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Aging buildings and insurance are driving up HOA fees in these U.S. cities

Some U.S. homeowners pay more in HOA fees than others do. LendingTree's new data shows exactly where costs run highest

Goh Rhy Yan / Unsplash

Buying a condo or a home inside a homeowners association often comes with an unstated second mortgage payment. HOA fees cover everything from landscaping and building insurance to elevator repairs and staff salaries, and in a growing number of buildings those bills now rival what buyers pay in property taxes each month. A shopper who budgets carefully for a mortgage payment can still get blindsided by an association fee that adds hundreds of dollars to the true cost of owning a home. Nationwide, nearly one in three homeowners in large cities now pays some kind of HOA or condo fee, and for millions of them that fee runs well past $500 a month.

Several forces are pushing those bills higher at once. Insurance premiums for the shared structures that HOAs are responsible for have climbed sharply in hurricane-prone and wildfire-exposed states, and older buildings across the country are reaching the age where major systems like roofs, elevators, and plumbing need expensive replacement rather than routine upkeep. A wave of new state laws passed after a deadly 2021 condo collapse in Florida has also forced associations nationwide to fund maintenance reserves they had been allowed to underfund for decades, turning years of deferred costs into today's dues. Older, denser housing markets are absorbing most of that increase. Those buildings carry the most deferred maintenance and the highest insurance exposure of any housing stock in the country.

LendingTree analyzed 2024 Census Bureau data across the 100 largest U.S. cities to calculate the median monthly HOA or condo fee homeowners pay in each one. Fees vary enormously by location, from $42 a month in the cheapest cities to well over $500 in the most expensive ones, a gap of more than tenfold between the top and bottom of the ranking. Five cities posted the highest median fees in the country, and each one shows a different combination of building age, insurance costs, and local regulation driving homeowners' bills higher.

Chandler Hilken / Unsplash

New York topped LendingTree's ranking with a median monthly HOA or condo fee of $558, the highest of any city in the country. More than half of New York's HOA-paying homeowners, 53.4 percent, pay $500 or more a month, and 28 percent pay upward of $1,000. Those figures sit on top of some of the highest property taxes and home prices in the nation, meaning a New York buyer's true monthly housing cost often runs far past what a mortgage calculator alone would suggest.

New York's fees run high largely because of how co-ops and condos are structured and how old much of the housing stock is. Co-op shareholders pay a maintenance charge that bundles the building's operating costs, staff salaries, and a share of the underlying property taxes and mortgage into one bill, while condo owners pay separate common charges on top of their own tax bill. Either way, the city's aging elevator systems, union........

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