Can Your DC Condo Board Meet and Vote Virtually? Here's What the Law Actually Says Right Now
Most DC condo boards assume virtual meetings are simply settled law at this point — Zoom board meetings have been normal for years, and after everything associations went through during the pandemic, it would be reasonable to think the legislature closed the loop permanently. It hasn't. What's actually in place is more fragile than most boards realize, and it's worth five minutes to understand exactly what you're relying on.
Two Very Different Rules Hiding Under One Topic
There are actually two separate questions here, and DC law treats them completely differently.
Executive board meetings — settled since 2014. DC's Condominium Act was amended in 2014 to permit board members to meet or attend by telephone, video conference, or similar electronic means, as long as everyone can hear and be heard. This is permanent, codified law. If your board has been running its own meetings over Zoom for years, that part has never been in question.
Full membership meetings and electronic voting — still temporary, over four years running. Before the pandemic, nothing in the Condominium Act allowed a full unit owners' association meeting — the kind where residents vote on budgets, bylaw amendments, or board elections — to happen virtually. It had to be in person. When COVID made that impossible, DC Council passed emergency legislation authorizing virtual membership meetings during the declared public health emergency. That authorization expired on July 25, 2021, when the emergency itself ended.
What's Happened Since 2021
Rather than let virtual membership meetings disappear along with the pandemic emergency, DC Council has kept the provision alive — but through a chain of temporary fixes, not a permanent change to the statute. Since 2021, the Council has repeatedly passed 90-day emergency acts and 225-day temporary acts reauthorizing the same basic language, including:
The Post-Public Health Emergency Protections Extension Temporary Amendment Act of 2022
The Association Meeting Flexibility Temporary Amendment Act of 2023
The Association Meeting Flexibility Temporary Amendment Act of 2024
The Association Meeting Flexibility Emergency Amendment Act of 2025 (D.C. Act 26-6) and its Congressional Review counterpart (D.C. Act 26-53)
The Association Meeting Flexibility Temporary Amendment Act of 2025 (D.C. Law 26-2), which took effect in May 2025
Each version does roughly the same thing: it lets meetings of the unit owners' association, executive board, or committees happen by phone, video, or similar means, counts remote attendees toward quorum, requires meeting notices to include a link or instructions for joining, and allows the executive board to authorize electronic voting submitted up to seven days before a meeting.
What none of these versions have done is become permanent. The DC Code's official permanent codification of this section still does not include this language — only the board-meeting provision from 2014 has made it into permanent law. Everything covering full membership meetings has lived, year after year, on borrowed time.
Why This Matters Practically
A statute that depends on periodic renewal creates a real, if narrow, risk: a gap between one temporary authorization expiring and the next one taking effect. Attorneys tracking this closely have flagged exactly that possibility in past years, when a temporary act's expiration date landed close to — or ahead of — the next reauthorization. If your association happens to schedule an annual meeting or a major vote during a gap like that, holding it purely virtually could be open to challenge.
This isn't a reason to abandon virtual meetings. It's a reason to build a five-minute habit into your governance calendar.
What Your Board Should Actually Do
Check the current statute before every major meeting, not just once. DC Code § 42-1903.03's live version (available at code.dccouncil.gov) always reflects whatever emergency or temporary legislation is currently in effect, along with a note if the authorization has lapsed. This takes two minutes and removes the guesswork.
Keep a hybrid option available for anything high-stakes. For routine committee check-ins, this level of caution is probably overkill. For an annual meeting, a bylaw amendment vote, or a board election, having an in-person or hybrid option as a fallback protects the association if the virtual authorization happens to be between renewals.
Document your notice and quorum procedures carefully. Whatever version of the law is currently in effect, the requirements around notice (including a link or joining instructions) and quorum counting for remote attendees are consistent across every version passed since 2021 — get those right and you're on solid ground regardless of which specific act is technically in force.
Don't assume last year's process is automatically still authorized. Because this law renews on a rolling basis rather than existing as a fixed rule, "we did it this way last year" isn't the same guarantee it would be under a permanent statute.
Where This Fits Into the Bigger Picture
This is a small, technical detail in the scheme of running a building — but it's exactly the kind of thing that trips up self-managed boards and gets overlooked by vendors who aren't paying close attention to DC's legislative calendar. Boards deserve a partner who catches this before it becomes a problem, not after a vote gets challenged.
At Urbaniqa, our on-site managers support boards with exactly this kind of operational and governance diligence — keeping meeting notices, quorum documentation, and procedural details squared away so your board can focus on the decisions that matter, not the fine print behind them.
Urbaniqa Property Solutions 1250 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 700, Washington, DC 20036 contact@urbaniqasolutions.com · www.urbaniqasolutions.com
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