Short answer: usually yes, within limits. In California your board can raise the regular assessment up to 20 percent in a year without asking you, and can levy special assessments up to 5 percent of the budget without asking you. But both powers come with a precondition almost nobody mentions, and it changes who is actually protected, and by what.
The short version
- Up to 20% more than last year's regular assessment: board's call, no member vote.
- Special assessments up to 5% of budgeted gross expenses: board's call, no member vote.
- Neither power exists at all unless the annual budget report reached you on time.
- The real protection is the disclosure, not the vote.
In this guide
What the board can do without you
What the law says
Civil Code § 5605(b): without membership approval, the board may not raise the regular assessment more than 20 percent over the immediately preceding fiscal year's, and may not levy special assessments that total more than 5 percent of budgeted gross expenses for the year. Beyond either limit, the increase needs a member vote.
Worked numbers. If your regular assessment was $400 a month, the board can adopt anything up to $480 on its own authority. If the association's budgeted gross expenses are $500,000, the board can levy up to $25,000 in special assessments during the year on its own authority. A $495 assessment, or a $40,000 special, goes to the membership.
The precondition everyone omits
Here is the detail most summaries skip, and it is not fine print. The board's power to raise assessments without a vote exists only if the association distributed the annual budget report on time: 30 to 90 days before the fiscal year begins (§ 5300, required by § 5605(a)).
No budget report in the window, no unilateral increase. The deadline and the authority are the same thing.
This is why the packet that lands in your mailbox each fall matters more than it looks. It is not a courtesy mailing. It is the legal act that gives the increase its authority.
The emergency exceptions
So it cannot be weaponized in either direction: § 5610 lets a board exceed the caps without a vote for true emergencies, court orders, and unforeseen repairs necessary for health and safety, with written findings. An emergency assessment is not a loophole for a budget that was simply built wrong, and a wrong budget is not an emergency.
The 20 percent shortcut
Now the part I most want owners to understand, because I have watched it happen from the board side. An association discovers a shortfall. Someone says: the law lets us raise 20 percent, so raise every unit 20 percent. It feels decisive, and it is wrong twice.
First error: the increase was never derived from a budget. The budget is the legal instrument. Assessments are its output, computed relative to what next year actually costs, not relative to what you paid last year. A flat 20 percent is a number picked because it was the biggest number available, which is the opposite of a derivation (the derivation, done properly, is in Show the Math: How HOA Assessments Are Actually Calculated).
Second error: flat-per-unit assumes every unit shares equally. Your CC&Rs may allocate costs so that a correct budget moves different units differently. Applying one flat percent to everyone silently re-decides the allocation your documents already decided.
If your increase is exactly 20 percent, ask to see the budget that produced it.
The correct order runs the other way: build the lines, total them, allocate per the documents, derive each unit's share, and only then check the result against the cap.
The real protection
It is natural to hear "no vote required" as "no protection." But the vote was never the main protection. The disclosure is. The law's actual design is: the board may act, but only after showing you the numbers, on a deadline, in a prescribed form. Your leverage as an owner is not vetoing the increase. It is reading the report the law already requires and asking the questions it should be able to answer: what changed, which lines moved, and how the total became my number.
If the report shows that math, thank your board. If it does not, the most useful thing you can do is show this to your community manager and your board, and ask for the derivation.
Sources: Cal. Civ. Code § 5605 (caps and precondition) · § 5300 (annual budget report) · § 5610 (emergency assessments).
