Delivery of Utility Bills in Condominium Property


By: Dr. Luz Eneida Saldaña, attorney, Universidad del Rosario, specialist in Administrative Law and Financial Law.

What happens when a condominium community's utility bills are lost, never delivered, or delivered to the wrong unit?

On this point, article 148 of Law 142 of 1994 provides:

In contracts with public utility companies:

• The form, timing, location, and method by which the company will make the bill known to subscribers or users must be agreed upon.
• That the bill has been made known is presumed by law once the company complies with what was agreed, and it's up to the company to prove compliance.
• The subscriber or user isn't required to fulfill any obligation the bill creates until after they've actually seen it.
• Utility companies cannot charge for services not rendered, apply rates or charges outside those set in the standard contract terms, or alter the rate structure defined for each utility service.

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So, as long as the utility company meets those conditions, any difficulty or loss of bills that occurs inside the condominium property itself — due to non-delivery or misdelivery — isn't the utility company's responsibility.

To avoid these situations, the condominium community must comply with the Condominium Property Law (Law 675 of 2001), setting up mechanisms that guarantee confidentiality and timely delivery to each individual co-owner, while anticipating possible violations of privacy or data-protection rights (Habeas Data).

The Superintendency of Residential Public Utilities issued a similar, partial ruling on this point in April 2021.

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