HOA forum — no administrative law judge, no agency that polices boards — so each remedy is tied to a particular kind of complaint. Discrimination runs through the Arkansas Civil Rights and Fair Housing Acts, where § 16-123-206 makes a covenant that directly or indirectly limits occupancy on a protected ground void and bars honoring it in the chain of title, and where the accommodation duty expressly reaches public and common use areas (§ 16-123-314(c)(2)) — one year to the Commission, two years to court. Third-party collection runs through the Arkansas Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, which is the strongest tool on this page — a written dispute within 30 days forces the collector to stop collecting until it verifies the debt, and there is a private right of action for damages and fees — but only one year from the violation to file. Everything else, from a destroyed tree to a stale lien on your title, is on the related-laws page.

Find HOA contact information & documents.

• Who runs your association. Search the Arkansas Secretary of State entity search — or visit HOPB's HOA Directory and select Arkansas — to find an association's corporate status, registered agent, officers and filings by community name. Check the incorporation date while you are there: it decides whether the 1993 Act or the 1963 Act supplies your meeting, voting and records rules. If nothing comes up at all, your association may never have been incorporated — in which case the Revised Uniform Unincorporated Nonprofit Association Act in subchapter 6 of chapter 28 is what governs it.
• Association records — and where the strongest right actually is. This is one place an older association is better off. Under the 1963 Act, all books and records may be inspected by any member for any proper purpose at any reasonable time (§ 4-28-218(e)) — a broad right with no statutory fee, waiting period or purpose form. For condominiums, the Horizontal Property Act requires the administration to keep a book with a detailed chronological account of receipts and expenditures, and both that book and the vouchers accrediting its entries must be available for examination by all the co-owners at convenient hours on working days that are set and announced for general knowledge (§ 18-13-110). If your association is instead under the 1993 Act, read your bylaws and declaration for the inspection procedure, because that act does not carry the 1963 Act's broad member-inspection sentence. The one statutory right it does give is narrow: the members’ list for a meeting, inspectable and copyable on written demand from two business days after notice is given through the meeting itself (§ 4-33-720(b)). Whichever applies, put the request in writing and keep a copy.
• HOA documents. The bill of assurance, declaration, master deed, amendments, plats, deeds, liens and judgments are recorded in the office of the county clerk and ex officio recorder — that is the statute’s own phrase, used when it requires a master deed to be recorded “in the office of the clerk and ex officio recorder of the county where the real property… is located” (§ 18-13-104(a)(2)). In practice that recording office is run by the county’s circuit clerk. Search under the subdivision or community name. Unlike association records, these are genuinely public. Contact details for all 75 counties are listed by the Association of Arkansas Counties; many counties also run an online land-records search through the circuit clerk's office.
• Before you buy. Two Arkansas rules make the pre-closing check unusually worth doing. In a condominium, the purchaser is jointly and severally liable with the seller for assessments the seller owed up to conveyance (§ 18-13-116(d)). And a transfer fee payable to a third person under a covenant recorded after July 27, 2011 does not run with the title and is unenforceable — though a fee payable to the association itself, used exclusively for the purposes the document authorizes with nothing passed through, is expressly carved out and remains valid (§ 18-12-107). Both are covered on the related-laws page.