Texas Property Code Chapter 209, the Texas Residential Property Owners Protection Act, governs what a mandatory-membership homeowners' association can do once an owner falls behind on assessments — the lien it can place, the notices it owes before filing that lien or foreclosing on it, and the foreclosure procedure itself. This is a different Property Code chapter from the one behind TREC Form 36-11 (the HOA Addendum, tied to § 207.003's "Subdivision Information"): that form covers what a buyer is told about the HOA before closing; this chapter covers what happens after closing if assessments go unpaid. This page describes what the statute says. It is not legal advice — an actual delinquency, lien, or foreclosure should go through a Texas attorney, not this summary.
Chapter 209 applies to a residential subdivision whose declaration authorizes the association to collect regular or special assessments, and to an association with mandatory membership for all or a majority of owners. It does not apply to condominiums.
Before a lien can even be filed
An HOA can't file an assessment lien the moment a payment is missed. § 209.0094 requires two separate delinquency notices first: a first notice by first-class mail or e-mail, then a second notice by certified mail (return receipt requested) sent no earlier than 30 days after the first. The association then has to wait until the 90th day after that second notice before it may file the lien. In practice that's a minimum runway of several months between a missed payment and a recorded lien — not counting whatever grace period the association's own dedicatory instrument builds in on top of the statute.
The homeowner's cure and payment-plan rights
Any HOA of more than 14 lots is required to adopt guidelines allowing an owner to pay off a delinquent assessment through an alternative payment plan, without extra monetary penalties beyond reasonable administration costs and interest. The plan must run at least 3 months; the association isn't required to extend one past 18 months, isn't required to offer a second plan within 12 months of a prior one, and can refuse an owner who already defaulted on a plan within the last two years. If the association later hires a third-party collection agent, it must first give the owner 45 days' written notice and a chance to cure before the account is turned over.
What can't trigger a foreclosure at all
Under § 209.009, an HOA cannot foreclose an assessment lien if the underlying debt consists solely of (1) fines, (2) attorney's fees tied solely to those fines, or (3) charges added to the account as an assessment for things like unreimbursed records-request costs or a failed vote recount. Foreclosure has to be backed by actual unpaid assessments — an association can't use the foreclosure remedy to collect a fine-only balance.
The real limit: most HOA foreclosures require a court, unlike a mortgage
This is where Chapter 209 diverges sharply from an ordinary purchase-money mortgage lien, which a lender can typically foreclose non-judicially — no lawsuit, no judge — under Property Code Chapter 51. An HOA does not get that same shortcut by default. Under § 209.0092(a), an association may not foreclose an assessment lien unless it first obtains a court order through an expedited-foreclosure application — a streamlined court process modeled on the same rule the Texas Supreme Court adopted for home-equity foreclosures. There are exactly two ways around that court-order requirement:
- The specific owner waives it. Under § 209.0092(c), expedited foreclosure isn't required if the individual owner agrees in writing, at the time the foreclosure is sought, to waive it. Critically, the statute says that waiver cannot be required as a condition of a title transfer — meaning an association can't bake a standing waiver into the original declaration or deed and treat every future owner as having pre-waived it. It has to be a case-specific waiver, signed when foreclosure is actually being pursued against that owner.
- The association chooses full judicial foreclosure instead. Under § 209.0092(d), an association can skip the expedited process and instead sue, obtaining a full court judgment foreclosing the lien and ordering the sale under Texas Rules of Civil Procedure 309 and 646a.
Before filing for either kind of foreclosure, the association also has to give written notice of the delinquency to any inferior lienholder of record (a subordinate deed of trust holder) and can't file until the 61st day after mailing that notice — giving that lienholder a 60-day cure window of its own. And the association's power to foreclose at all isn't automatic: a provision granting or removing the right to foreclose a lien for unpaid HOA amounts requires a 67% vote of the total votes allocated to owners in the association.
Attorney's-fee cap on a nonjudicial sale
If a nonjudicial foreclosure does happen (i.e., after a valid case-specific waiver under § 209.0092(c)), § 209.008(f) caps the attorney's fees the association can fold into that sale at the greater of one-third of the actual costs and assessments (excluding attorney's fees, plus interest and court costs) or $2,500. That specific cap doesn't limit an association's ability to recover attorney's fees through other means, like a judicial fee award.
After the sale: notice and the 180-day right to redeem
A foreclosure sale doesn't end the owner's rights. The association must notify the lot owner and every lienholder of record within 30 days of the sale (certified mail, return receipt requested) and record an affidavit of that notice within 30 days after sending it. From the date that notice is mailed, the owner has 180 days to redeem the property — a lienholder of record can also redeem, but only starting 90 days in, and only if the owner hasn't already done so. If the property is occupied, the purchaser can't just move to evict; they have to bring a forcible entry and detainer action under Property Code Chapter 24 to get possession.
The redemption price isn't just the delinquent balance. If the association itself bought the property at the sale, the owner has to pay back all amounts due at the time of sale, interest (at whatever rate the declaration specifies, or 10% a year if it's silent), the association's foreclosure and conveyance costs including reasonable attorney's fees, any assessments levied after the sale, and reasonable holding costs like mortgage payments, repairs, and leasing expenses the association incurred. If a third party bought the property instead, the redemption math splits into a separate payment to the association and a separate payment to the purchaser (covering the purchase price, deed recording fee, and post-sale taxes the purchaser paid). Redeemed property comes back subject to all the liens and encumbrances that existed on it before the foreclosure.
Homestead status doesn't block this
Chapter 209 itself is silent on homestead protection — the rule comes from case law, not this statute. The Texas Supreme Court held in Inwood North Homeowners' Ass'n v. Harris, 736 S.W.2d 632 (Tex. 1987), that Texas homestead law does not shield a property from HOA assessment-lien foreclosure when the declaration creating the lien was recorded before the property became that owner's homestead — the lien is treated as a pre-existing contractual lien running with the land, not a forced sale for an ordinary debt. Whether a particular declaration predates a particular owner's homestead claim is a fact question tied to that property's own chain of title, not something this chapter answers uniformly.