Age-Restriction Bylaws in BC: Recent Changes (Post Bill 44)

In November 2022 the province passed Bill 44, the Building and Strata Statutes Amendment Act. On royal assent, every age-restriction bylaw in BC except 55+ became unenforceable. No transition period, no opt-in. Many BC stratas across the province lost their age bylaws overnight. Three and a half years in, we still see Sea-to-Sky councils with dead age-19 bylaws on their filed sets, and buyers in 2026 still being told a building is "adults only" when the law says otherwise. Here's the plain-language version of what changed.

What Bill 44 actually did

Bill 44 was a two-track reform. The headline track eliminated rental restrictions entirely. Stratas can no longer cap rentals, ban rentals, or require an owner to live in their unit for a year before renting. The second track addressed age restrictions. Before Bill 44, BC stratas could pass any age threshold they wanted: 19+, 25+, "no children," "no minors." After Bill 44, only one threshold survives: 55+, and only under the specific terms in Strata Property Act s. 144.

The mechanism is simple. The legislature didn't ask councils to repeal their old bylaws. It made them unenforceable by operation of law. Whether your filed bylaw set still shows an age-19 restriction or not, that bylaw has no legal effect after November 24, 2022. A strata that tries to enforce one will lose at the CRT and pay costs.

This applied retroactively to every existing bylaw. There was no consultation period and no exemption process. The only exemptions baked in were:

• 55+ communities (the bylaw must state "at least one occupant 55 or older," not "all occupants")
• Limited "hardship" carve-outs for residents in transition (largely procedural)

For councils, that meant a bylaw set carefully drafted and ratified by 3/4 vote was suddenly obsolete, and the AGM agenda for 2023 needed an item to formally repeal the dead text.

What "55+" actually means in BC strata law

The 55+ category survived because the legislature wanted to preserve genuine seniors-oriented housing. The drafting rules are stricter than most owners realize. A valid 55+ bylaw under s. 144 must:

• Require at least one occupant of each strata lot to be 55 or older, not all occupants.
• Be registered at the Land Title Office under the proper bylaw amendment process.
• Apply on a forward-looking basis, with grandfathering for residents present at the bylaw's effective date.

The "at least one" wording matters. A bylaw requiring every occupant to be 55+ would prevent an older owner from having an adult child or grandchild move in to provide care. The legislature considered this and built in the more flexible standard. We've seen Sea to Sky stratas draft an "all occupants 55+" bylaw and get told by their lawyer to rewrite it.

What changed for buyers

If you're shopping for a BC strata in 2026, the short version: age is almost never a bar to ownership or occupancy anymore. Don't trust an MLS listing that says "age 19+ building." That restriction is unenforceable. The only listings where age restriction still matters are properly registered 55+ communities, and your realtor should confirm registration with one phone call to the strata's manager.

For buyers with children, this is unambiguously good. Pre-2022, families looking for ground-floor townhomes in newer Sea-to-Sky buildings often hit age-19 bylaws on otherwise-perfect units. That bar is gone. For buyers who specifically sought adult-oriented communities, the only path forward is a 55+ registered building, which narrows the inventory considerably.

What changed for existing residents

Before Bill 44, many stratas had bylaws that allowed residents present on the bylaw's effective date to keep living there, even if they didn't meet the age threshold. These grandfather clauses are now moot. The underlying bylaw is dead, so the grandfather clause is irrelevant. Everyone is "in compliance" by default.

If you were a parent hiding the fact that your teenager moved back from university because the age-19 bylaw still technically applied to new arrivals, you can stop. The bylaw doesn't exist anymore. If you'd been told you couldn't have a grandchild stay for the summer, that's no longer true.

There is one category of friction left: existing 55+ stratas where the council wants to enforce more aggressively now that other age bylaws are gone. Some councils have tried to tighten enforcement against grandfathered residents, and the CRT has consistently held that grandfather rights survive.

Why the legislature made this change

The policy rationale was straightforward: a tight housing market made age-restriction bylaws a structural drag on the supply of family housing. Stratas built family-suitable units (three-bedroom townhomes, ground-floor patios, near schools) but blocked the families who needed them. The math was particularly relevant in the Sea to Sky corridor, where many two- and three-bedroom strata units were built in the 2010s and 2020s.

Bill 44 was paired with municipal zoning reform allowing up to four units on most single-family lots. The province's signal was clear: open up the housing stock, including strata. The age-restriction reform landed with little political resistance, which says something about how soft the constituency for these bylaws actually was.

What councils should do now (if they haven't already)

If your strata still has an age-restriction bylaw on its filed set in 2026, you have three options:

1. Repeal it formally at the next AGM by 3/4 vote (the cleanest path). The amendment process is set out in Strata Property Act s. 121.
2. Leave it in place but mark it unenforceable in your council records and Form B disclosures (acceptable but creates ongoing confusion).
3. Convert to a 55+ bylaw if your demographics genuinely support it (rarely the right call, see below).

We recommend option 1. Dead bylaws on a filed set create friction at every Form B request, every Property Disclosure Statement, and every realtor question. Cleaning them up costs nothing and removes a recurring source of buyer-strata friction.

Converting to a 55+ bylaw is a much bigger lift. It requires demographic analysis (do you have a community of seniors who want this?), proper drafting (s. 144 has specific language requirements), grandfather clauses for current under-55 residents, and a 3/4 vote at a properly noticed meeting. Most stratas that consider this end up not doing it once they see the work involved.

Common misconceptions we still hear

Even three years after Bill 44, the same questions come up at council meetings and realtor previews:

• "Can we still ban children from the pool?" No. Use-of-amenity restrictions based on age (children's pool hours, supervised use) need to be drafted as safety rules, not age-restriction bylaws.
• "Our bylaw was registered before 2010, so we're grandfathered, right?" No. Bill 44 applied to all age-restriction bylaws regardless of registration date, with the single 55+ exception.
• "Our developer-disclosed age 19+ bylaw is a contract right of the original buyers." No. The legislature has constitutional authority to amend property-related bylaws, and the courts upheld this principle in property-tax and rental-restriction contexts long before Bill 44.
• "We can pass a new age 30+ bylaw if 3/4 of owners vote yes." No. The bylaw would be void by operation of statute the moment it was registered.

For a deeper dive on how strata bylaws differ from rules, and which is the right tool when the council wants to manage behaviour rather than demographics, see our strata bylaws vs rules guide.

How this connects to the broader Bill 44 picture

Age restrictions were the second leg of Bill 44. The first and bigger leg was the elimination of rental restrictions, which had a much larger impact on housing supply and investor behaviour. The two reforms together represented a substantial reset of how BC stratas can restrict ownership and occupancy. The province paired these with separate short-term rental rules that came online in 2024, creating a layered system: long-term rentals are now broadly permitted, short-term rentals are tightly restricted, and age bylaws are mostly extinct.

If your strata is working through what all this means in practice at the AGM, in the bylaw set, in council enforcement decisions, we can help. Avesta has been drafting and amending bylaws for Sea to Sky stratas since 2011, and we've run dozens of post-Bill 44 cleanup AGMs since 2023. The work is straightforward but needs to be done correctly, and the cost of getting it wrong shows up in Form B disputes, CRT cases, and frustrated owners.

Contact us if you'd like a free review of your filed bylaw set. We'll flag the dead bylaws, the conflicts with current law, and the ones worth keeping or amending.