Florida public records & parcel GIS sources

Easement records in Florida

We currently index 11 Florida counties by hand, Broward County, Duval County, Hillsborough County, Lee County, Leon County and Miami-Dade County, plus 5 more, recording the recorder-of-deeds search page, the assessor or GIS parcel viewer, and any published map service for each one.

Florida also publishes 2 statewide sources, 7 of which expose machine-readable endpoints you can query directly rather than clicking through a viewer.

About 55% of the indexed Florida 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 84 out of 100. The remainder go down for maintenance, throttle bulk requests, or change URLs without notice.

How to pull an easement document in Florida

1. Start at the Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller for the county where the parcel sits: Broward County, FL 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 Official Records index by legal description keywords such as the subdivision name, then narrow by document type to 'easement'. Florida clerks index document type consistently.
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.

Florida easement record questions

Where are easements recorded in Florida?

With the Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller in the county where the land sits. Florida does not have a separate recorder. The elected Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller in each of the 67 counties maintains the Official Records series, which is where deeds, easements and plats are recorded. Recording is governed by Fla. Stat. § 28.222 (clerk as recorder).

Are Florida easement records free to search?

Searching the index is generally free. Florida is among the most open states for online land records: nearly every county clerk publishes a searchable Official Records index with document images, and most go back to the start of the county's imaging program. Copies are a separate charge: Copy and certification charges are set uniformly by statute across all counties, which makes Florida unusually predictable. The same document costs the same in Miami-Dade and in Liberty County. That authority is Fla. Stat. § 28.24 (service charges). Every source listed on this page can be reached without a paid data subscription.

Can an easement exist in Florida without being recorded?

Yes. Florida recognizes prescriptive easements after 20 years of open, continuous, and unpermitted use (Fla. Stat. § 95.361; Downing v. Bird, 100 So. 2d 57 (Fla. 1958)), 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 Florida easement records?

Florida easement burdens are frequently drainage related and created by plat dedications tied to a water management district. The plat dedication, not a standalone easement deed, is often the operative document.

How current are these Florida sources?

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