HOA Fee Statistics (2026)

About 373,000 community associations covered 29.6 million housing units and 78.1 million residents in 2025.

That is 35.2% of all US housing, so roughly one home in three is in a homeowners association, condominium community or housing cooperative.

Homeowners associations make up 58% to 63% of the total, condominium communities 35% to 40% and cooperatives 2% to 4%.

In 1970 there were 10,000 community associations with about 700,000 housing units and 2.1 million residents.

By 1990 that was 130,000 associations, by 2010 it was 311,600, and by 2025 it was 373,000. FCAR expects between 374,000 and 377,000 in 2026.

Nothing in US housing has grown by that multiple over the same period, which is why an HOA is now a default condition of buying rather than a niche one.

81% of homes sold and 66% of homes completed are in a community association.

Those two figures explain the whole trend without any need for a theory about preferences: new housing is built this way, so the share of the stock rises every year mechanically.

For a buyer the practical consequence is that avoiding an HOA increasingly means buying an older home, which is a constraint on the search rather than a preference within it.

Associations collected $124.2 billion in assessments in 2025.

Those assessments fund professional management, utilities, security, insurance, common area maintenance, landscaping, capital improvement projects and amenities such as pools and clubhouses.

Dividing the total by 29.6 million units gives roughly $4,200 a year, about $350 a month. FCAR publishes the aggregate rather than an average, and the real distribution is wide: a small suburban HOA and a high-rise condominium with an elevator, a doorman and a pool are not comparable.

$31.1 billion of assessments, about a quarter of the total, went into reserve funds.

Reserves are what pay for roofs, street resurfacing, pool and elevator repairs, and increasingly for new environmental and energy standards.

This is the single most important number in any individual association's finances, because an underfunded reserve does not reduce the cost of a new roof. It converts it into a special assessment that lands on owners at once.

A monthly fee is predictable and can be budgeted. A special assessment is a one-off demand for a share of a capital cost, and it can run to five figures.

It arrives when a reserve is inadequate for a repair that cannot wait, which means the risk is highest exactly where the monthly fee has been kept artificially low.

So a low HOA fee is not automatically good news. It can be a deferred cost rather than an absent one, and the reserve study is where the difference shows.

Mortgage affordability calculations include the HOA fee, but the mental arithmetic buyers do usually does not.

At about $350 a month, the implied average assessment is comparable to a car payment and it is permanent, unlike the mortgage, which ends.

It also rises. Assessments track the cost of insurance, utilities, labour and materials, and none of those is fixed for the association any more than for anyone else.

Master policy premiums for community associations have risen sharply in exposed states, and insurance is one of the largest line items an assessment funds.

That is why assessments in Florida and other coastal markets have moved far faster than the national aggregate suggests.

For a buyer comparing two similar homes, the association's insurance line is worth reading directly rather than inferring from the headline fee.

California has about 51,700 community associations and Florida 50,600, together more than a quarter of the national total.

Texas follows at 23,500, then Illinois at 19,850, North Carolina at 15,200 and New York at 14,600.

Florida's 50,600 associations cover 4.47 million units against California's 5.11 million from 51,700, so Florida's are slightly smaller on average and far more likely to be condominiums.

2,555,000 people serve as elected board members or appointed committee members, contributing 102.6 million volunteer hours a year, valued by FCAR at $3.6 billion.

Between 30% and 40% of associations are self-managed, meaning no professional manager or management company.

The quality of an association's finances therefore depends heavily on unpaid people with variable expertise, which is an argument for reading the documents yourself rather than assuming a professional standard applies.

The reserve study, which states what capital items are coming and whether the money for them exists.

The last few years of minutes and budgets, where a coming special assessment usually appears long before it is levied.

The insurance summary and the litigation history, which are the two items most likely to produce a cost that is not in the current fee.

Every figure is from the Foundation for Community Association Research's 2025 U.S. National and State Statistical Review, drawn from the Community Association Fact Book 2025.

FCAR is the research arm of the Community Associations Institute and produces this data itself, so it is primary for its own statistics and is named here rather than presented as a government source.

The per-unit assessment and the reserve share are our arithmetic on FCAR's aggregates, not published averages, and they are indicative only.