Florida Law Does Not Make Your Board Save for the Air Conditioning

A list that has cost boards more money than they realize

If you have sat through a reserve study presentation in the last three years, you have seen the list. Seven bullets on a slide, read out by an engineer while somebody in the third row asks what a primary structural member is. It is the most consequential list in Florida community association law, and most boards have never read the sentence that follows it.

Start with why the list exists. After the Champlain Towers South collapse, the Legislature built two things: a milestone inspection, which looks at whether the building is sound, and a reserve study, which looks at whether the association has the money to keep it that way. The inspection statute is blunt about its own scope. It examines load-bearing elements and primary structural members and systems, and it says outright that it is not there to determine whether the building complies with the Florida Building Code or the firesafety code. The reserve study is the money companion to that inspection.

So when a board notices that the air conditioning is missing from the reserve study, the first thing to understand is that this is not a drafting mistake. Those laws were written by people whose job was to keep buildings from falling down. Whether the lobby is 74 degrees in August was somebody else's problem.

That is defensible as policy. It is also a real hole in a lot of budgets, and it got slightly wider in 2025.

The seven components, exactly as the statute has them

Here is the list from section 718.112(2)(g)1 of the Florida Statutes, in the statute's own order.

1. Roof.
2. Structure, including load-bearing walls and other primary structural members and primary structural systems as those terms are defined in section 627.706.
3. Fireproofing and fire protection systems.
4. Plumbing.
5. Electrical systems.
6. Waterproofing and exterior painting.
7. Windows and exterior doors.
8. Heating, ventilation and air conditioning. Not listed.

One quick housekeeping note, because it is a good test of whether a document in front of your board is current. If your reserve study proposal, your management company's summary, or a vendor's one-pager lists nine items and includes "floor" and "foundation" as separate entries, that text was copied from the original 2022 version of the law. Those two were folded into "structure" in 2023 and have not appeared in the statute since. It is a small thing. It tells you how old the source is.

The eighth line, and the half of it that keeps getting dropped

The list does not end at seven. There is a catch-all, and it is the reason people believe the chiller is covered.

Read the bold part twice. That is a two-part test, and both halves have to be true at the same time.

We are an HVAC contractor. It would be very good for our business if that sentence stopped after the dollar figure, and we are telling you that it does not. A $400,000 chiller replacement does not land in your reserve study because it is expensive. It lands there if the person performing the study looks at it and concludes that letting it go will damage one of the seven named components. If someone tells your board otherwise, ask them to read you the rest of the sentence.

Note also who makes that call. The statute assigns it to the visual inspection portion of the study. Not the contractor's quote. Not the manager's spreadsheet. Not the board's opinion in the moment.

When cooling equipment genuinely does belong in the study

Sometimes it clears both halves, and in South Florida the reasons are not exotic:

• A cooling tower basin, sump or overflow that has been wetting the roof assembly or a shaft wall long enough to show it.
• Corrosion at the structural steel, dunnage or curbs supporting rooftop equipment, which is what salt air does to a roof-mounted plant over fifteen years.
• A chronically failing condensate line saturating a chase that also carries plumbing or electrical risers.
• A mechanical room or penthouse whose waterproofing has been compromised by equipment that has been leaking since before the current board was seated.

Notice what those four have in common. In each one, the cooling equipment is not the subject of the finding. The building is. The equipment is the cause. That is the structure of the statute working exactly as written, and it is also why a board cannot use the reserve study as its mechanical plan. A study built this way will tell you about a cooling tower that is ruining a roof. It will say nothing at all about a 22-year-old chiller sitting on a sound roof, running fine, four summers from the end of its life.

The declaration decides, not the price tag

This is the part we would put first if we could only give a board one paragraph.

The reserve study requirement expressly excludes any portion or component that is maintained by a party other than the association. And the reserve funding requirement reaches only the listed items for which the association is responsible pursuant to the declaration of condominium. So the threshold question is not what the equipment costs. It is what your declaration says the association owns.

In practice that splits cleanly most of the time. A building on a central chilled water plant: the chillers, cooling towers, pumps, risers and the mechanical rooms are the association's, full stop. A building where every unit has its own split system, heat pump or PTAC: that equipment is usually the owner's, and no dollar threshold anywhere in Chapter 718 changes it. The interesting buildings are the ones in between, with association-owned risers and owner-owned fan coils, or a common-element corridor system nobody has looked at since turnover. Those are worth having counsel read the declaration on before the budget meeting rather than after the failure.

Two changes in 2025 that made deferral easier

House Bill 913 took effect on July 1, 2025. It was a large bill, and two pieces of it matter here.

First, the threshold went up. The dollar figure that pulls an item into required reserves moved from $10,000 to $25,000, a two and a half times increase, and it is now indexed. The statute directs the Division of Florida Condominiums, Timeshares, and Mobile Homes to adjust it annually using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers released in January, and to post the adjusted minimum on its website by February 1 each year. The operative number is $25,000 or the posted inflation-adjusted amount, whichever is greater. We are deliberately not printing a current figure here, because the correct one is whatever the division has actually posted. Ask your reserve study provider to cite the number they used.

What that change does to mechanical work is quiet but real. Plenty of association-owned equipment lives in the $10,000 to $25,000 band: a couple of large air handlers, a pump replacement, a corridor unit, a controls upgrade. Those items were closer to the required-reserve conversation before July 2025 than they are now.

Second, there is now a way to pause. For a budget adopted on or before December 31, 2028, an association that has completed a milestone inspection within the previous two calendar years may temporarily pause reserve contributions for no more than two consecutive annual budgets, or reduce them, for the purpose of funding repairs the milestone inspection recommended. It takes the approval of a majority of the total voting interests of the association, which is a higher bar than a majority of the owners who show up. Developer-controlled associations, associations under owner control for less than a year, and bulk-buyer-controlled associations cannot use it, and a reserve study has to be performed before contributions resume.

Three separate mechanisms get confused with each other constantly, and boards act on the wrong one. Worth keeping straight:

One more correction while we are here, because it gets misattributed in almost every summary. The rule that stops owners from voting to fund no reserves or reduced reserves for the seven listed components did not come from HB 913. It came from House Bill 1021 in 2024, and it applies to budgets adopted on or after December 31, 2024.

None of this is a scandal, and we are not going to pretend it is. Every one of these provisions answered real distress: special assessments arriving at four and five figures per unit, owners on fixed incomes, buildings that needed structural money immediately. The Legislature decided to make structural money easier to find. What it did not do is put anything in the way of mechanical work sliding to the back of the line, because mechanical work was never at the front of the line to begin with.

The Legislature knows how to name air conditioning

Here is the detail that convinced us the omission is a choice rather than an oversight.

Chapter 718 names cooling equipment in several other places. The developer turnover inspection report under section 718.301(4)(q) lists heating and cooling systems by name. Conversion disclosures under section 718.616 list them too. And section 718.618 requires a developer converting a building to condominium ownership to fund a dedicated air-conditioning reserve account, calculated by statutory formula, with a shorter assumed remaining life applied to buildings within 1,000 yards of the seacoast.

Read that last one again if you manage a beachfront or Intracoastal property. Florida law contains a salt-air-adjusted air conditioning reserve requirement. It applies to a conversion developer. It does not follow the building into the structural reserve study that the association will be producing every ten years for the rest of the building's life.

Dates that still matter in 2026

On consequences, be precise with your board. The statute provides that if officers or directors willfully and knowingly fail to complete a reserve study, that failure is a breach of their fiduciary relationship to the unit owners. That is a meaningful exposure. It is not a per-day fine, and telling owners otherwise damages the board's credibility when someone looks it up.

What a board can do before the next budget meeting

Five things, in order, none of which require a vote:

1. Get the equipment list in writing. Every piece of association-owned mechanical equipment, with make, model, tonnage, install year and location. A surprising number of associations do not have this document, and a board cannot plan for a machine nobody has written down.
2. Have counsel confirm what the declaration assigns to the association. Before the dollars, settle the ownership.
3. Ask your reserve study provider one direct question: which mechanical items did you evaluate under the catch-all, and what did the visual inspection conclude about each one? A good provider will answer immediately.
4. Build the mechanical capital plan separately. Equipment, expected replacement year, current replacement cost, and the annual number that gets you there. It sits beside the reserve study, not inside it.
5. Put the two documents in front of owners together. The reserve study is what the state requires. The mechanical plan is what August requires. Boards that present both stop getting ambushed at the annual meeting.

If you want help with the first and fourth items, that is ordinary work for us. A mechanical condition assessment walks every piece of association-owned equipment, documents what is there and what shape it is in, and gives the board a written replacement schedule with real numbers, in a format that goes straight into a budget packet or next to a reserve study. Boards in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach have been using it to stop guessing.

For the wider picture, our high-rise capital planning primer covers how to sequence mechanical replacements across a decade, and The True Cost of Waiting covers what deferral actually costs on a South Florida roof.

One last note for the co-ops. House Bill 913 made parallel changes for cooperatives through section 719.106, so if your community is a co-op rather than a condominium, the structure of the analysis above holds, but the citations are different. Same advice: ask counsel, then count your equipment.