The surprising answer is that a Florida HOA probably can restrict firearms in the common areas it owns — and the state's top lawyer is betting it can't. In May 2026, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier sent a letter to the Tradition Community Association in Port St. Lucie demanding it stop enforcing a common-area gun ban, and threatened to sue if it did not back down by June 1. The headlines made it sound settled. It is not. The prevailing view among Florida community-association attorneys is the opposite of the Attorney General's — that a private association, as the owner of its parks and clubhouse, may adopt a reasonable rule restricting firearms there. No Florida court has decided who is right. This guide lays out both sides honestly, separates the statutes that actually apply from the ones people cite by mistake, and tells your board what to do while the question is unsettled.
This is general information about Florida community-association and firearms law, not legal advice — and this is genuinely unsettled, politically charged law. A firearms rule is one of the few board decisions where adopting (or repealing) one from a template can expose the association to litigation. Before your board acts in either direction, consult the association's attorney. This guide addresses homeowners' associations under Chapter 720; condominium and cooperative associations under Chapters 718 and 719 face a parallel analysis with their own rule-adoption procedures.
The short answer: probably yes, but it's being tested
Strip away the politics and the legal picture is straightforward to state, if not to resolve. A homeowners' association owns its common areas — the clubhouse, the pool deck, the parks, the trails. A private property owner in Florida generally has the right to decide whether firearms are allowed on the property it owns, enforced through trespass law, the same way a restaurant or a shopping center can post a "no firearms" sign. On that reasoning, most Florida community-association attorneys conclude that an association can adopt a reasonable rule restricting firearms in its common areas. The law firm Sachs Sax Caplan puts it plainly: just as a restaurant can post and enforce a no-firearms sign through trespass law, an association that owns its common areas may adopt and enforce rules restricting firearms in those spaces.
What makes 2026 different is that the Attorney General has taken the opposite position and picked a fight to prove it. That makes the question live and, for the moment, genuinely unsettled: there is no Florida appellate decision and no binding Attorney General opinion squarely holding that a private HOA either can or cannot restrict firearms in common areas. So a board reading this should hold two things at once — the weight of legal commentary favors the association's authority, and the state's chief legal officer is actively contesting it. Both are true.
What the Tradition HOA actually did
The dispute that put this question on the map involves Tradition, a large master-planned community in Port St. Lucie developed by Mattamy Homes among several builders. In December 2025, the Tradition Community Association, Inc. adopted a rule barring any person — residents, guests, and contractors alike, and explicitly including concealed-carry licensees — from carrying a firearm, openly or concealed, in the association's common areas. The covered spaces, as reported by local outlets, included the town hall, Tradition Square, the gazebo, the splash pad, the dog park, the parks, and the trails. The rule carved out law enforcement, private rights-of-way and sidewalks, and — importantly — firearms inside vehicles.
In May 2026, Attorney General James Uthmeier sent the association's president a letter calling the rule unlawful and demanding that the association "certify to me in writing by June 1, 2026, that the Association will not enforce its Rule," warning that otherwise "my office will take appropriate action to enforce the law." As of late May 2026, the association had not publicly rescinded the rule, and no lawsuit had been filed — an imminent standoff rather than a resolved case. A University of Florida law professor quoted by WQCS noted the basic difficulty with the AG's framing: constitutional rights like the Second Amendment generally do not apply directly against a private association in the first place.
The starting point: a private owner's right to exclude
Every analysis here begins with property law, not gun law. The right to exclude others is the most fundamental stick in the bundle of property rights, and in Florida a private property owner may generally prohibit firearms on property it owns and enforce that decision through trespass. That baseline is visible even inside the firearms statutes: the concealed-carry statute, FS 790.06, contains an express provision preserving the private property rights of a church, synagogue, or other religious institution to decide whether to allow firearms — language that only makes sense against a background assumption that private owners can make that call.
Applied to associations, the firm Seward Law Office draws the line this way: a community association cannot ban an owner from having guns in their private home, but it can ban firearms from its common areas, either by amending the governing documents or by adopting a reasonable board rule — because both state and federal law have historically supported private entities of all kinds in restricting firearms on their own premises. The right to exclude is the association's strongest argument, and it is why the burden is really on the Attorney General to find a statute that overrides it.
Chapter 720's reasonable-rule power — and its limits
The association's second pillar is its rulemaking authority under Chapter 720. The statute does not mention firearms anywhere — but it gives associations broad power to adopt and enforce reasonable rules governing the use of common areas. Under FS 720.305, members and their tenants, guests, and invitees must comply with the governing documents and the reasonable rules of the association, and the association may levy reasonable fines for violations (capped at $100 per violation and $1,000 in the aggregate unless the governing documents provide otherwise) and may suspend, for a reasonable period, a member's or guest's right to use the common areas.
The operative word is reasonable. A firearms rule is, in the association's view, simply another common-area use restriction — like a no-glass-containers-at-the-pool rule or a leashed-dogs-only rule — and stands or falls on whether it is reasonable and applied uniformly. That last point matters: a rule enforced against some owners but not others invites a selective-enforcement defense. Adopting the rule properly — at a duly noticed board meeting, within the authority the declaration and bylaws grant the board, and recorded where required — is part of what makes it defensible, which is why the mechanics of how the board adopts rules are not a formality here. Chapter 720 gives the power; it does not resolve whether a firearms statute overrides it.
The AG's theory: FS 790.251 and the "invitee" clause
To override the right to exclude, the Attorney General needed a statute. His letter leaned mainly on an unexpected one: FS 790.251, the law most Floridians know as the "Bring Your Guns to Work" statute. Its definitions are broad. An "employer" includes "any business that is a sole proprietorship, partnership, corporation, limited liability company, professional association, cooperative, joint venture, trust, firm, institution, or association ... that has employees." An "invitee" is "any business invitee, including a customer or visitor, who is lawfully on the premises of a public or private employer." And the statute provides that no public or private employer may expel a customer or invitee for exercising the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
The Attorney General strings those pieces together: the Tradition association has employees and contractors, so it is a "private employer"; residents, guests, and prospective buyers in the common areas are "invitees"; therefore, the argument runs, the association cannot expel them — or bar them — for carrying a firearm. It is a creative reading, and on the surface the definitional language does seem to fit. That is what makes the theory colorable. Whether it holds up is another matter.
Why that theory is a stretch
The problem is the rest of the statute. FS 790.251's official short title is the "Preservation and Protection of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms in Motor Vehicles Act of 2008," and its operative prohibitions are almost entirely about one narrow thing: a firearm locked inside or locked to a private motor vehicle in a parking lot. The core of the statute bars an employer from prohibiting a customer, employee, or invitee from keeping a legally owned firearm locked in their car, and from searching cars or asking about guns in them. It was written so that an employee could leave a gun in their truck in the company lot — not so that a customer could carry a pistol through the building.
- FS 790.251 is, by its own title, a motor-vehicles statute. Its main protections are confined to firearms locked in a vehicle in a parking lot.
- The "may not expel an invitee" language the Attorney General relies on is real, but extending it from the parking lot to body-carry in a clubhouse, pool, or trail is untested.
- No Florida court has ever applied 790.251 that way. Reading it to govern how people carry firearms across an association's parks would be a significant expansion of a statute written for company parking lots.
There is an irony worth pausing on. The one thing FS 790.251 clearly does prohibit — banning a firearm locked in a vehicle in the parking lot — is the one thing the Tradition rule carefully did not do; the rule expressly exempted vehicles. So the association already complied with the part of 790.251 that unambiguously applies, and the Attorney General is left arguing for the part that does not obviously apply at all. That is the heart of why the prevailing community-association view treats the rule as defensible.
The statute people get wrong: FS 790.33 preemption
Hovering over every Florida gun debate is the firearms preemption statute, FS 790.33, and it is the source of most of the confusion here. Preemption declares that the Legislature occupies "the whole field of regulation of firearms and ammunition ... to the exclusion of all existing and future county, city, town, or municipal ordinances or any administrative regulations or rules adopted by local or state government." Read it carefully and the target is unmistakable: governments. The statute's teeth — civil fines of up to $5,000, removal from office, a bar on using public funds to defend the conduct — are aimed squarely at elected and appointed local-government officials.
Myth 1: HOA directors face a $5,000 fine for a firearms rule. No. That penalty applies to local-government officials, not private HOA directors. Notably, the Attorney General's challenge to the Tradition association relied mainly on FS 790.251, not on 790.33's penalties. Myth 2: an HOA board meeting is a "government meeting" where carry is barred. No. FS 790.06(12)'s prohibition on carrying at a "meeting of the governing body of a county, public school district, municipality, or special district" names governmental bodies — a private association board meeting is not one of them.
No Florida court or Attorney General opinion has applied 790.33 to a private homeowners' association. The phrase "or other entity" does appear in the statute's penalty and standing provisions, and an aggressive reading could try to stuff a private HOA into it — but the field-defining language is about local and state government, and every reported application of 790.33 has been against a city, county, or local agency. Treating a private association as a body bound by firearms preemption would be a first-impression theory, and it is telling that the Attorney General did not build his Tradition demand on it.
The constitutional-carry backdrop
This fight is happening now because of how much Florida carry law has changed. In 2023, the Legislature passed HB 543, which authorized permitless — "constitutional" — concealed carry for eligible Floridians effective July 1, 2023, eliminating the need for a license to carry concealed. Open carry, long prohibited, became lawful separately in 2025 through litigation when a state appellate court struck Florida's open-carry ban and the Attorney General declined to appeal. The combined effect is that far more people can lawfully carry, openly or concealed, in far more places than a decade ago. That is precisely why a community would think to adopt a common-area firearms rule — and why the question of whether it may is suddenly worth a fight.
One more piece of the carry framework matters for context. FS 790.06(12) lists the specific places where even a license does not authorize carry — courthouses, police stations, jails, polling places, government-body meetings, schools and colleges, the alcohol-serving portion of a bar, airport terminals, and a handful of others. HOA common areas are not on that list. But that cuts both ways: the statute governs where licensees may carry; it neither authorizes nor forbids a private association's own rule. Its silence on clubhouses is not permission, and it is not prohibition either.
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The hard part: owners' easement rights
If the association's case were airtight, there would be no genuine debate. Here is the wrinkle that keeps it interesting. The "a restaurant can post a sign" analogy works cleanly for guests and contractors — they are on the property by permission and can be excluded on the owner's terms. It is less clean for owners. Unlike a restaurant patron, a lot owner holds a property interest in the common areas: under the typical declaration, every owner has a vested easement or right to use the parks, pool, and clubhouse. The association does not own the common areas as a stranger; it holds them subject to the owners' use rights. That is the strongest point in the Attorney General's favor, even if his statute is not.
The association's answer is that an owner's right to use the common areas has always been subject to the declaration and the association's reasonable rules. FS 720.305 says members and their guests must comply with the rules of the association, and that the association may suspend common-area use rights for cause. A firearms rule, on this view, is just one more reasonable condition on a shared amenity — the same legal footing as pool hours or guest-policy limits. Whether a court agrees that a firearms restriction is "reasonable" as applied to owners, as opposed to guests, is exactly the kind of question that an amended declaration — adopted by owner vote rather than imposed by board rule — is better positioned to survive. If a community wants the most defensible version of such a restriction, the path often runs through amending the governing documents rather than a bare board rule, and through the same reasonableness discipline that governs every other association rule.
What this means for your board
While the law is unsettled, a Florida board is not helpless — it just needs to act deliberately. A practical sequence:
- Start with counsel, not a template. This is unsettled, high-profile law. Whether your board wants to adopt a firearms rule or is being pressured to repeal one, get the association's attorney involved before anything goes on an agenda.
- Confirm the association actually owns the common areas. The right-to-exclude argument depends on ownership. Verify that the parks, clubhouse, and trails are association-owned, not a public easement, a CDD facility, or a developer-retained parcel.
- Ground the rule in the declaration. Tie any firearms rule to the declaration's reasonable-rule authority, adopt it at a properly noticed meeting by a vote of the full board, not the president acting alone, and document the board's reasons in the minutes.
- Apply it uniformly. Selective enforcement is the fastest way to lose an otherwise-defensible rule. Enforce it the same way against everyone or do not adopt it.
- Keep it off the parking lot. Exempt firearms locked in vehicles, exactly as Tradition did, to stay clear of FS 790.251's one unambiguous command.
- Distinguish owners from guests. Recognize the rule is cleanest as applied to guests and contractors and more contestable as applied to owners with vested use rights — and consider a declaration amendment if owners are the real concern.
- Watch the Tradition case. It may produce the first Florida ruling on the question. Until it does, treat the area as legally uncertain and avoid absolute assurances to residents in either direction — and keep up with each year's Florida HOA law changes, which can shift the ground under any rule.
Key takeaways
- Most Florida lawyers say an HOA can restrict firearms in common areas it owns — through the right to exclude plus Chapter 720's reasonable-rule power.
- The law is unsettled. The Attorney General challenged the Tradition (Port St. Lucie) HOA's ban in May 2026, with a June 1 certification deadline, but no Florida court has ruled.
- The AG's theory rests on FS 790.251, the "Bring Your Guns to Work" statute — treating the HOA as a private employer and residents as invitees. The theory is colorable but untested.
- FS 790.251 is mostly a parking-lot statute. Its clear command is that you cannot ban a gun locked in a car — which is the one thing the Tradition rule already allowed.
- FS 790.33 preemption targets government, not private HOAs. Its $5,000 fines apply to local officials; HOA directors do not face them, and an HOA board meeting is not a "government meeting."
- Owners have vested common-area use rights, which makes a firearms rule cleaner against guests than owners — a declaration amendment is the most defensible route if owners are the concern.
- Boards should move deliberately: counsel first, confirm ownership, ground the rule in the declaration, enforce uniformly, exempt vehicles, and watch the Tradition case.
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