Meetings & GovernanceAL
Attending HOA Board Meetings in Alabama
By The HOARebel Team · May 28, 2026 · 2 min read
The decisions that affect your home — budgets, rules, assessments — often get made at board meetings. In Alabama, the rules about those meetings sit in a different place than most homeowners assume, and depend on whether your HOA falls under the 2016 Act or operates under older law and the Nonprofit Corporation Act. For your specific situation, a licensed Alabama attorney is the right resource. This is general information, not legal advice.
What § 35-20 actually says about meetings
For post-2016 HOAs, the Alabama Homeowners' Association Act addresses board elections and modification of the declaration in § 35-20-7, and requires the organizational documents to lay out the corporate structure (§ 35-20-5). What the Act does not do is impose a one-size-fits-all open-meeting / notice-period regime the way some states (like Vermont) do.
Day-to-day meeting procedure — when the board meets, how members are noticed, whether owners can speak — comes from:
- The declaration and bylaws — the recorded community documents typically set out meeting rules.
- The Alabama Nonprofit Corporation Law (§§ 10A-3-1.01 et seq.) — for HOAs incorporated as nonprofits, the corporate-law layer governs annual meetings, special meetings, notice to members, voting, and minutes.
Why notice is the leverage point
Notice exists so owners can attend and participate before a decision is locked in. When a board adopts a rule, approves a budget, or raises assessments at a meeting that owners were never properly noticed of — or that wasn't on the agenda — the lack of notice (under the bylaws or the Nonprofit Corporation Law) is often the first thing a homeowner or attorney examines. A decision reached without the notice the documents and corporate law require may be vulnerable.
Older HOAs
If your HOA was created before January 1, 2016, the 2016 Act generally doesn't apply. The meeting rules instead come from the declaration and bylaws and the Nonprofit Corporation Law — which often does most of the heavy lifting here. See Which Alabama Laws Govern Your HOA or Condo?.
Minutes are records you can get
If you couldn't attend, the minutes show what happened. For post-2016 HOAs, § 35-20-13 gives owners access to records within 30 days of a written request. For older HOAs, member inspection rights come from the bylaws and the Nonprofit Corporation Law. Either way, requesting minutes is a common move when a board action seems to have appeared from nowhere.
If meetings are closed or unnoticed
When an owner believes the board is meeting without the notice the documents or corporate law require, the options include raising it with the board in writing, requesting the records that would show what happened, and consulting a licensed Alabama attorney about whether the applicable meeting rules — § 35-20 for newer HOAs, the bylaws and § 10A-3 for older — were followed.