Delaware public records & parcel GIS sources

Easement records in Delaware

We currently index 1 Delaware county by hand, New Castle County, recording the recorder-of-deeds search page, the assessor or GIS parcel viewer, and any published map service for each one.

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

About 0% of the indexed Delaware 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 78 out of 100. The remainder go down for maintenance, throttle bulk requests, or change URLs without notice.

How to pull an easement document in Delaware

1. Start at the Recorder of Deeds for the county where the parcel sits: New Castle County, DE 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. Sussex County's rapid subdivision growth means many easements were created by plat in the last thirty years, check the recorded plat before assuming a rural parcel is unburdened.
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.

Delaware easement record questions

Where are easements recorded in Delaware?

With the Recorder of Deeds in the county where the land sits. Delaware has only three counties: New Castle, Kent and Sussex, so every recorded easement in the state sits in one of three Recorder of Deeds offices. That makes a statewide search unusually tractable compared with larger states. Recording is governed by 25 Del. C. ch. 1 (recording of deeds and other instruments).

Are Delaware easement records free to search?

Searching the index is generally free. All three counties publish an online index; image access and the depth of scanned records differ between them, and the oldest deed books are usually available only at the courthouse. Copies are a separate charge: Recording and copy fees are fixed by statute per document, with an added charge for certified copies. That authority is 9 Del. C. ch. 96 (Recorder of Deeds; fees). Every source listed on this page can be reached without a paid data subscription.

Can an easement exist in Delaware without being recorded?

Yes. Delaware recognizes prescriptive easements after 20 years of open, continuous, and unpermitted use (Del. Code Ann. tit. 10, § 7901; common law prescription), 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 Delaware easement records?

Delaware still uses metes-and-bounds descriptions tied to old road and watercourse monuments in the two southern counties, so an easement description may reference features that no longer exist on the ground.

How current are these Delaware sources?

Each county hub carries the date it was last checked by hand, and the oldest verification in Delaware 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.