Eight consecutive years: the condo board term limit, and how to count it.

By Carlos Castellano · Current as of August 13, 2026

Every annual meeting produces the same question about the director who has been on the board longer than anyone can remember: is he allowed to run again? Until this year the question was mostly theoretical. Florida caps condominium directors at eight consecutive years, but only service on or after July 1, 2018 counts toward the total, and eight years from that date arrives in 2026. This is the first election cycle in which the cap can actually keep a name off the ballot. Here is what the statute says, the two ways past it, the arithmetic that trips boards up, and the parts the law genuinely leaves open.

What the statute actually says

The whole rule is two sentences in Section 718.112(2)(d)3., Florida Statutes. The first sets the cap and its two exceptions:

“A board member may not serve more than 8 consecutive years unless approved by an affirmative vote of unit owners representing two-thirds of all votes cast in the election or unless there are not enough eligible candidates to fill the vacancies on the board at the time of the vacancy.”

The second says which service counts:

“Only board service that occurs on or after July 1, 2018, may be used when calculating a board member’s term limit.”

Everything below follows from those two sentences. Notice what is not in them: no definition of a year, no rule for partial terms, and no procedure for putting the two-thirds question to owners. Those gaps are real and we come back to them.

Why 2026 is the first year this bites

This is arithmetic, not opinion. The earliest service that can be counted is service on July 1, 2018. Eight consecutive years of countable service therefore cannot be complete before July 1, 2026. A director who has sat continuously since that date or earlier is in the first group that can reach the cap at all, and the annual meetings held after it are the first at which a board has to answer the question for real.

The corollary matters just as much, and it is the part long-serving directors are relieved to hear. Service before July 1, 2018 does not count, no matter how much of it there is. A director who joined the board in 2004 and never left is in exactly the same position as one who joined in June 2018. The statute does not grandfather anyone out; it starts everyone’s clock on the same day.

It is eight years, not four terms

Boards routinely count terms, and on a two-year cycle that produces the wrong answer. The statute counts years of service. The same subparagraph confirms that terms are not a fixed length: “Board members may serve terms longer than 1 year if permitted by the bylaws or articles of incorporation.”

So a board whose bylaws set two-year terms reaches eight years after four of them, and a board on one-year terms after eight. If your association staggers terms, each director is counted separately on his or her own service, not on the board’s election cycle. Count years. Then check the count against the minutes rather than against anyone’s memory.

The two-thirds vote is of votes cast, not of all owners

This is the sentence most often repeated wrong, and the error runs in the direction that costs a board a director it could have kept. The common summary is that owners representing two-thirds of the membership, or two-thirds of all voting interests, must approve. That is not what the statute says. It says approval by an affirmative vote of unit owners representing “two-thirds of all votes cast in the election.”

The difference is large. In a 200-unit condominium where 60 owners cast ballots, two-thirds of the votes cast is 40. Two-thirds of all voting interests would be 134, a number an ordinary election turnout will never produce. Read the higher threshold into the statute and you will conclude a nine-year director is ineligible when the owners in fact approved him.

Note the second half of the phrasing too: the approval happens “in the election.” The statute ties it to the election itself, not to a separate members meeting called for the purpose. What it does not do is prescribe the mechanics, and that omission is one of the open questions below.

The second exception: not enough candidates

The cap also lifts when there are “not enough eligible candidates to fill the vacancies on the board at the time of the vacancy.” It is the same relief valve Section 718.112(2)(d)3. uses elsewhere, including in the rule that normally keeps two co-owners of one unit off the board at the same time.

The practical effect is that the term limit is not allowed to shrink a board below the seats it has to fill. An association that struggles to find anyone willing to serve is not forced to leave chairs empty in order to enforce a cap on the people who are willing.

What the statute does not settle

Three questions come up constantly and the text answers none of them. The following is our reading of what is open, not legal advice, and capable lawyers land in different places on each one. If the answer decides whether a specific director may run, get the association’s counsel to put a position in writing before the board acts on it.

• Does a partial year count as a year? The statute measures “board service,” not terms, and never defines the unit. A director appointed to a vacancy in March and elected the following winter has served part of a year first. Whether that fragment counts as one of the eight is not addressed.
• What breaks the word “consecutive”? The cap applies only to consecutive years, so a gap plainly matters. The statute does not say how long a break must be, whether stepping down partway through a term creates one, or whether a director who sits out a single cycle starts again at zero.
• Does appointed service count like elected service? The sentence says “board service” without distinguishing the two. Section 718.112(2)(d)10. lets the remaining directors fill a vacancy by majority vote, and provides that the person appointed serves “the unexpired term of the seat being filled.” Whether those months land on the term-limit ledger is left to interpretation.

One thing that is not ambiguous: your bylaws may be stricter than the statute. The same subparagraph provides that board members whose terms expire “may stand for reelection unless prohibited by the bylaws.” Read your own documents before you read the statute, because a tighter limit in them is enforceable on its own terms.

This is a condominium rule. It does not apply to an HOA.

There is no equivalent anywhere in Chapter 720. Not in Section 720.303, not in the election provisions of Section 720.306, and not in Section 720.3033. A Floridahomeowners’ association director is under no statutory cap on consecutive years, and a board that applies the eight-year rule to an HOA election is enforcing a limit the legislature did not write.

If your HOA has a term limit, it comes from your declaration, articles, or bylaws, and those documents set both the limit and the way past it. That is a governing-documents question, and the answer is in the documents rather than in the statute book.

When the board has to answer this, and where the answer lives

Not on election night. Eligibility is fixed earlier: the same paragraph provides that a unit owner who wants to run “must be eligible to be a candidate to serve on the board of directors at the time of the deadline for submitting a notice of intent to run in order to have his or her name listed” on the ballot. In a condominium election that deadline sits 40 days before the election, so the counting belongs in the window between the first notice and the candidate deadline, not in the room on the night. The full calendar is in how Florida condo board elections work.

The evidence is your own paperwork. How long someone has served is established by the minutes of the annual meetings, the election results, and the board’s record of any appointment to a vacancy. Those are official records of the association, which is why a board that keeps loose minutes discovers the problem at the worst possible moment. What the association must keep and produce is covered in the records a member can ask for, and the officer who keeps them is covered in the board secretary’s duties.

A workable sequence for the board: pull the service history from the minutes, count countable years starting no earlier than July 1, 2018, decide whether the count reaches eight consecutive years, and if it does, work out with counsel how the two-thirds approval will be put to owners in the election. Do all of that before the candidate deadline passes, and write down what you concluded and why.