If you fall behind on your HOA dues, your association has a faster and meaner path to your house than your mortgage company does. And associations are using it more than they used to.
There were 6,376 properties with HOA-related foreclosure filings in the first quarter of 2026, according to ATTOM data reported by The Wall Street Journal. That’s nearly 40% higher than two years earlier, and it’s climbing faster than mortgage foreclosures are. For scale, total US foreclosure filings hit 118,727 in the quarter, up 26% from a year earlier and the highest since early 2020.
The liens come first. Homeowners associations filed 284,933 of them against residents in 2025, up 8.6% from 262,446 the year before, per real estate data firm Benutech. That’s roughly one lien every 90 seconds. Florida, Texas, California, Georgia and Arizona account for more than half of them.
Why now? Because your board is broke too. The Foundation for Community Association Research found 93% of surveyed associations saw property and casualty insurance premiums rise, with more than half of those increases landing between 11% and 25% and about one in ten exceeding 100%. Add deferred repairs and post-Surfside reserve rules, and the informal grace period your board used to extend is gone. “HOAs are being forced into more aggressive collections to avoid their own financial collapse,” Benutech co-founder Brian Fox told the Journal. Accounts now go to a collections attorney fast.
That’s where a small number turns into a big one. A housing counselor at Jacksonville Area Legal Aid described a client who fell about $3,000 behind in dues and watched it snowball to nearly $7,000 once late fees, penalties and legal costs stacked on top. The association threatened foreclosure unless the balance was paid in full.
Here’s what nobody prices in when they buy. About 74% of HOA-governed communities are underfunded on reserves, based on an analysis of more than 100,000 reserve studies. A community that’s 70% funded has saved 70 cents for every dollar of wear its shared roofs, elevators and plumbing have already accumulated. When that bill lands, it lands as a special assessment, and in many states a board can levy one below a certain threshold without a membership vote. Most state disclosure rules do not require sellers to tell you the reserve funding level, and mortgage underwriting does not count a future special assessment against your debt-to-income ratio. You inherit a liability you were never shown.
So do this the week a notice arrives, not the month after. Call the association and ask for a written payment plan before the account is handed to an attorney, because attorney fees are the part that doubles the balance. Do not ignore the letter. Unpaid special assessments usually carry the same lien authority as regular dues and run the same foreclosure timeline.
Then pull your CC&Rs and bylaws and check whether the assessment was properly authorized. In some states, an assessment above a set share of the annual budget requires a vote of the membership. If the procedure was wrong, you have grounds to push back, and a community association attorney in your state can tell you in one call whether you do.
And if you’re shopping: ask for the reserve study and the funding percentage before you write an offer, the same way you’d ask about the roof. Run the full carrying cost, dues included, on our mortgage calculator, and see the rest at our mortgages hub.
Ignoring an HOA letter is dumb math. The balance is never smaller than it is the day it arrives.
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