Types of easements, explained
Almost every easement on an American property fits one of these categories, and the category decides the practical question you care about: how wide it is, who can enforce it, what you can still build, and whether it will ever go away.
Two questions sort almost any easement
The first is who benefits. If the benefit belongs to a neighboring parcel, the easement is appurtenant and transfers automatically with both properties. If it belongs to a company or a person, it is in gross — the pattern behind most utility, pipeline and billboard easements.
The second is how it was created. Most easements are express: someone signed a grant and recorded it. Others are implied by a court because a parcel was left landlocked, or earned by prescription through years of open use without permission. That origin controls how it can be ended, and how hard it will be to prove in a dispute.
The pages below take each type in turn: what it is, how it appears on a title commitment or plat, what it does to a building plan, a real example of the recorded language with the operative phrases explained, and the realistic ways it ends.
- Utility easement
A utility easement gives an electric, gas, water, sewer or telecom provider the recorded right to install and maintain equipment inside a defined strip of your land.
Typical residential width: 5 to 15 feet along a lot line
- Access easement (driveway easement)
An access easement gives a specific parcel the recorded right to cross another parcel to reach a public road, most often over a shared driveway or private lane.
Usual form: Appurtenant — attached to the benefited lot
- Easement by necessity
An easement by necessity is access a court implies — not one anybody recorded — when a parcel was cut off from a public road by the same owner who once held both pieces.
Created by: Court order, not a signed grant
- Prescriptive easement
A prescriptive easement is a right of use earned by years of open, continuous use without the owner's permission — the use-based cousin of adverse possession.
Created by: Years of use, then confirmed by a court
- Appurtenant easement
An appurtenant easement benefits a parcel rather than a person, so it transfers automatically every time either property is sold.
Parties: Dominant estate benefits, servient estate is burdened
- Easement in gross
An easement in gross belongs to a person or a company rather than to a neighboring parcel — the category most utility, pipeline and billboard easements fall into.
Benefited parcel: None — the holder is a person or company
- Conservation easement
A conservation easement is a voluntary, recorded restriction that permanently limits development on a property, held and enforced by a land trust or government agency.
Held by: Land trust or government agency
- Drainage easement
A drainage easement reserves part of a lot for stormwater to collect, flow or be stored, and it usually forbids anything that would block or redirect the water.
Purpose: Move, hold or release stormwater
- Right-of-way easement
A right-of-way is an easement to pass over land along a defined route — the category that covers public road corridors, railroads, trails and many private lanes.
Function: Passage along a defined route
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Where to go next
If you already have a document, the guide to reading a recorded easement walks through the clauses line by line. If you do not have one yet, find my easement document explains how to pull it from your county. To see what a corridor is worth, use the easement valuation calculator, and for the rules where you live, start at the state easement law index.
How this page is sourced
Last reviewed September 9, 2026 by the Easements.com editorial team. Written from state statutes, county recorder publications, and standard appraisal practice. Every state-specific figure links to a free official source you can open yourself.
General information, not legal advice. Read our editorial standards or report a correction.
General educational reference only. Prescription periods and their exceptions change, and several states set the period by case law rather than by statute. Read the linked official code and consult a licensed attorney in that state before relying on any of it.