Virginia public records & parcel GIS sources

Easement records in Virginia

We currently index 3 Virginia counties by hand, Chesterfield County, Fairfax County and Loudoun County, recording the recorder-of-deeds search page, the assessor or GIS parcel viewer, and any published map service for each one.

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

About 100% of the indexed Virginia 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 86 out of 100. The remainder go down for maintenance, throttle bulk requests, or change URLs without notice.

How to pull an easement document in Virginia

1. Start at the Circuit Court Clerk for the county where the parcel sits: Chesterfield County, VA 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. Ask the clerk's office directly for the deed book and page from the title commitment; Virginia clerks routinely pull and mail copies for the statutory fee.
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.

Virginia easement record questions

Where are easements recorded in Virginia?

With the Circuit Court Clerk in the county where the land sits. Virginia has no county recorder. Land records are recorded with the Clerk of the Circuit Court in the county or independent city where the land sits, and the deed books physically live at the courthouse. Recording is governed by Va. Code § 17.1-227 (writings to be recorded by the clerk).

Are Virginia easement records free to search?

Searching the index is generally free. Virginia's remote land-records access generally runs through a secure subscriber system rather than an open public portal, so free image access usually means a public terminal at the clerk's office. Some independent cities publish more openly than the counties around them. Copies are a separate charge: Clerk fees are fixed statewide by statute, including per-page copy charges and a separate certification fee. That authority is Va. Code § 17.1-275 (fees collected by circuit court clerks). Every source listed on this page can be reached without a paid data subscription.

Can an easement exist in Virginia without being recorded?

Yes. Virginia recognizes prescriptive easements after 20 years of open, continuous, and unpermitted use (Va. Code Ann. § 8.01-236; 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 Virginia easement records?

Virginia's independent cities are not inside any county. A parcel in an independent city is recorded at that city's circuit court, not at the surrounding county's, searching the county returns nothing.

How current are these Virginia sources?

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