New York public records & parcel GIS sources

Easement records in New York

We currently index 3 New York counties by hand, Erie County, Kings County (Brooklyn) and Suffolk County, recording the recorder-of-deeds search page, the assessor or GIS parcel viewer, and any published map service for each one.

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

About 33% of the indexed New York 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 New York

1. Start at the County Clerk, or the NYC City Register for the county where the parcel sits: Erie County, NY 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. New York easements affecting older city lots are often recorded as covenants and restrictions in liber and page form; search by block and lot rather than by name where the borough index supports it.
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.

New York easement record questions

Where are easements recorded in New York?

With the County Clerk, or the NYC City Register in the county where the land sits. Outside New York City, land records are filed with the County Clerk. Inside the city, the Department of Finance's Office of the City Register records for the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens through ACRIS, while Staten Island's records stay with the Richmond County Clerk. Recording is governed by N.Y. Real Prop. Law § 291 (recording of conveyances).

Are New York easement records free to search?

Searching the index is generally free. ACRIS provides free public access to city records from the mid-1960s forward, with older records held on microfilm at the borough offices. Upstate county clerks run their own portals with widely varying image coverage. Copies are a separate charge: County clerk fees are set by statute per document and per page; the New York City Register publishes its own schedule for the four boroughs it serves. That authority is N.Y. C.P.L.R. § 8019 and county clerk fee schedules. Every source listed on this page can be reached without a paid data subscription.

Can an easement exist in New York without being recorded?

Yes. New York recognizes prescriptive easements after 10 years of open, continuous, and unpermitted use (N.Y. Real Prop. Acts. Law §§ 501, 511), 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 New York easement records?

Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens searches go through ACRIS, but Staten Island does not, searching ACRIS for a Richmond County parcel returns nothing, which people routinely misread as 'no easements'.

How current are these New York sources?

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