Your milestone inspection said nothing about your elevators.

What the law actually requires

After the Surfside collapse, Florida passed SB 4-D in 2022, refined it with SB 154 in 2023, and adjusted it again with HB 913 in 2025. For condo and cooperative buildings three or more habitable stories tall, two obligations came out of it.

The first is the milestone inspection: a structural review by an architect or engineer once a building turns 30 years old (25 in some coastal jurisdictions), repeated every 10 years. The second is the structural integrity reserve study, or SIRS, which forces associations to fund reserves for specific building components. Most associations had to complete their first SIRS by the end of 2025, with limited extensions into 2026 for buildings with a pending milestone inspection.

Where elevators fit, and where they do not

Milestone inspections are structural. The engineer is looking at load bearing walls, floor slabs, foundations, and waterproofing. Nobody opens your machine room door. An elevator can pass through a milestone inspection cycle without a single trained eye on it.

The SIRS component list is also structural: roof, load bearing structure, fireproofing and fire protection, plumbing, electrical, waterproofing and exterior painting, and windows and exterior doors. Elevators are not on the named list. Under the original SB 4-D, elevators were often swept in through a catch all for any item with deferred maintenance or replacement cost over $10,000. HB 913 changed that in 2025: the threshold rose to $25,000 and the catch all now only applies to items whose failure would affect the listed structural components. For most buildings, that moved elevators out of the mandatory SIRS bucket entirely.

Why that is a problem, not a relief

Elevators landed back in the ordinary reserve schedule, the part of the budget a membership vote can still waive or underfund. At the same time, SIRS obligations are consuming the reserve dollars that used to have slack in them. The practical result across the coast: elevator reserve lines are being squeezed exactly when most coastal buildings are reaching modernization age.

And the number on that line is usually nobody's number. Reserve studies price elevators from generic component tables: a standard useful life, a standard replacement cost, adjusted for inflation. No one has looked at your controller, your callback history, or whether your equipment is three years from a forced modernization or fifteen. A generic table cannot tell the difference between a well maintained machine and a neglected one, and the difference is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars either way.

What a defensible elevator number looks like

An independent condition assessment gives your board and your reserve study preparer what the tables cannot: documented condition of each unit, realistic remaining life based on the actual equipment and its maintenance history, code standing, and a modernization budget figure grounded in the current Florida market rather than a national average. If the money is not needed for years, you avoid overfunding. If it is needed soon, you find out while there is still time to plan instead of special assessing in a panic.

It also closes the inspection gap. Between annual state inspections that check safety compliance rather than condition, and milestone inspections that skip the elevator entirely, an independent assessment is the only point where someone whose job is not selling you something evaluates the equipment.

What boards should do

If your reserve study is due for its periodic update, get an elevator condition assessment done first so the update carries a real number. If your building is approaching or past 25 years, treat the elevator line with the same seriousness the law now forces on the roof and the structure. And if a contractor is telling you modernization is urgent, verify it independently before committing seven figures; we regularly find equipment declared obsolete that has years of supportable life left.

Ocean View provides documented condition assessments for exactly this purpose, and reviews reserve study elevator lines, contractor obsolescence letters, and modernization proposals at no charge as part of our free document review.

This page is general information for Florida community associations, not legal advice. Statutory requirements live primarily in sections 553.899 and 718.112, Florida Statutes, and change frequently. Confirm current requirements with association counsel.