When purchasing a timeshare resale, understanding how often maintenance fees are payable for biennial use ownership is essential. This article reviews the maintenance fee setup for major timeshare brands to help owners understand when their maintenance fees are billed, what usage they are paying for, and helps buyers and sellers make informed decisions.
What Are Biennial Use Ownerships?
Biennial ownerships are those in which the owner can only use a home resort stay every other year. Biennial ownership can even be odd or even years of usage. For example, an odd ownership would entitle the owner to use their home resort stay during 2025, 2027, 2029, and so on. An even use ownership would entitle the owner to use their home resort stay during 2026, 2028, 2030, etc.
How Are Maintenance Fees Paid for Biennial Ownerships?
Timeshare dues payments can be made sometimes once yearly and other times twice yearly, quarterly, or monthly. When it comes to biennial ownership, regardless of the frequency of the payment, the setup is of two types:
Payment During Use Years Only
The owner is only billed for the maintenance fee during the year they are entitled to use the ownership.
For example, the owner of an odd use timeshare would pay fees in 2025, 2027, and so on.
Payments Are Due Every Year
The annual total payment is approximately about half of the fee of a yearly use owner.
For example, in 2024, for Marriott’s Ko’Olina Beach Club, the owner of an annual use two-bedroom paid approximately $3,135 for their yearly dues. In contrast, the owner of a biennial-use two-bedroom paid roughly $1,567.
The biennial owner at this resort pays the same fee to use their home resort week as the annual owner; they are entitled to use their stay only once every two years but pay half the annual fee each year.
How Do Major Timeshare Brands Bill Biennial Ownership Dues?
The table below summarizes how major timeshare brands / developers bill maintenance fees for every other year ownerships.
| Brand | Dues Paid |
|---|---|
| Breckenridge Grand Vacations | Every year ½ fee |
| Hyatt Residence Club | During use years only |
| Hilton Grand Vacations | During use years only |
| Marriott Vacation Club | Every year ½ fee |
| Vistana Signature Experience (Sheraton and Westin) | Every year ½ fee |
| Club Wyndham | Every year ½ fee |
Club Dues, Exchange Fees, and Property Taxes
An important note is that owners of biennial properties with maintenance fees billed during use years only may still need to pay certain items during non-use years, such as club dues or property taxes.
For example, Hyatt and Hilton will bill a club fee during non-use years for biennial ownerships, which covers benefits such as the Interval International or RCI accounts. The owner can use these exchange company accounts during non-use years to book exchanges using deposited points or to book getaways and extra vacations for cash rates.
Getting Into the Weeds: Why is This Important When Buying or Selling a Timeshare?
Calculating Cost Of Ownership
When purchasing a resale timeshare used only every other year, the buyer should evaluate the ongoing usage cost by correctly calculating the maintenance fee. In the example above, the owner’s expense to use a two-bedroom once for seven nights is not $1,567 but $3,135 because they pay annual fees twice before they can use their ownership once.
Who is Responsible for Maintenance Fees When Transferring a Timeshare?
Whether buying or selling, it is also important to understand when the seller should stop paying and the buyer should pick up responsibility for the following maintenance fee. For ownerships where fees are billed during use years, this is very straightforward—the buyer’s first fee will coincide with the first use year—e.g., if a buyer takes ownership of an odd use property in 2025, their first maintenance fee responsibility will be in 2025.
However, this can be tricky for biennial ownerships, where fees are paid yearly. Typically, the fees paid during the year before usage and the year of usage cover the year of usage; for example, fees paid in 2024 and 2025 cover the usage for 2025.
How Marriott Bills Maintenance Fees for Biennial Ownerships
The Marriott Vacation Club considers the fees paid during the use year and the year after the use year as those that pay for the usage. So, for a Marriott Vacation Club resale week with odd years usage, 2025 and 2026 fees are paid to cover 2025 usage.
Please be mindful that this is a fact that we learned through our experience brokering transactions and reviewing closing statements, and it is subject to Marriott’s practice and/or regulations. This information can be helpful if you are selling a biennial property and Marriott exercises their right of first refusal; be sure to very clearly specify in the purchase agreement who is responsible for fees for each calendar year, as Marriott’s treatment of dues will result into deducting from the seller’s proceeds the dues for the calendar year that follows the use year, if the seller has used their stay for that year.
Understanding how maintenance fees are billed, what you’re paying for when you make those payments, and how to protect yourself throughout a timeshare resale transaction is key to making sure your timeshare is a benefit, rather than a burden. Now that we’ve detailed the finer points of how maintenance fees are billed for biennial timeshare ownerships, we hope we’ve been able to demystify the subject.
If you’d like to continue learning about timeshares, check out back catalog of educational timeshare articles. If you’re looking into buying or selling a timeshare, feel free to contact our team of licensed Real Estate agents who can walk you through the process.
