Fine schedules
The written list of penalties your board has to adopt, publish, and actually follow before a fine holds up.
A fine schedule is a board-adopted, written list of penalty amounts tied to specific violation categories, distributed to every owner before it is enforced. Some states require the schedule in writing and cap individual fine amounts; publishing it and applying it the same way to every owner is what protects the board from claims of arbitrary or selective enforcement.
What goes into a fine schedule
A fine schedule is not just a number a board president remembers. It is a document: a list of violation categories and the penalty attached to each, adopted by the board and given to owners before anyone is fined under it.
How that document has to be built, and what it can charge, varies by state. California requires the board to adopt and distribute a written schedule to every member, and generally caps most penalties at $100 per violation, with an exception for health and safety violations.
"The board shall adopt and distribute to each member... a schedule of the monetary penalties."
Source: California Civil Code section 5850, State of California
Florida takes a different shape: a fine can run up to $100 per violation per day, capped at $1,000 in the aggregate unless the governing documents say otherwise.
"An association may levy reasonable fines for violations of the declaration, association bylaws, or reasonable rules."
Source: Florida Statutes section 720.305, State of Florida
Neither number is a default. Confirm your own state's statute and your declaration before setting or relying on a figure.
Why publishing it protects the board
A fine schedule that sits in a board member's inbox does nothing for anyone. The trade body's own guidance treats consistent enforcement as an obligation, not a courtesy.
"The governing board or its appointed hearing panel should ensure that all violations of rules and regulations of which the association becomes aware are enforced in a consistent, uniform manner using common sense."
Source: Rules Development and Enforcement, Community Associations Institute
A published, previously communicated schedule is your evidence that a fine was not made up on the spot. Without one, an owner who is fined while others go unfined has a real opening: an association that tolerates a violation by one owner and then enforces the same violation against another can be told it cannot pick and choose. See owner defenses and waiver and abandonment arguments for how that plays out.
What a fine schedule does not decide
A fine schedule sets the amount. It does not, by itself, decide whether a repeat violation accrues a new fine every day, every week, or once, and it does not build an escalation ladder from warning to fine to suspension. Those pieces come from your state statute and your declaration, not from the schedule document itself. See continuing violations and repeat offenders.
It also does not remove the board's judgment about whether to enforce a given violation at all. A board can decide not to pursue a trivial or technical violation, provided that decision is deliberate and documented, not simply a rule nobody got around to enforcing.
Check yourself
Answer before you read the explanation, recalling it is what makes it stick.
Your board's published fine schedule sets a $50 fine for unauthorized basketball hoops. The board fined one owner but let three others with hoops, noticed months ago, go unfined. What can that owner argue?
A California board wants to fine an owner $150 for a single trash can violation, and has no board-adopted schedule on file. What is the most likely problem?
The fine schedule lists a flat $75 fine for parking violations but says nothing about what happens if the same car is there again next week. What should the board do?
Sources
- Rules Development and Enforcement, Community Associations Institute
- Three Common Covenant Enforcement Defenses: Waiver, Estoppel, and Selective Enforcement, Becker & Poliakoff
- Florida Statutes section 720.305, State of Florida
- California Civil Code sections 5850 and 5855, State of California
Related elsewhere in the Academy
Covenant Enforcement
Next, see how a fine gets levied step by step in Fines.
Whether your fine schedule must be published in writing, how it must be distributed, and whether a fine amount is capped by law all vary by state and by your governing documents.