Texas public records & parcel GIS sources

Easement records in Texas

We currently index 8 Texas counties by hand, Bexar County, Collin County, Dallas County, Denton County, El Paso County and Harris County, plus 2 more, recording the recorder-of-deeds search page, the assessor or GIS parcel viewer, and any published map service for each one.

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

About 50% of the indexed Texas 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 Texas

1. Start at the County Clerk for the county where the parcel sits: Bexar County, TX 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. For pipeline corridors, cross-check the Railroad Commission's public mapping viewer against the county index; the recorded easement often predates any usable survey description.
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.

Texas easement record questions

Where are easements recorded in Texas?

With the County Clerk in the county where the land sits. Texas records land documents with the elected County Clerk in each of the 254 counties, the largest number of independent recording offices in the country. There is no statewide index, so a search must be run county by county. Recording is governed by Tex. Prop. Code § 11.004 (recording and indexing duties).

Are Texas easement records free to search?

Searching the index is generally free. The metro counties publish deep, image-complete online indexes. Many rural counties provide only a recent index online and hold older volumes on the shelf in the clerk's office. Copies are a separate charge: Fees are set by statute with a per-page structure for recording and separate charges for plain and certified copies. That authority is Tex. Loc. Gov't Code § 118.011 (county clerk fees). Every source listed on this page can be reached without a paid data subscription.

Can an easement exist in Texas without being recorded?

Yes. Texas recognizes prescriptive easements after 10 years of open, continuous, and unpermitted use (Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code §§ 16.026, 16.024-16.025), 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 Texas easement records?

Texas utility and pipeline easements are commonly written as blanket grants. 'over and across' the tract with no fixed location or width. The corridor's location was then set by where the line was actually built, which is why the deed alone will not tell you where it runs.

How current are these Texas sources?

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