Florida Condominium Official Records: What Your Association Must Keep, and for How Long

Jason Hamilton Mikes, JD, MBA
Founder & Managing Shareholder

• Published September 25, 2026
• Reviewed by Jason Hamilton Mikes, JD, MBA, September 26, 2026
• Florida Statutes as of July 1, 2026
• Applies to: Condominiums

Florida law does not let a condominium board decide what its records are. Section 718.111(12)(a) sets out the categories, and anything falling inside one of them becomes an official record the moment it is received or created. The association keeps the first six categories permanently, most of the rest for seven years, and a handful for one or fifteen years. All of it stays in Florida, and any owner can ask to see it.

An official record is defined by category, not by the board

The most common misunderstanding about condominium records is that the board decides what goes in the file. It does not. Section 718.111(12)(a) says the association must maintain the listed records from the inception of the association, and the list is written by category rather than by document name. If a piece of paper or a file on a server fits one of the categories, it is an official record, and the association is obliged to have it, keep it for the stated period, and produce it when an owner asks.

That matters because a great many association documents are created by somebody other than the association. A vendor sends a proposal. An engineer delivers a report. A manager runs a ledger inside proprietary software. The insurance agent holds the policy. In each case the record belongs to the association, and the fact that it physically sits with a third party is not a defense to a records request. Boards that sign a management agreement without a clause covering the return of records in a usable format discover this at the worst possible moment.

The last category in the list is deliberately open ended. It captures all other written records of the association related to the operation of the association that are not specifically listed. A board should read that as a warning rather than a loophole. When an item plausibly relates to how the association operates, the safer assumption is that it is a record.

The list in section 718.111(12)(a)

The 2026 edition lists twenty-one categories. Running down them once a year at a board meeting is one of the cheapest compliance exercises available to an association.

Two entries give boards more trouble than the rest. The roster at (a)7. contains information that is itself protected from inspection, so the roster cannot simply be handed over. The accounting records at (a)11. are broad enough to reach nearly every financial document the association touches, including material a manager may regard as internal working product.

What the 2024 and 2025 amendments added

The list grew in two consecutive sessions, and a records policy written before 2024 is now incomplete.

• Bank statements and ledgers are now named inside the accounting records category rather than left to argument. An association that produces a summary financial report and stops has not answered a request for accounting records.
• Video recordings of meetings conducted by video conference are official records under (a)6. This is the consequence of allowing directors to attend and vote by real-time video. The recording is not a courtesy; it is a document the association must keep.
• Affidavits required by Chapter 718 are a category of their own at (a)20., which means an owner may request them and the association must be able to produce them for the retention period.
• Building permits at (a)18. and director education certificates at (a)19. are now expressly listed. On the certificates, note who has to hold the paper: the association, not the individual director.
• Affirmative acknowledgments at (a)17. are the owner acknowledgments required before the association changes how it delivers assessment invoices or statements of account. They are both a required record and, separately, exempt from inspection.

How long each record must be kept

There is a default and there are exceptions. The default is seven years. The exceptions are specific and worth posting on the wall of the management office.

Read the one-year periods carefully. They are floors, not ceilings, and destroying a record the day the period expires is often a poor idea. Election materials are the clearest example. The year in (a)12. runs from the election, but an election challenge, a recall or an arbitration can still be live when that year ends, and destroying ballots while a dispute is pending is a different problem entirely. When anything is in dispute or reasonably anticipated, the retention schedule stops and a litigation hold starts.

The fifteen-year periods exist because those documents support decisions with a long tail. A structural integrity reserve study drives reserve funding for a decade, and a milestone inspection report under section 553.899 sets the repair obligations that follow it. Both are also the first documents a buyer's lender, an insurer or an opposing expert will ask for.

Where the records have to be kept

Section 718.111(12)(b) requires the records to be maintained within the state and in an organized manner. It then sets the access obligation: the records must be made available to a unit owner within 45 miles of the condominium property, or within the county in which the condominium property is located, within 10 working days after the board or its designee receives a written request. The 45-mile requirement does not apply to an association governing a timeshare condominium.

Three consequences follow. An out-of-state management company cannot be the only place the records live. A storage unit two counties away does not satisfy the access obligation even if it is inside Florida. And the association can meet the obligation by making the records available electronically, which for most associations is now the sensible answer. The statute permits records to be offered over the Internet or viewed in electronic format on a computer screen with printing on request, which is the subject of our guide to keeping condominium records electronically.

Organized manner is not defined, and the Division has not issued a rule setting a standard. In practice it means the board should be able to locate any listed category without searching unlabeled boxes. If producing three years of invoices takes a weekend, the records are not organized, and the ten-working-day clock will not care.

Building a retention schedule the association can follow

A retention schedule is worth adopting as a written board policy rather than leaving to the manager's habit. It survives turnover in both the board and the management company, and it is evidence of good faith if the association is ever accused of destroying something.

1. Map the twenty-one categories to where each one lives today, physically or electronically. Most associations discover at this step that two or three categories have no home at all.
2. Set the retention period for each category from the statute, not from a generic corporate schedule. Seven years is the default, but the fifteen-year and one-year categories are the ones that create liability.
3. Name one custodian, usually the manager with the secretary as backup. Diffused responsibility is how records go missing between management companies.
4. Write the destruction step down. Nothing is destroyed except on the schedule, in writing, and never while a dispute, claim or arbitration is open or reasonably anticipated.
5. Review the schedule annually against the current text of section 718.111(12). The list has grown in each of the last three sessions.

Our records retention checklist tracks the categories and periods in the table above and can serve as the starting point for a board policy.

Where we recommend the records live

A retention schedule answers how long. It does not answer where, and where is what decides whether the association can actually produce on the tenth working day. Our recommendation is that every category in the retention table above that is not exempt from inspection be scanned, indexed and posted in the owner-only section of the association's website. For a condominium with 25 or more units the site already exists, because section 718.111(12)(g) requires one, and the posting list in that paragraph is a minimum rather than a limit on what the association may put there. Nothing stops a board from keeping the seven years of bank statements and the fifteen years of inspection reports behind the same login as the budget, and there are two reasons to do it. An owner who can open a record stops asking for it, and a record the association can produce in a minute is a record it can prove it kept.

Two qualifications belong with that advice. First, the website does not replace the response obligation. A record that is not posted still has to be made available within 10 working days of a written request, and the checklist required by section 718.111(12)(c)1.b. still has to state what was made available and what was not. Second, nothing described in section 718.111(12)(c)5.a.–h. goes on the site, and under subparagraph (g)3. protected information inside a document that is posted must be redacted before posting. The roster at (a)7. is the standing example. Name, unit designation and mailing address are generally produced. The e-mail addresses, telephone numbers and emergency contact information are exempt and have to come out before the roster goes anywhere near a website.

What happens when a record does not exist

A request for a record the association never created is different from a refusal, but it is not costless. The statute obliges the association to maintain the listed records. If the record should exist and does not, the failure is in the maintenance rather than in the response, and the association is exposed on the underlying obligation even if it answers promptly.

The right response is to say so clearly and in writing. Section 718.111(12)(c)1.b. requires the association, in response to a written request, to simultaneously provide a checklist of the records made available and of the records requested that were not made available, and to keep that checklist for seven years. A checklist stating that a record does not exist is an honest answer and creates a dated document showing what was said. Silence, or a production with no explanation of what is missing, invites the argument that the association withheld the record. The mistakes boards make responding to requests and the narrow list of records exempt from inspection are covered separately.

Where the missing record is one the association was required to create, tell counsel before answering. Sometimes the document exists in a form nobody recognized, such as a signed proposal that is functionally the contract. Sometimes it genuinely was never made, and the board's next decision is how to reconstruct the substance going forward rather than how to word the letter.

For community association managers: see An owner asked for association records: what does the manager do next? and Official Records Compared in the Manager Resource Center.

Contact Hamilton Mikes

Hamilton Mikes helps condominium boards and managers in Lee, Collier and Charlotte Counties build retention schedules that match the current statute, close the gaps a management transition exposes, and answer requests without creating liability. Call 239-594-7227 or visit our Official Records page.