If your Florida condominium building is three or more habitable stories tall, your association must complete a structural integrity reserve study — a SIRS — under Fla. Stat. 718.112(2)(g), and it must actually fund the reserves the study calls for. For associations existing on or before July 1, 2022, the deadline was December 31, 2025, with a hard outer limit of December 31, 2026 for buildings completing the SIRS alongside a milestone inspection. And for any budget adopted on or after December 31, 2024, unit owners can no longer vote to waive or reduce reserves for the structural components the SIRS covers.
That's the short answer — and if your board hasn't acted yet, 2026 is the year the runway ends. This guide walks through the law as it stands after four consecutive years of amendments, then gets practical: what a SIRS costs for a small building, what the first funded budget looks like in real dollars, and how to explain the fee increase to owners without a riot at the annual meeting. One caveat up front: I'm not an attorney and this article is not legal advice. These statutes have changed every legislative session since 2022, so confirm anything consequential with a Florida community-association attorney before you act.
Where These Requirements Came From
On June 24, 2021, Champlain Towers South collapsed in Surfside, killing 98 people. The building was 40 years old, engineers had flagged serious structural deterioration years earlier, and the association had only recently approved a $15 million special assessment for repairs it had debated for years. Florida's response was the fastest rewrite of condominium law in state history — delivered in four installments:
- SB 4-D (May 2022): Created mandatory milestone inspections (Fla. Stat. 553.899) and the SIRS requirement, and scheduled the end of reserve waivers for structural components. The original version required milestone inspections at 25 years for buildings within three miles of the coastline and set the "other items" threshold at $10,000.
- SB 154 (2023): The glitch-fix bill. It replaced the blanket coastal rule with local discretion — building officials may require inspection at 25 years based on environmental conditions such as proximity to salt water — clarified the SIRS component list (adding exterior doors alongside windows), and broadened who may perform the study.
- HB 1021 (2024): Required an officer or director to sign an affidavit acknowledging receipt of the completed study, and made willfully and knowingly failing to complete a SIRS a breach of the officers' and directors' fiduciary duty.
- HB 913 (2025): The affordability correction, effective July 1, 2025. It extended the SIRS completion deadline to December 31, 2025, raised the "other items" threshold from $10,000 to $25,000 (indexed to inflation annually), and opened new funding paths: loans, lines of credit, pooled reserve accounting, and a two-year pause to prioritize milestone repairs.
The practical consequence: most online summaries are describing an outdated version of the law. Anything written before mid-2025 misses HB 913 entirely. When in doubt, read the current text of Fla. Stat. 718.112 and Fla. Stat. 553.899 on the Legislature's own site, and see our state law hub for how Florida compares to other states.
Does Your Building Need a SIRS?
The test is height, not unit count. Residential condominium buildings that are three or more habitable stories tall must have a SIRS; a parallel provision in Chapter 719 covers cooperatives. A 12-unit, four-story building on the beach is covered. A 200-unit community of two-story garden buildings is not — though it still owes ordinary reserve planning, which our reserve fund guide covers in depth.
The word "habitable" was clarified by HB 913 and matters for small buildings. Height is measured in habitable stories as defined under the Florida Building Code, so a non-habitable level — an open-air parking deck under two residential floors, for example — may not count toward the three. This is exactly the kind of edge case worth a one-hour consult with your attorney or a written determination from your local building department before you spend money either way.
Also note what the waiver ban does not touch: reserves for non-SIRS items like pools, paving, and clubhouses under 718.112(2)(f) can still be waived or reduced by a majority vote of owners. The mandatory-funding rule applies only to the SIRS structural components in buildings three habitable stories and up.
Milestone Inspections and the SIRS Are Two Different Things
Boards conflate these constantly, and vendors sometimes encourage the confusion. They are separate legal requirements that happen to cover the same buildings.
The milestone inspection (Fla. Stat. 553.899) is a structural safety inspection. It applies to condo and co-op buildings three or more habitable stories tall and is due by December 31 of the year the building turns 30, measured from the certificate of occupancy — or 25 if your local enforcement agency requires it based on environmental conditions like salt water exposure. It then repeats every 10 years. The catch-up schedule for older buildings: those that turned 30 before July 1, 2022 were due by December 31, 2024, and those turning 30 between July 1, 2022 and December 31, 2024 were due by December 31, 2025.
The inspection runs in two phases. Phase one is a visual examination by a licensed architect or engineer, due within 180 days after the local enforcement agency's written notice. If the inspector finds no substantial structural deterioration, you're done — no phase two. If deterioration is found, phase two involves destructive or non-destructive testing, and repairs must commence within 365 days of the phase two report. An association that fails to comply forces the local enforcement agency to review whether the building is unsafe for human occupancy — language you do not want attached to your property records.
The SIRS (Fla. Stat. 718.112(2)(g)) is a financial planning study with an inspection inside it. It prices out the remaining useful life and replacement cost of the structural components and tells the association how much to reserve each year. It repeats at least every 10 years. The two interact in one useful way: an association whose milestone inspection is due on or before December 31, 2026 may complete the SIRS simultaneously with it — but in no event later than December 31, 2026. Bundling both with a single engineering firm is usually the cheapest path, since the site visit does double duty.
What the SIRS Must Cover
The statute enumerates the components. Your SIRS must study, at minimum:
- Roof
- Structure, including load-bearing walls and other primary structural members
- Fireproofing and fire protection systems
- Plumbing
- Electrical systems
- Waterproofing and exterior painting
- Windows and exterior doors (exterior doors added by SB 154 in 2023)
- Any other item with a deferred maintenance expense or replacement cost exceeding $25,000 — adjusted annually for inflation, with the division posting the current figure each February — whose failure would negatively affect the items above
For each item, the study states remaining useful life and replacement or deferred-maintenance cost, then recommends an annual reserve contribution. Since HB 913, it must also include a baseline funding plan — a schedule that keeps the reserve cash balance above zero rather than fully funding every component on a straight line. The study must be performed or verified by an engineer licensed under chapter 471, an architect licensed under chapter 481, or a person credentialed as a reserve specialist or professional reserve analyst by the Community Associations Institute or the Association of Professional Reserve Analysts. If you want intuition for typical component lives and costs before the professionals arrive — say, why an asphalt shingle roof carries an 18-to-25-year life while a flat modified-bitumen roof runs shorter — browse our component library.
The End of Reserve Waivers — and the New Flexibility
For decades, Florida condo owners routinely voted each year to waive reserves and keep dues low. That era is over for structural components. For budgets adopted on or after December 31, 2024, members of a unit-owner-controlled association that must obtain a SIRS may not vote to provide no reserves, or less than the statute requires, for SIRS items.
What the Legislature took away in waivers, it partially returned in flexibility. Under the current statute, an association may:
- Fund SIRS reserves with a special assessment, a line of credit, or a loan — with approval by a majority of the total voting interests — instead of relying solely on monthly assessments.
- Pause or reduce SIRS reserve contributions for up to two consecutive annual budgets after completing a milestone inspection — also with approval by a majority of the total voting interests — to prioritize the repairs the inspection identified. This option applies only to budgets adopted on or before December 31, 2028.
- Use pooled (cash-flow) reserve accounting and the baseline funding plan, which typically lowers the required annual contribution versus straight-line component funding.
- Invest reserve funds in certificates of deposit or depository accounts at banks and credit unions without a unit-owner vote.
The loan and line-of-credit options are genuinely new territory — before HB 913, borrowing to "fund" reserves was legally murky. They're best understood as bridge tools: they smooth the shock of the first funded years, but the debt service still lands on owners eventually, much like the financing tradeoffs in our special assessment guide.
What It Costs: A Worked Example for a 24-Unit Building
First, the study itself. Published Florida provider price surveys put SIRS pricing at roughly $5,500 to $16,500 or more, with small three- or four-story buildings toward the bottom of that band and large or complex properties at the top. A milestone inspection is a separate engagement — published phase one figures run about $5,000 to $25,000 for small buildings and considerably more for high-rises — but bundled milestone-plus-SIRS pricing is widely offered and usually costs less than contracting the two engagements separately.
The bigger number is the funding obligation the study creates. Take a hypothetical 24-unit, four-story building in St. Petersburg, built in 1985, with essentially nothing in structural reserves. A straight-line SIRS might look like this:
- Roof (flat modified bitumen): $180,000 replacement, 8 years remaining — $22,500 per year
- Waterproofing and exterior painting: $96,000 per cycle, every 8 years — $12,000 per year
- Windows and exterior doors: $240,000, 12 years remaining — $20,000 per year
- Plumbing (repipe): $150,000, 15 years remaining — $10,000 per year
- Fire protection systems: $30,000, 10 years remaining — $3,000 per year
- Electrical systems: $50,000, 20 years remaining — $2,500 per year
Total: $70,000 per year, or about $243 per unit per month on top of the existing operating budget. That's the sticker shock. But note two levers before anyone panics. Pooled accounting usually lowers that figure, because dollars saved for the 15-year plumbing project can cover the 8-year roof in the interim. And the baseline funding plan can lower the early years further, provided the cash balance never dips below zero. Run your own components through our reserve fund calculator to see annual contribution scenarios, and check where you stand today with the percent-funded calculator. These tools are for board education and sanity-checking between studies — they complement a professional SIRS, they don't satisfy the statute.
Then compare the alternative. Doing nothing means the day that roof fails, 24 owners split $180,000 — a $7,500-per-unit hit, due in months rather than spread over eight years. You can model exactly that scenario in the special assessment calculator; it's a persuasive exhibit at a town hall.
Penalties, Officer Duties, and Real-World Enforcement
The statute now says it plainly: if the officers or directors willfully and knowingly fail to complete a SIRS, that failure is a breach of their fiduciary relationship to the unit owners — the same legal hook that supports personal claims against board members. An officer or director must also sign an affidavit acknowledging receipt of the completed study, and the Division of Florida Condominiums, Timeshares, and Mobile Homes has regulatory jurisdiction over associations that don't comply.
The market enforces faster than the state does. Since Fannie Mae's post-Surfside lender requirements took effect in 2022, lenders scrutinize deferred maintenance, inspection status, and reserve adequacy before writing conforming loans in condo buildings. A building that can't produce a milestone inspection and a funded SIRS can become effectively unfinanceable — which means every owner trying to sell discovers the problem at the worst possible moment. Insurers ask the same questions at renewal.
The Termination Pressure on Older Buildings
There's a quieter storyline here for older small condos. South Florida real estate press (Bisnow, among others) has documented associations facing six-figure-per-unit repair bills going to developers to ask for buyouts — a reversal from 2021-2022, when developers came knocking. Special assessments of that scale in aging coastal buildings have pushed some communities toward termination under Fla. Stat. 718.117 as the least-bad option. The courts have complicated the developer path: in the Biscayne 21 litigation, Florida appellate courts sided with holdout owners against a developer's attempt to lower the termination approval threshold retroactively, and the Florida Supreme Court declined to take up the appeal in October 2025.
For a small board, the lesson isn't that termination looms — it's that a building with a completed SIRS and a credible funding plan negotiates from strength in every scenario: with buyers, lenders, insurers, and yes, developers. Unfunded buildings negotiate from weakness.
A Practical Playbook for a Small Self-Managed Board
- Confirm applicability. Pull your certificate of occupancy date and count habitable stories. If the answer is ambiguous, get it in writing from the building department or your attorney.
- Get three quotes, and bundle. If your milestone inspection is due on or before December 31, 2026, ask each firm to price the milestone and SIRS together. Verify credentials — licensed PE, registered architect, or CAI/APRA reserve designation — and ask about turnaround time up front, because the inspection market remains busy.
- Choose your funding architecture before budget season. Pooled accounting plus a baseline funding plan is usually the gentlest lawful ramp. If the milestone inspection found repairs, evaluate the two-year pause so repair dollars come first.
- Adopt the budget with SIRS line items broken out. Owners accept a $243 increase far better when they can see $78 of it is the roof. Our budget planning guide covers the mechanics of adoption and notice.
- Decide the funding mix. Monthly assessments alone, or a line of credit or loan to smooth year one? Remember the special assessment, credit line, and loan options each require approval by a majority of the total voting interests — not just a majority of those who show up.
- Paper the compliance. The receipt affidavit signed, study filed with the official records, copies available to owners, and calendar reminders for the 10-year cycles.
Communicating the Increase to Owners
Every hard conversation I've seen go well followed the same script: show the statute, show the math, show the alternative. Hold a town hall before the budget meeting, not after. Explain that the waiver vote owners took for twenty years is no longer legal for structural items — the board isn't choosing this. Present the per-unit monthly number next to the special-assessment number it prevents. For owners on fixed incomes, explain the loan and line-of-credit options that spread the cost, and be honest that debt has a price too. Put it all in a one-page FAQ, because the owners who don't attend are the ones who complain loudest later.
Once the SIRS lands, the schedule has to live somewhere other than a PDF in a drawer. Our Reserve Planner keeps each SIRS component's balance, funding progress, and next replacement date in one place, so the board's budget and the study stay in sync year after year. It complements the professional study rather than replacing it — under Florida law, only a licensed engineer, architect, or credentialed reserve professional can produce the SIRS itself.
A final word: this article summarizes Fla. Stat. 718.112(2)(g) and 553.899 as of mid-2026, but the Legislature has amended this framework every year since 2022 and local enforcement practices vary by county. Before your board relies on any deadline, exemption, or funding option described here, have a Florida community-association attorney confirm how the current statute applies to your building.