Iowa Access to Solar Energy

Start with what this chapter is not. Chapter 564A is not an HOA solar-rights law. It does not give an Iowa homeowner a right to install solar panels over a restriction in their declaration, and it does not void a covenant that forbids them. What it does is create a procedure for obtaining an easement over a neighbour’s land so that sunlight keeps reaching a collector — and the neighbour gets paid for it.

Its own purpose section says as much: “to facilitate the orderly development and use of solar energy by establishing and providing certain procedures for obtaining access to solar energy” (§ 564A.1). Access to sunlight, from the property next door.

The one provision that touches covenants, read exactly

Section 564A.8 is a single sentence, and it is the whole of Iowa’s statutory law on solar and private restrictions:

“City councils and county boards of supervisors may include in ordinances relating to subdivisions a provision prohibiting deeds for property located in new subdivisions from containing restrictive covenants that include unreasonable restrictions on the use of solar collectors.”

Four limits sit inside that sentence and each one matters.

“May”, not “shall”. No Iowa city or county is required to do this. Whether the protection exists where you live depends entirely on whether your city council or county board chose to enact it.

“Ordinances relating to subdivisions”. The vehicle is subdivision regulation — the rules a developer must satisfy to plat new lots — not a free-standing solar ordinance.

“Deeds for property located in new subdivisions”. This is prospective. It operates on deeds in new subdivisions. Nothing in chapter 564A reaches a covenant already recorded against an existing community.

“Unreasonable restrictions”. Even where a city has acted, what it may prohibit is an unreasonable restriction on the use of solar collectors, not every restriction.

So the practical answer for an Iowa homeowner in an existing association is that state law does not override the covenant. We searched the whole Code of Iowa 2026 for solar collectors, solar energy, solar panels and solar devices. Outside this chapter the words appear in tax credits, property assessment, zoning objectives, the department for the blind, community colleges, the regents, transportation and corrections — and in none of them does the legislature displace a private restrictive covenant. What governs is the declaration, plus whatever your city or county has enacted under § 564A.8 for new subdivisions.

Two provisions elsewhere in the Code that do help

Installing solar does not raise your assessment. Under § 441.21(8)(b), “any construction or installation of a solar energy system on property classified as agricultural, residential, commercial, or industrial property shall not increase the actual, assessed, and taxable values of the property for five full assessment years”. And § 441.21(8)(d) is written without any time limit at all: “In assessing and valuing the property for tax purposes, the assessor shall disregard any market value added by a solar energy system to a building.” The statute attaches no term to that sentence the way paragraph “b” attaches five assessment years to its own; how the two paragraphs read together is a question for the assessor and the department of revenue rules the same paragraph directs, and this page does not assert an answer to it.

For that subsection a “solar energy system” is either a system of equipment “capable of collecting and converting incident solar radiation or wind energy into thermal, mechanical or electrical energy” and transforming it to storage or point of use, constructed or installed after January 1, 1978; or a system that uses the building’s own design to maximise solar heat gain in the cold season and minimise it in the hot season using natural means, constructed or installed after January 1, 1981 (§ 441.21(8)(c)).

Zoning has to take solar access into account. Both city and county zoning regulations “shall be made in accordance with a comprehensive plan and designed ... to promote reasonable access to solar energy”, among the other objectives listed — § 414.3(1) for cities and § 335.5(1) for counties. That is an objective a zoning ordinance must be designed to promote, not a right an individual can enforce against a neighbour or an association.

The solar access easement: who decides

Your city or county may have set up a board — or it may be the district court. A city council or county board of supervisors may designate a solar access regulatory board: a board of adjustment, the council or board of supervisors itself, or “any board with at least three members” (§ 564A.3). A city board’s jurisdiction covers applications where the dominant estate is in the city; a county board’s covers the county outside city limits. “In the absence of the designation of a specific board ... the district court having jurisdiction in the area where the dominant estate is located shall receive and act on applications” and serves as the board — and a district associate judge may exercise that jurisdiction.

The vocabulary is worth ten seconds. The dominant estate is the land the easement benefits — yours, if you are installing the collector. The servient estate is the land burdened by it — your neighbour’s. A “solar collector” is a device or structural feature of a building that collects solar energy as part of a system for collecting, storing and distributing it — and the chapter adds, in terms, “a greenhouse is a solar collector” (§ 564A.2).

Applying: nine items, and one deadline that trips people

You must apply before you build. “The application must be filed before installation or construction of the solar collector.” (§ 564A.4(1)). Panels already on the roof put this chapter out of reach.

The application states nine things: the need for the easement; legal descriptions of the dominant and servient estates; the names and addresses of the record owners of both; a description of the collector; its size and location, including heights, its orientation with respect to south, and its slope from the horizontal; an explanation of how the applicant “has done everything reasonable, taking cost and efficiency into account” to design and site the collector so as to minimise the impact on development of the servient estates; a legal description of the easement sought plus a drawing showing the vertical and horizontal angles it extends through and the points they are measured from; a statement that the applicant tried and failed to negotiate the easement voluntarily; and a statement that the space to be burdened “is not obstructed at the time of filing ... by anything other than vegetation that would shade the solar collector”.

Then notice, and the neighbour’s right to be heard. The board checks the application is complete, may return it for correction, and on acceptance schedules a hearing. A copy of the application and notice of the hearing must be served on the servient estate owners in the manner provided for service of original notice and at least twenty days before the hearing, and the notice must tell them the board will decide whether and to what extent an easement is granted, will decide the compensation, and that they have the right to contest it. The applicant pays the board’s copying and mailing costs. An application to the district court acting as the board “is not subject to the small claims procedures” of chapter 631.

The decision, and the three ways it can go against you

Section 564A.5(1) tells the board to grant the easement if it finds a need for the collector, that the burdened space was unobstructed except by shading vegetation when the application was filed, that the proposed location minimises the impact on the servient estate’s development, and that the applicant tried and failed to negotiate. The board may also modify the easement applied for and impose conditions on where the collector goes.

But there are two refusals written into the same subsection. The board may refuse on a finding that the easement “would require the removal of trees that provide shade or a windbreak to a residence on the servient estate”. And the board shall not grant one where the servient owner, at least six months before the application was filed, “has made a substantial financial commitment to build a structure that will shade the solar collector”.

The easement has a hard geometric limit. The board “shall grant a solar access easement only within the area that is within three hundred feet of the center of the northernmost boundary of the collector and is south of a line drawn east and west tangent to the northernmost boundary of the collector” (§ 564A.5(2)). Three hundred feet, and only to the south.

What it costs, and what you get

You pay your neighbour for the development rights you are taking. The board determines compensation for “the impairment of the right to develop the property”, and “[c]ompensation shall be based on the difference between the fair market value of the property prior to and after granting the solar access easement” (§ 564A.5(3)).

Two thirty-day clocks then run. The parties are notified of the decision within thirty days of the hearing, and the dominant estate owner has thirty days from notification to deposit the compensation with the board. On receipt the board issues the order and remits the money to the servient owners. And there is an exit: “The owner of the dominant estate may decline to deposit the compensation with the board, and no order granting the solar access easement shall then be issued.” You may see the price and walk away.

Recording turns it into an interest in land. The dominant owner records the order with the county recorder, who lists the dominant owner as grantee and the servient owner as grantor in the deed index, and “[t]he solar access easement after being recorded shall be considered an easement appurtenant in or on the servient estate” (§ 564A.5(4)). It runs with the land.

Use it or lose it

Section 564A.6 lets the servient owner apply to the board, or petition the district court, to remove the easement in three situations: the collector is not installed and made operational within two years of the easement being recorded; the dominant owner ceases to use the collector for more than one year; or the collector is destroyed or removed and not replaced within one year.

The procedure and notice are the same as for a grant, and an order removing the easement “may provide for the return by the servient estate owner of compensation paid” — after deducting the servient owner’s reasonable expenses in the granting and removal proceedings.

The easier route: agree with your neighbour

Nothing requires a contested application. “Persons, including public bodies, may voluntarily agree to create a solar access easement”, and either way it is “subject to the same recording and conveyance requirements as other easements” (§ 564A.7(1)).

Every solar access easement must be in writing and must contain two things — note that § 564A.7(2) is not limited to the voluntary kind; it reaches an easement granted by board order just the same: the legal descriptions of the dominant and servient estates, and “[a] legal description of the space which must remain unobstructed” expressed in the vertical and horizontal angles the easement extends through and the points they are measured from.

Three things it may usefully add — and the list is expressly open, since § 564A.7(3) offers them “but the contents are not limited to” what it names: limits on the growth of existing and future vegetation or on the height of buildings and other potential obstructions; the terms on which it may be abandoned or terminated; and provisions for compensating the benefited owner if the easement is interfered with, or the burdened owner for maintaining it.

And the state publishes the paperwork. The department of natural resources “shall make available information and guidelines” to help local governments and the public use the chapter, including an application form, instructions and aids for preparing and recording easements, and “model ordinances that promote reasonable access to solar energy” (§ 564A.9).