Every Record Georgia SB 406 Names, Organized Before the Portal Opens
Georgia SB 406 creates a Secretary of State registration for homeowner associations starting January 1, 2027. The filing wants your association’s name and address, its current officers, a copy of your governing documents, and a financial statement dated within the last year. HomeHerald keeps all four of those current as a side effect of running your community - free for your first 14 days with no credit card, then $49 a month for up to 105 properties.
Most Georgia boards will meet this law twice. The first time is quiet: a $100 annual filing nobody notices. The second time is loud, on the afternoon a treasurer tries to record a lien and learns that an unregistered association - and anyone acting as its agent - cannot collect a fine or a fee, file a lien, or start a foreclosure. No regulator has to show up. The consequence is self-executing.
Registration opens January 1, 2027. As of this page’s last update on August 25, 2026, that is 129 days out - and every registration expires on December 31, so the one you file in January 2027 comes due again at the end of that same year. The Secretary of State’s rules go out for public comment around October 2026, so the move right now is not to guess at a form that does not exist yet. It is to get your four documents in order.
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This page explains how HomeHerald helps a Georgia association organize the records SB 406 names. It is not legal advice, and HomeHerald does not file your registration for you. Your association is responsible for its own filings, records, and collection practices, and you should confirm your obligations with your association attorney.
What SB 406 Actually Requires
Georgia Senate Bill 406, the Georgia Property Owners’ Bill of Rights Act, was signed on May 12, 2026 and is carried in the session laws as 2026 Ga. Laws Act 715. It creates a new chapter of Georgia code - O.C.G.A. Title 43, Chapter 17A - and a new Georgia Property Owners’ Associations Division inside the Secretary of State’s office.
The registration itself. Beginning January 1, 2027, a Georgia property owners’ association registers with the Secretary of State through an online portal. The fee is $100 a year. Every registration expires on December 31 regardless of when you filed it. If your association’s name, address, or officers change, an amended filing is due within 30 days.
The filing asks for:
- The association’s name and address
- Its current officers
- A copy of the association’s governing documents
- A financial statement dated within the last year
That last item is where a persistent rumor starts. You will hear that Georgia now wants three years of financials with your registration. It does not. The registration wants one financial statement less than a year old. The three-year figure comes from a completely separate part of the same Act - the owner-inspection right in O.C.G.A. § 43-17A-7, which lets an owner demand three years of finalized financial statements and bank statements in writing. Two different obligations, two different documents, frequently confused.
The teeth. An association that has not registered, or its agent, may not collect fines or fees, may not file or record a lien, and may not initiate foreclosure. Regular assessments are a different story, which is the part of this law most summaries get wrong. More on that below.
What else lands on January 1, 2027. Registration is the headline, but the same Act changes how Georgia associations handle money and records:
- A mandatory payment waterfall under § 43-17A-8: regular assessments first, then special, then specific, then fees and fines. An association may never refuse a partial payment, and accelerated assessments are banned for every association, registered or not.
- Ten-year records retention under § 43-17A-2(g) for assessment, fine, lien, and foreclosure records, explicitly including electronic records, kept at a Georgia office and open to examination by the Secretary of State.
- Owner complaints to the Secretary of State under § 43-17A-5, with a 180-day window. Filing one automatically stays collection of the disputed fines and fees until a hearing officer rules.
- Tougher foreclosure math under § 44-3-232: notice moves from 30 to 60 days, lien lapse from four years to six, and a minimum lien applies - the lesser of $4,000 or twelve months of regular assessments, floor $2,000, computed excluding specific assessments, fines, and fees.
- Twelve enumerated owner rights under § 43-17A-7, including the inspection right described above.
For a provision-by-provision walkthrough, see Georgia HOA laws in 2027.
Where Each SB 406 Record Lives in HomeHerald
Nothing on this list is exotic. It is the paperwork a functioning association already produces - which is exactly why associations that keep loose records feel this law hardest.
| What SB 406 touches | Where it lives in HomeHerald |
|---|---|
| Association name and address | Community settings, on your letterhead, invoices, and notices |
| Current officers | Board roster with names, seats, and titles, kept as member records |
| Governing documents (declaration, bylaws, rules, amendments) | Documents hub, behind resident login, with AI rule extraction |
| Financial statement dated within the last year | Board-ready profit and loss, AR aging, and balance reporting you can run and export on any date |
| Three years of financials on owner demand (§ 43-17A-7) | Same reporting engine, plus a members-only resident portal where the board can post what it chooses to share |
| Assessment, fine, and lien history for ten-year retention | Per-property ledger where every charge and payment is its own labeled, dated line |
| Dues, special assessments, and specific assessments | Flexible dues and assessments and payments, itemized per property |
| Notices sent to owners about amounts owed | Communications - email, text, and physical or certified mail, with the send recorded |
| Meeting records and votes behind the decisions | Official Meetings and Community Voting, both timestamped |
| Insurance policies and vendor contracts | Insurance and Contracts, with expiration and renewal reminders |
| Officer changes that start the 30-day amended-filing clock | Board roster, so the change has a date attached to it |
The mapping is deliberately conservative. HomeHerald gives every record the statute calls out a home, and it does not file anything with the Secretary of State on your behalf.
Register, File as Nonregistered, or Neither
This is the decision that deserves your board’s attention, and it is not a yes-or-no question. SB 406 leaves a Georgia association in one of three states.
Registered. You file, you pay $100, you renew by December 31 each year, and you amend within 30 days of an officer, name, or address change. You keep the complete toolkit: regular assessments, special assessments, specific assessments, fines, fees, liens, and foreclosure.
Nonregistered by choice. The Act lets an association give the Secretary of State written notice that it elects not to register. This is a real, legitimate status, not a loophole. A nonregistered association keeps its assessments - regular, special, and specific - and gives up fines, fees, liens, and foreclosure.
Neither. You did not register, and you did not file the notice electing not to. You are in the same enforcement posture as a nonregistered association with none of the clarity, and you have an unanswered question sitting in the Secretary of State’s office.
For a large share of Georgia communities, the honest answer is that opting out is defensible. If your association collects dues, has never levied a fine, and has no realistic path to foreclosing on a neighbor, the nonregistered election costs you tools you were never going to use and saves you an annual filing, a renewal date, and a 30-day clock every time a board seat turns over.
If any of the following are true, registering is almost certainly the right call:
- You fine for covenant violations, or you want to keep that option
- You have ever recorded a lien, or you have delinquencies that could get there
- You are professionally managed, and your manager collects on your behalf
- Your governing documents lean on fines as the primary enforcement mechanism
- You expect to sell or refinance in a market where a clean, registered status is easier to explain
Whichever way you go, decide on the record and put the decision in your minutes. The worst outcome is a board that assumed someone else handled it.
”Or Its Agent”: Why Managed Communities Should Read This Twice
The enforcement bans in SB 406 do not stop at the association. They reach the association or its agent. If your community is professionally managed, the management company sending your violation letters and filing your liens is operating inside the same restriction your association is.
That has two practical consequences.
For self-managed boards, it removes an excuse you might have expected to lean on. There is no arrangement where a vendor absorbs the risk for you. The status that matters is your association’s.
For managed communities, it means your manager has a direct, first-person interest in your registration status, and probably a list of clients they are working through. If you are on that list, the most useful thing you can do is hand over the four documents quickly and in one place. Boards that keep their governing documents, officer roster, and financial statements in a shared, current system answer that request in a day. Boards running on a former treasurer’s laptop take a month.
That is the whole argument for a shared system of record: not that software satisfies a statute, but that when someone asks for a document with a deadline attached, you can produce it.
The Dates Most Georgia Boards Have Wrong
There is real confusion in circulation about when the pieces of SB 406 take effect, and some of it comes from otherwise reasonable sources. Section 9 of the Act settles it, and it is worth being precise:
Effective July 1, 2026 - already live. Section 7 of the Act, and only Section 7. Before an association collects attorney’s fees, it must send notice of the amounts owed by certified mail or statutory overnight delivery, allow a 30-day cure window, and provide an itemized list of the fees. A court must find the fees reasonable by order. If your association is collecting attorney’s fees in Georgia today, this rule already applies to you.
Effective January 1, 2027. Everything else. Registration, the payment waterfall, the partial-payment rule, the acceleration ban, the ten-year retention requirement, the Secretary of State complaint process, the foreclosure changes, and the enumerated owner rights.
If a summary you are reading puts the voting or foreclosure amendments at July 1, 2026, it is wrong, and the Act is the document to follow.
The attorney’s-fee rule being live now is the part worth acting on this quarter. Notice, a real 30-day window, and an itemized fee list are a documentation problem before they are a legal one. HomeHerald’s communications tools send email, text, and physical or certified mail from the community’s records, and the Dues Chaser collection ladder logs what went out and when, so the timeline is reconstructable months later. Your attorney sets the notice language and the strategy. The record of what you sent, and when, is the part software should be handling.
The Annual Registration You Already File Is Not This One
Nearly every Georgia HOA is already a nonprofit corporation filing an annual registration with the Corporations Division of the Secretary of State. That filing is not affected by SB 406, and it does not satisfy SB 406.
Starting in 2027 a Georgia association has two separate filings, two fees, and two systems: the corporate annual registration it has always filed, and the new property owners’ association registration with the new division. Boards that assume their corporate filing covers them will find out at the worst possible moment, when a lien gets challenged.
Practical version: whoever handles your corporate annual registration is the natural person to own the new one too, but they need to be told it exists. Name that person now, before your officers turn over.
What to Gather Now, Before the Form Exists
The Secretary of State’s rules go out for public comment around October 2026. Until they land, nobody knows the exact fields on the registration form, and any vendor claiming otherwise is guessing. What is knowable from the statute is the substance, and you can assemble all of it today.
1. Your governing documents, complete and current. Declaration, articles of incorporation, bylaws, rules, and every amendment - not the 2003 scan that is missing pages. In HomeHerald these live in the Documents hub behind resident login, where the AI reads your covenants so Herald can answer owner questions from the actual text.
2. A current officer roster with titles. This is the item most likely to bite you later, because SB 406 puts a 30-day amended-filing clock on officer changes. A board that learns about a turnover three months after the fact has already missed the window. HomeHerald keeps the roster as structured member records, so a change has a date on it.
3. A financial statement dated within the last year. One statement, under twelve months old. If your books are current, this is a report you run, not a project you schedule. HomeHerald’s financial reporting produces board-ready profit and loss and AR aging on demand from the ledger your dues and payments already write to.
4. Your legal name and address, as they appear in your articles. The name on your articles, your bank account, and your letterhead are supposed to match. Check now rather than while filling out a form.
5. A named person who will file. The statute contemplates an authorized officer or representative. Whether a managing agent may file on an association’s behalf is one of the questions the October rules should answer.
A Georgia registration tracker - status, the December 31 renewal, and the 30-day officer-change clock - is coming to HomeHerald before the portal opens.
Ten-Year Retention Is a Vendor Question, Not Just a Board Question
The retention rule in § 43-17A-2(g) is easy to skim past and expensive to get wrong. Assessment, fine, lien, and foreclosure records must be kept for ten years, explicitly including electronic records, at a Georgia office, and the Secretary of State may examine them.
Ten years is longer than most volunteer boards keep anything, longer than the average tenure of the treasurer holding the files, and longer than most software relationships. That makes it a fair question for any vendor, HomeHerald included: if we leave, what happens to ten years of ledger history, and can we export it? In HomeHerald, assessments, payments, fines, and adjustments are written as individual dated ledger lines per property rather than as a rolled-up balance, and community backups run automatically. A balance tells you nothing about what was charged in 2028.
That same itemized ledger is what lets a board or its attorney see exactly how a given payment was applied and check it against the § 43-17A-8 waterfall. The legal call on allocation belongs to your association and its counsel, not to your software vendor.
Who This Applies To - and What It Costs
SB 406 reaches Georgia property owners’ associations broadly, and the enforcement consequences fall on associations of every size. A 40-home subdivision that fines for parking violations has the same exposure as a 400-home community, because the ban is on collecting fines and fees at all, not on collecting a certain amount.
On the software side, a typical Georgia association fits HomeHerald’s Automate plan at $49 a month for up to 105 properties - see pricing. That covers documents, member and board records, dues and payments, financial reporting, insurance and contract tracking, meetings, voting, and the resident portal. Larger communities move up by property count, never per unit.
Every community can try HomeHerald free for 14 days with no credit card. Adding a card at any point starts a full 30-day free trial. There are no contracts and no setup fees.
Against a $100 annual filing, software is not the expensive part of SB 406. The expensive part is the lien you could not record, or the six months of fines you had to write off, because a document nobody could find held up a filing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does HomeHerald register my HOA with the Georgia Secretary of State?
No. HomeHerald does not file your registration, and the Secretary of State’s registration rules have not been published yet, so nobody knows the form’s exact fields. What HomeHerald does is keep the substance the statute names - governing documents, your officer roster, and financial statements you can run on demand - current and in one place, so filing is a short task instead of a document hunt. This page is not legal advice; confirm your obligations with your association attorney.
What happens if a Georgia HOA does not register by January 1, 2027?
Under SB 406, an association that has not registered, or its agent, may not collect fines or fees, may not file or record a lien, and may not initiate foreclosure. The restriction is self-executing, which means it applies whether or not anyone from the state contacts you. Regular assessments are treated differently, and an association may also elect in writing not to register.
Can a Georgia HOA choose not to register and still collect dues?
Yes. The Act allows an association to notify the Secretary of State in writing that it elects not to register. A nonregistered association keeps its regular, special, and specific assessments and gives up fines, fees, liens, and foreclosure. For a dues-only community that has never fined anyone, that can be a reasonable choice - but it should be a decision your board makes on the record, not a deadline it misses.
Does Georgia SB 406 require three years of financial statements to register?
No. The registration asks for a financial statement dated within the last year. The three-year figure comes from a separate provision, the owner-inspection right in O.C.G.A. § 43-17A-7, which lets an owner demand three years of finalized financial statements and bank statements in writing. They are two different obligations that are often confused.
Is any part of Georgia SB 406 already in effect?
Yes, one part. Section 7 took effect July 1, 2026: before collecting attorney’s fees, an association must send notice of the amounts owed by certified mail or statutory overnight delivery, allow a 30-day cure period, and provide an itemized list of the fees, and a court must find the fees reasonable by order. Per Section 9 of the Act, everything else - registration, the payment waterfall, retention, complaints, and the foreclosure changes - takes effect January 1, 2027.
Get Your Four Documents in One Place Before January
Upload a spreadsheet of your properties and a PDF of your governing documents, and your community is running in minutes. When the Georgia portal opens, the association’s name, its officers, its documents, and a current financial statement are all in one system instead of four inboxes.
Start free - no card needed - your first 14 days are free with no credit card, and adding a card any time starts a full 30-day free trial. No contracts, cancel anytime.
- Take the free SB 406 Readiness Check
- Georgia SB 406: the registration deadline, explained
- Georgia HOA laws in 2027
- Documents - members-only records hub
- Financial reporting and HOA accounting
- Dues, assessments, and payments
- Insurance and COI tracking
- Contracts and bids on file
- Official Meetings and notices
- Resident portal and login
- Florida HB 1203 compliance guide