Do HOA rules override state law or city ordinances?
Reviewed by the OurHOA team · Updated July 2026
Where HOA covenants sit in the legal pecking order, why they can be stricter than the law but never looser, and what happens when the two conflict.
The order of authority
There is a hierarchy here, and it is not really in dispute. Federal law sits on top, state law comes next, county and city ordinances after that, and your association's governing documents sit at the bottom. That last part is the piece people get wrong: CC&Rs are a private contract that runs with the land, not a fourth level of government. When a covenant and a law genuinely conflict, the law wins and the covenant is unenforceable to that extent. A board can vote on something unanimously, put it in writing, and mail it to every owner, and it still does not matter if a statute says otherwise.
Stricter is allowed, looser is not
The most useful way to hold this in your head is that government law sets the floor and your HOA builds on top of it. Say the city allows a six foot fence and your covenants cap it at four. That four foot limit is perfectly enforceable, because you agreed to it when you bought the house, and nobody has a legal right to the maximum the zoning code permits. What the association cannot do is go the other direction. If the city caps the fence at four feet, an approval letter from your architectural committee for six feet is worth nothing, and the city can still make you tear it down. An HOA can take away privileges you would otherwise have. It cannot hand you ones the law does not give.
State legislatures carve out exceptions constantly
The interesting cases are the ones where a legislature decided a particular restriction is bad public policy and wrote a statute knocking it out. Texas is a good example of how specific this gets: Property Code section 202.010 blocks an outright ban on solar energy devices, section 202.007 protects drought-tolerant landscaping and water-efficient irrigation, and section 202.012 protects display of the American, Texas, and armed forces flags. Some states say the quiet part directly, with West Virginia and Oregon both providing that a covenant restricting solar access is void and unenforceable in so many words. Colorado bars an association from prohibiting xeriscape or drought-tolerant ground cover on the part of the property the owner is responsible for. On the federal side, the Freedom to Display the American Flag Act of 2005 stops associations from banning the U.S. flag on an owner's own property, and the FCC's over-the-air reception devices rule limits what an HOA can say about small dishes and antennas in areas under the owner's exclusive use.
Two approvals, two separate tracks
For anything you build, you are usually dealing with two gatekeepers who do not talk to each other and are not checking the same things. The city or county is looking at code, setbacks, structural safety, and zoning. Your architectural committee is looking at whether the thing matches the neighborhood. Practice varies a lot, and some building departments will not issue a permit until you show HOA sign-off while others explicitly stay out of it, but the safe sequence for a real project is to get the HOA approval first, since it is the one more likely to send you back to the drawing board on design. Do not read a permit as HOA permission or an approval letter as a permit. They answer different questions, and a permit does not stop your neighbors from enforcing the covenants.
Why the old covenant still says the wrong thing
This is where most real disputes come from. When a state passes a law voiding a category of restriction, nobody drives around re-recording every set of covenants in the county. The offending paragraph is still sitting there in a document from 1994, and a well-meaning volunteer board reads it and enforces it, because enforcing what the documents say is exactly what they were told to do. So you can absolutely get a violation letter over solar panels, a clothesline, or a xeriscaped front yard in a state where the underlying restriction has been unenforceable for a decade. The board is not necessarily acting in bad faith. The paper is just stale, and nothing automatically cleans it up.
What to do when you think a rule conflicts
As an owner, look up the specific statute before you argue, because 'I think that is illegal' goes nowhere and a citation to a code section changes the conversation immediately. Put the reference in writing to the board, ask them to confirm whether they intend to enforce the provision, and keep the response. Most boards back down once someone shows them the law, and the ones that do not have handed you a clean record for a state complaint or an attorney. As a board, the move is to inventory the covenants against current state law every few years with your association's attorney, then flag or formally amend the provisions that no longer hold. Keeping your governing documents, adopted rules, and the dates you changed them in one place owners can actually pull up, which is the kind of recordkeeping OurHOA is built for, is what keeps a board from enforcing a paragraph the legislature repealed out from under it.
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These guides are general education for HOA boards and residents, not legal, tax, or financial advice. Rules vary by state and by your community's governing documents - check with a professional for your situation.