Arizona public records & parcel GIS sources

Easement records in Arizona

We currently index 2 Arizona counties by hand, Maricopa County and Pima County, recording the recorder-of-deeds search page, the assessor or GIS parcel viewer, and any published map service for each one.

Arizona also publishes 1 statewide source, 6 of which expose machine-readable endpoints you can query directly rather than clicking through a viewer.

About 50% of the indexed Arizona counties publish spatial layers, meaning you can see parcel and corridor geometry rather than only a document index. Median platform reliability across those counties is 88 out of 100. The remainder go down for maintenance, throttle bulk requests, or change URLs without notice.

How to pull an easement document in Arizona

1. Start at the County Recorder for the county where the parcel sits: Maricopa County, AZ is linked below and search by the current owner's name or by the book and page cited on Schedule B of your title commitment. Search the grantor/grantee index under the developer or utility name, not just the current owner. Most Arizona utility easements were granted by the subdivider before any home existed.
2. Pull the plat or subdivision map for the lot. Platted easements are drawn with widths and dimensions, which the deed language often omits entirely.
3. Open the county parcel or GIS viewer to see how recorded corridors sit relative to the boundary. Treat these as approximate: GIS parcel lines are digitized from tax maps and routinely differ from a surveyed line by several feet.
4. Check the statewide and federal sources below for corridors the county will not have. Pipelines, transmission lines, rail, and floodplain or drainage districts are typically mapped at the state or federal level.
5. Order a boundary or ALTA survey before construction. Public records tell you an easement exists; only a survey tells you where it lands on your lot.

Arizona easement record questions

Where are easements recorded in Arizona?

With the County Recorder in the county where the land sits. Arizona records land documents with the elected County Recorder in each of the fifteen counties. The Recorder handles the document index; the County Assessor maintains the parcel and mapping side, so an easement search and a parcel-boundary check are two different offices. Recording is governed by A.R.S. § 33-411 (recording gives constructive notice).

Are Arizona easement records free to search?

Searching the index is generally free. The large Arizona recorders. Maricopa, Pima and Pinal among them, publish a free document index with viewable images going back decades. Rural counties often expose only a recent index and route image requests to the counter or to mail. Copies are a separate charge: Arizona sets recording fees by statute as a single flat charge per document rather than per page, with separate charges for copies and for certification. That authority is A.R.S. § 11-475 (recorder fees). Every source listed on this page can be reached without a paid data subscription.

Can an easement exist in Arizona without being recorded?

Yes. Arizona recognizes prescriptive easements after 10 years of open, continuous, and unpermitted use (Ariz. Rev. Stat. § 12-526), and access by necessity can be implied when a parcel would otherwise be landlocked. Neither appears in a records search, which is why walking the property matters as much as reading the index.

What trips people up when searching Arizona easement records?

Arizona easements are frequently created on the recorded subdivision plat rather than in a separate deed, so a name-based search of the grantor/grantee index can come back clean on a lot that is fully burdened. Always pull the plat as well as the deeds.

How current are these Arizona sources?

Each county hub carries the date it was last checked by hand, and the oldest verification in Arizona is shown at the top of this page. County offices move URLs and change platforms often, so a hub that has not been verified recently should be treated as a lead rather than a guarantee.