Easement Knowledge Hub & Title Directory

A utility easement gives a public or private utility company the right to install, access, and maintain infrastructure across part of your lot. Power lines, water and sewer mains, gas, fiber, and telecom. The right belongs to the utility, not to you, and it usually survives every future sale of the property.

An appurtenant easement attaches to the land itself rather than to a person. One parcel (the dominant estate) holds a right to use part of a neighboring parcel (the servient estate). Most commonly a shared driveway, an access road, or an ingress/egress corridor to a landlocked lot. It transfers automatically with the property.

A prescriptive easement is created by use rather than by a document. When someone uses part of a property openly, continuously, and without permission for the period set by state law, they may acquire a legal right to keep doing so. A neighbor's fence line, a shortcut path, a shared parking area, or an encroaching drive.

Schedule B of a title commitment lists the exceptions. The matters the title company will not insure. Nearly every standard owner's policy includes a general survey exception covering encroachments, overlaps, boundary line disputes, and anything an accurate survey would disclose.

A conservation easement is a voluntary, recorded agreement between a landowner and a qualified land trust or government agency that permanently limits how the land can be developed. The owner keeps title and can still sell, mortgage, or pass down the property, but the restrictions run with the land and bind every future owner. Most are perpetual, and the holder has the right to enter and monitor compliance.

Purchase-of-development-rights (PDR) and farmland preservation programs pay owners to retire the right to develop working land. The parcel stays in private ownership and in production, but the development rights are permanently severed. Related tools include open-space and scenic easements, agricultural districts, and current-use tax programs.

Drainage easements reserve a corridor for water to move across the lot. Swales, ditches, storm sewers, detention and retention basins, and outfalls. They are usually dedicated on the subdivision plat and held by the city, county, or drainage district, and they typically prohibit anything that would obstruct flow.

A public right-of-way is the corridor dedicated for a road and its shoulders, sidewalks, and utilities. Often much wider than the visible pavement. A private access easement, by contrast, is a recorded right benefiting specific parcels. Confusing the two is a frequent cause of setback, driveway, and fence disputes.

Solar and wind easements secure access to sunlight or unobstructed wind across neighboring land, and view easements protect a sightline. Some states have statutes authorizing solar easements and limiting covenants that ban rooftop panels; leases for utility-scale solar and wind projects often add access, transmission, and setback easements across the host parcel.

Pipeline easements let an operator install and maintain gathering or transmission lines across the lot, usually with a permanent strip plus a wider temporary construction workspace. Separately, mineral, oil, gas, and coal rights may have been severed from the surface long ago, giving the mineral owner the implied right to use the surface to reach them.

Government agencies and some regulated utilities can acquire an easement or a strip of land through condemnation, paying just compensation. Road widenings, transmission lines, and pipelines frequently take a permanent easement plus a temporary construction easement rather than the entire parcel.

Covenants, conditions, and restrictions (CC&Rs) are private rules recorded against the subdivision; setbacks and zoning are public rules imposed by the municipality. Neither is technically an easement, nobody gains a right to cross your land, but both appear in Schedule B and both limit what you can build.

When a parcel is landlocked by a split of commonly owned land, courts can imply an easement by necessity so the owner can reach a public road. Related doctrines include easements implied from prior use (a visible, continuous use existing at the time of severance) and easements by estoppel where an owner relied on permission to their detriment.

Easements can end. But rarely easily. Common routes are a recorded release from the holder, merger when one owner acquires both parcels, expiration of a stated term, abandonment shown by clear intent, or a court action to quiet title. A growing number of states also allow the burdened owner to relocate an easement if the holder's use is not materially impaired.