Arkansas mineral rights

Ark. Code Ann. § 18-11-105(d)(1)

Arkansas has no dormant mineral interests act. Chapter 11 of Title 18 was walked end to end, fifty-four sections across eight subchapters, and the word mineral appears in it exactly six times, every one of them a carve-out rather than a rule. The provision that comes closest is Ark. Code 18-11-105, and it is worth knowing precisely because it looks like the thing an absent mineral owner should fear. It provides that all right, claim, title, interest, equity and estate of a cotenant or tenant-in-common to SURFACE RIGHTS which they are not possessing, where the interest was created by intestate descent and distribution or by testate distribution from their grantor, is conclusively deemed waived, abandoned and forfeited to the cotenant in possession, on two conditions: that the cotenant out of possession, whose whereabouts are unknown, has made no written demand for rents, profits or possession for twenty years, and that after those twenty years the cotenant in possession publishes notice of an intent to oust once a week for two consecutive weeks in a newspaper of general circulation in the county, then between ninety and three hundred and sixty-five days after the last publication brings an action to quiet title. That is a real forfeiture on a twenty year clock with a court at the end of it. And then subsection (d)(1) removes minerals from it in a single sentence. So an Arkansas mineral interest held by a tenant-in-common who has never been heard from is not reachable by the one mechanism the property chapter provides for exactly that situation. The other express carve-out is at 18-11-704, in the easement relocation subchapter, which forbids serving a summons and petition on the owner of a recorded oil, gas or mineral interest unless that interest includes an easement to facilitate development.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 18-11-105(d)(1) on the verbatim mirror, with the whole of chapter 11 of Title 18 walked through the mirror's own Previous and Next chain rather than enumerated from an index. The negative is stated on a chapter read end to end and on the statute's own words, not on a search: the six appearances of the word mineral in the chapter were each read in place. What was NOT read is Arkansas case law, and that limit is stated in the gaps on this page.

Ark. Code Ann. § 18-11-106(a), with §§ 18-11-102 and 18-11-103

What Arkansas has instead of a dormancy statute is an adverse possession rule that runs on the tax roll. Ark. Code 18-11-106(a) requires the claimant and those under whom they claim to have actual or constructive possession of the property AND either to have held colour of title for at least seven years while paying the ad valorem taxes on it, or to have held colour of title for at least seven years to contiguous property while paying the taxes on that. The part that does the work is 18-11-106(a)(1)(B), because colour of title may itself be ESTABLISHED by paying the taxes: seven years of payments for unimproved and unenclosed land, or fifteen years for wild and unimproved land, provided the true owner has not also paid the taxes or made a bona fide good faith effort to pay taxes that the taxing authority then misapplied. Those two periods come from the older sections that still sit alongside it, 18-11-102 for unimproved and unenclosed land and 18-11-103 for wild and unimproved land, the second of which frames the fifteen years as creating a presumption of law that colour of title was held before the first payment. Bodies exempt from ad valorem tax are relieved of the payment limb by subsection (b) and need only possession plus colour of title for the same periods. The reason this is filed under possession rather than dormancy is that every limb of it requires actual or constructive possession as well as payment. Non-use alone does nothing in Arkansas.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 18-11-106, with 18-11-102 and 18-11-103, on the verbatim mirror. This states what the statute says. Whether any of it can be applied to a SEVERED mineral estate, which in the general law cannot be possessed by acts on the surface alone, is a question of Arkansas case law that was not read for this page, and it is stated in the gaps rather than resolved here.

Ark. Code Ann. § 18-12-105, with §§ 18-12-601 and 18-12-201

Arkansas has no statute that tells a court how to read a mineral severance deed, and that absence is itself the answer, because the general conveyancing rule then governs and it runs the opposite way from the newest legislation on this record. Ark. Code 18-12-105 provides that the word heirs and other words of inheritance are not necessary to create or convey a fee simple, and that ALL deeds shall be construed to convey a complete estate of inheritance in fee simple unless expressly limited by appropriate words in the deed. So an Arkansas instrument granting or reserving the minerals carries the whole mineral fee, of whatever the minerals turn out to be, unless the deed itself cuts it down. Compare Tennessee, where for any contract on or after 1 July 2011 the parties must name the specific minerals and everything not described stays with the surface owner. Arkansas puts the burden the other way round: what is not expressly limited is conveyed. Two neighbouring sections matter to the same reader. Ark. Code 18-12-601 is the after-acquired title rule, so where somebody conveys land in fee simple absolute, or any lesser estate, without holding the legal estate at the time and acquires it afterwards, the estate passes to the grantee immediately and the conveyance is as valid as if the grantor had held it all along, which is what rescues a mineral deed given by an heir before the estate was settled. And Ark. Code 18-12-201 requires every deed or other instrument for the conveyance of real estate, or by which real estate may be affected in law or equity, to be proved or duly acknowledged before it may be admitted to record at all. Chapter 12 of Title 18 was walked end to end, thirty-eight sections; the word mineral appears in it three times and never in a construction rule, only in the dower, curtesy and homestead provisions and in the beneficiary deed section.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 18-12-105 on the verbatim mirror, with chapter 12 of Title 18 walked through the Previous and Next chain, thirty-eight sections. The negative that Arkansas has no mineral-specific severance deed construction statute rests on that end-to-end read and on each of the three appearances of the word mineral being read in place, not on a search of the chapter.

Ark. Code Ann. § 15-73-201

This is the provision most likely to be worth money to an Arkansas lessor, and most leases do not mention it because it does not have to be in the lease. Ark. Code 15-73-201(a)(1) provides that the term of an oil and gas lease extended by activities on lands in one section or pooling unit, whether the unit was established by rule, by order of the Oil and Gas Commission, or by the lease itself, shall NOT be extended to sections or pooling units under the lease where there has been no activity. In the ordinary law of oil and gas a single producing well anywhere on the leased land holds the entire lease indefinitely, which is why lessors negotiate for a Pugh clause. Arkansas supplies one by statute. The parties may still contract out, but only in a particular way: subsection (a)(2) permits a continuous drilling provision extending the term to additional lands only if the lessor's waiver of the right to terminate the lease as to the lands, sections or units where no activity has occurred is fully set forth in the lease or another agreement IN BOLD, ENLARGED, OR OTHER DISTINCTIVE PRINT. A waiver buried in ordinary type does not satisfy the section on its face. Subsection (b) adds a separate limit for the unregulated case: after the primary term, in an uncontrolled oil field with no spacing requirements, a producing well holds a maximum of one governmental quarter-quarter section as a production unit, which is forty acres.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 15-73-201 on the verbatim mirror, with chapter 73 of Title 15 walked end to end through the Previous and Next chain, twenty-five sections across three subchapters. The chapter has no subchapter 1: 15-73-101 was fetched and is the host's not-found page, so the chapter genuinely begins at 15-73-201.

Ark. Code Ann. § 15-73-207

Most states leave the implied covenants of an oil and gas lease to their courts. Arkansas has written the answer down, and it cuts in both directions in three lines. Ark. Code 15-73-207(a) states flatly that a mineral lessee under an oil and gas lease does not owe a fiduciary duty or a fiduciary obligation to the mineral lessor. That closes off the most demanding standard a lessor might argue for, and it matters, because a fiduciary would have to prefer the lessor's interest to their own. Subsection (b) then sets what is owed instead: the mineral lessee SHALL perform the covenants of the lease in good faith, and SHALL develop and operate the leased mineral estate as a prudent operator for the mutual benefit of the mineral lessor and mineral lessee. The phrase to hold on to is mutual benefit. It means the operator may not treat the lease purely as its own asset, and that decisions about developing, producing and marketing have to take the lessor's return into account as well as the operator's costs, but it stops short of requiring self-sacrifice. Read alongside Ark. Code 15-74-705, which requires the lessor's royalty to be paid at the same price including premiums and bonuses that the working interest receives, the two together are Arkansas's answer to the question of whether an operator can structure a sale so that the royalty share is worth less than the working interest share.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 15-73-207 in full on the verbatim mirror; the section is short enough that the quote above is the whole of it. How Arkansas courts have applied the prudent operator standard to particular disputes was not read and is stated in the gaps.

Ark. Code Ann. § 15-72-607, with § 15-72-604

Owning the minerals under a tract in Arkansas does not carry the gas that somebody else put there. Ark. Code 15-72-607 provides that all gas which has been reduced to possession and is subsequently injected into underground storage fields, sands, reservoirs and facilities shall at all times be deemed the property of the injector, their heirs, successors or assigns, and that in no event shall it be subject to the right of the owner of the surface, or of the owner of any mineral interest under which the storage lies, or of anyone other than the injector, to produce, take, reduce to possession, waste or otherwise interfere with it. That is the rule against a landowner capturing stored gas, and it is stated as strongly as any provision on this record. The balance is in the last sentence of the same section and in the section that precedes it. The injector has NO right to gas in any stratum, or portion of one, which has not been condemned under the subchapter or otherwise purchased, so the protection extends only as far as the interest actually acquired. And Ark. Code 15-72-604 limits what can be taken: a natural gas public utility or gas storage facility may condemn a subsurface stratum the Oil and Gas Commission finds suitable and in the public interest, but not a stratum the Commission affirmatively finds on substantial evidence is producing or capable of producing oil in paying quantities through any known recovery method, and a gas-bearing stratum only where its value as a storage reservoir exceeds its value for producing the relatively small volumes of gas remaining in it.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 15-72-607, with 15-72-604, on the verbatim mirror. Subchapter 6 of chapter 72 was reached by walking the chapter end to end rather than by looking for a storage provision; nothing in the chapter's name would send a reader to it.

Ark. Code Ann. § 26-58-101, with §§ 26-58-111(5) and 26-58-127

Ark. Code 26-58-111 predicates the severance tax on the quantity severed and then sets rates mineral by mineral, and for natural gas it sets four of them. The default at subdivision (5)(D) is five percent of market value. The exception that matters most in Arkansas is high-cost gas at one and a half percent, because Ark. Code 26-58-101 defines high-cost gas as gas produced from any gas well completed within a shale formation, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE FAYETTEVILLE SHALE, the Woodford Shale, the Moorefield Shale and the Chattanooga Shale formations, or their stratigraphic equivalents as described in published stratigraphic nomenclature recognised by the Office of the State Geologist. It is unusual for a state to name a play in its tax code. The rate is not permanent. Ark. Code 26-58-127(b) applies the one and a half percent to the first thirty-six consecutive calendar months beginning on the date of first production, and if the well has not achieved PAYOUT by the end of that period the reduced rate is extended until the earlier of payout or twelve months after the original period expires. After that the well pays the ordinary five percent, or one and a quarter percent if it qualifies as marginal gas. Payout is defined at 26-58-101 as the date cumulative working interest revenues equal all drilling and completion costs plus all operating costs, so the extension is measured on the operator's economics rather than the owner's. New discovery gas from a conventional well gets one and a half percent for twenty-four months under 26-58-127(a). For oil the rate is five percent of market value at the time and point of severance, dropping to four percent where a separately measured well or group of wells averages ten barrels or less per well per day in a calendar month, with injection wells used for pressure maintenance or secondary recovery counted in the group.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 26-58-111, 26-58-101 and 26-58-127 on the verbatim mirror, with chapter 58 of Title 26 walked end to end, forty-one sections. The reliefs were found separately and are NOT in this chapter: 15-72-1001 to 15-72-1003 and 15-72-706 sit in the natural resources title and are described in the tax summary on this page. The currency of the rate section was checked against the legislature's own record and the one change since the snapshot is the lithium amendment, set out separately.

Ark. Code Ann. § 15-72-214(b), with § 15-72-219

Arkansas does not give a surface owner the pre-drilling notice and negotiation rights that North Dakota, New Mexico or Tennessee give. What it gives is a remedy after a spill, and it is a reasonably strong one. Ark. Code 15-72-219(a) entitles a surface owner or surface tenant to reasonable compensation where a spill of crude oil or produced water has damaged real property, growing crops, trees, shrubs, fences, roads, structures, improvements, livestock or personal property, or has caused measurable damage to the productive capacity of the soil. Subsection (b) adds restoration on top of compensation: the operator SHALL restore the damaged land in accordance with the rules of the Division of Environmental Quality or of the Oil and Gas Commission, and subsection (c) requires those rules to provide as nearly as practicable for remediation to the condition of the property before the spill and to specify a reasonable time frame for starting and finishing. If the responsible party does not restore, subsection (d) lets the surface owner or tenant sue for an order requiring restoration to the agency's standards on the balance of probabilities, and the court may allow a reasonable attorney's fee together with costs. The section is prospective, applying to spills after 17 September 2007, does not limit causes of action for damage the agency rules do not address, and does not cut down more stringent restoration terms in a lease. Now the trap, which is in a different section and has a clock on it. Ark. Code 15-72-214(b) provides that a surface owner seeking to recover under the operator's proof of financial responsibility for damages caused by the operator's neglect must file written notice of claim with the Commission WITHIN ONE YEAR OF THE DATE THE DRILLING PERMIT ISSUED, not within a year of the damage, and that the claim ranks behind the Commission's own rights under the same security.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 15-72-214 and 15-72-219 on the verbatim mirror. The quote chosen is the one-year limit rather than the compensation right, because the compensation right is what a reader will expect and the limit is what will surprise them: it runs from the permit rather than from the damage, so a spill in a well's third year has no claim against that security at all.

Ark. Code Ann. § 15-72-305(a)(1), with §§ 15-72-303 and 15-72-304

Arkansas has compulsory integration and, unlike Tennessee, the scheme is in the statute rather than delegated to the regulator. Ark. Code 15-72-303 lets owners of separately owned tracts or interests in an established drilling unit pool voluntarily, and provides that where they fail or refuse to do so, on the application of any such owner or operator the Oil and Gas Commission SHALL enter an order integrating all tracts and interests in the unit. Ark. Code 15-72-304(a) requires those orders to be made after notice and an opportunity for a hearing, on terms that afford the owner of each tract or interest the opportunity to recover or receive their just and equitable share without unnecessary expense. The election is set out at 15-72-304(b): the order must prescribe the time and manner in which owners who wish to pay their share of costs and participate may elect to do so, and must provide that an owner who does NOT affirmatively elect to participate transfers their rights to those who do, for a reasonable consideration determined by the Commission in the absence of agreement, either permanently or for a limited period pending recoupment out of the non-participating owner's share of production of the costs they would have borne PLUS an additional sum fixed by the Commission. That additional sum is the risk penalty, and the statute sets no cap on it. The provision that protects the owner who does nothing at all is 15-72-305(a)(1). Royalty, overriding royalty, production payment and similar interests in the unit are integrated automatically with no further order or action by anyone, and where a unit includes an UNLEASED mineral interest on the effective date, one eighth of that unleased interest shall be deemed royalty. Subsection (a)(3) then treats one eighth of all gas sold from the unit as royalty gas and puts the operator in charge of distributing the net proceeds, with each working interest owner obliged to supply the names, addresses, tax identification numbers and decimal interests of its royalty owners within thirty days of receiving sale proceeds.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 15-72-303, 15-72-304 and 15-72-305 on the verbatim mirror, with chapter 72 of Title 15 walked end to end through the Previous and Next chain, one hundred and one sections across eleven subchapters. Note that 15-72-305 has since gained a subsection (c) from Act 1024 of 2025 defining net proceeds by reference to the new 15-72-325, which is set out separately on this page and sourced to the act itself.

Ark. Code Ann. § 15-72-309(a)(1)

Forced integration of a drilling unit and unit operation of a whole pool are different things in Arkansas, and the second has a much higher bar which counts royalty owners as a separate constituency. Ark. Code 15-72-309(a) provides that the Commission shall order unit operation in accordance with a proposed unit operating agreement only if it makes three findings. The first is the one that matters to a mineral owner: that the proposed unit agreement, or counterparts of it, has been executed by persons who at the time the petition was filed owned of record legal title to at least an undivided seventy-five percent interest in the right to drill into and produce oil or gas from the total proposed unit area, AND by persons who at that time owned of record legal title to seventy-five percent of the royalty and overriding royalty payable from the entire unit area. Those are two separate seventy-five percents, and a royalty owner's signature is not counted through their lessee. The second finding is that unit operation is reasonably necessary to prevent waste, increase ultimate recovery and protect correlative rights; the third is that the value of the additional oil or gas recovered will exceed the additional cost. Once the order is made, subsection (b) binds every person owning an interest in the unit area, or in the oil or gas produced from it, or in the proceeds. There is a wrinkle for anybody whose interest is mortgaged: subsection (c) treats both the grantor and the grantee of a mortgage or deed of trust as the record owner for the purposes of the seventy-five percent count, unless the instrument gives the grantor the right to execute the unit agreement, in which case the grantor alone is deemed the record owner.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 15-72-309 on the verbatim mirror. This is the counterpart of the Tennessee rule built the day before, where the whole of unitization is three subdivisions of a rulemaking list and the only threshold in the code is fifty percent of pool acreage requesting it. Arkansas puts the scheme in the statute and gives royalty owners a vote of their own.

Ark. Code Ann. § 15-72-325, as enacted by Act 1024 of 2025

Act 1024 of the 2025 regular session, approved on 22 April 2025, added a new section to the oil and gas chapter that did not exist when the mirror this page otherwise reads from was taken. Ark. Code 15-72-325 does four things for a gas royalty owner. First it defines NET PROCEEDS twice over: for a mineral interest inside a drilling unit that is an integrated interest not covered by an executed lease, net proceeds are the gross proceeds from the sale of gas including royalty gas, minus applicable taxes, assessments and true third-party costs or costs specifically allowed by the form lease adopted by the Oil and Gas Commission; and for an interest covered by an executed lease, gross proceeds from the sale of gas including royalty gas, minus applicable tax, assessments and charges or deductions specifically allowed by the terms of the lease. Second, it declares that ownership of minerals, INCLUDING THE PROCEEDS PAID AS ROYALTY from the sale of the production of the mineral estate, is a property right, and that a mineral owner has the right to contract about their interest. Third, it sets the floor: the minimum royalty payable to royalty owners from the production of gas shall be one eighth of the net proceeds from the sale of the gas, and an owner may negotiate higher by contract. Fourth, it puts the obligation on the right party and gives it a deadline. Where a mineral interest in a drilling unit is covered by an executed lease, the working interest owner or owners under that lease are responsible for ensuring the full amount of royalties is paid, regardless of whether the payments are actually made by the operator or by a non-operating working interest owner. And if deductions or expenses are taken which are not in accordance with the lease terms, including deductions pertaining to royalty gas, those deductions must be REIMBURSED TO THE ROYALTY OWNER WITHIN THIRTY DAYS of being taken. The limit is in subsection (e): the section does not apply to a producing unit or well that produces liquid hydrocarbons only, liquid hydrocarbons associated with the production of gas, or gas produced in association with liquid hydrocarbons. It is a gas rule.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from the enrolled text of Act 1024 of 2025 as published by the Arkansas General Assembly on its own arkleg.state.ar.us host, which is an official source rather than a mirror, so this rule does not depend on the mirror at all. It could not have: the mirror is current as of 28 March 2024, its chain walks 15-72-320 through 15-72-324 and then jumps straight to 15-72-401, and 15-72-325 was fetched directly and returns the host's not-found page. Both the presence of the act and the absence of the section were checked independently.

Ark. Code Ann. § 15-74-604(b), with §§ 15-74-601, 15-74-705 and 15-74-707

Arkansas puts the payment of production proceeds on a statutory clock and attaches real consequences to missing it. Ark. Code 15-74-601(a) requires proceeds from the sale of oil or gas production to be paid to the persons legally entitled commencing no later than SIX MONTHS after the date of first sale, and thereafter no later than SIXTY DAYS after the end of the calendar month within which subsequent production is sold. The obligation falls on the first purchaser of the production, defined as the first commercial purchaser after completion of the well rather than anyone buying during initial testing. Small balances may be aggregated and paid annually where the amount owed is at least ten dollars but under a hundred and fifty, and a royalty owner may cut that short: on WRITTEN REQUEST the payment must be made once the aggregate exceeds fifty dollars. Anything under ten dollars may be held but must be paid when production ceases or when the payor gives up responsibility. Ark. Code 15-74-604 then supplies the teeth. Where the operator fails to pay oil or gas royalties within ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY DAYS after the production is marketed, the unpaid royalties bear interest at TWELVE PERCENT a year until paid. A willful breach of the obligation to pay or deliver royalties may authorise, among other relief, cancellation of the lease where the court determines the equities of the case warrant it. And a prior first lien is created to the extent of any unpaid royalty together with any interest or penalty. The section does not apply where the owner elects to take their share in kind, or where unmarketability of title would substantially affect the making of the payments. Two more sections protect the amount rather than the timing. Ark. Code 15-74-705 makes it the duty of the lessee and of any pipeline company or other purchaser to pay the lessor THE SAME PRICE, including premiums, steaming charges and bonuses of whatsoever name, that is paid to the operator or lessee for the working interest. And Ark. Code 15-74-707 requires the purchaser to pay the royalty interest at the same time it pays the lessee or producer, unless time and manner are expressly waived in writing, and to furnish each royalty owner by the twelfth of each month a statement showing the correct amount of oil or gas purchased in the previous month and the correct amount paid for it.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 15-74-601, 15-74-604, 15-74-705 and 15-74-707 on the verbatim mirror, with chapter 74 of Title 15 walked end to end through the Previous and Next chain, thirty-five sections across seven subchapters. Note the two different clocks: sixty days from the end of the month of sale is when payment is DUE under 15-74-601, while the twelve percent under 15-74-604 does not begin until a hundred and eighty days after marketing, so there is a window in which a payment is late but not yet earning interest.

Ark. Code Ann. § 15-72-1109, with §§ 15-72-1102 and 15-72-1103

Subchapter 11 of chapter 72, the Oil and Gas Lien Act, is the strongest protection on the Arkansas record for an owner who is not being paid, and it works without anybody filing anything. Ark. Code 15-72-1103(a) grants EACH INTEREST OWNER an oil and gas lien, to the extent of their interest in an oil and gas right, to secure the obligations of a first purchaser to pay the sales price, existing as part of and incident to the ownership of that right. The definitions carry the weight. Ark. Code 15-72-1102(8) defines an interest owner as a person owning an interest in an oil and gas right before the acquisition by a first purchaser, including a representative and a transferee, and 15-72-1102(11)(A) defines an oil and gas right to include oil, gas, PROCEEDS, an oil and gas lease, an INTEGRATION ORDER and an agreement to sell. A royalty owner is inside it, and so is somebody who was forced into a unit and never signed a lease. The lien attaches immediately to all oil and gas as of 28 July 2021, continues uninterrupted and without lapse after severance, continues in the proceeds, and exists until the interest owner or the representative first entitled has actually received the sales price. It does not depend on possession and is not voided by any transfer of title or possession. A first purchaser who pays in good faith to someone apparently entitled, without actual knowledge that they were not, takes free of the lien on the oil and gas, but the lien CONTINUES in the proceeds paid to or due that person. The part that makes it unusual is Ark. Code 15-72-1109. An interest owner may not be REQUIRED, as a condition or term of an agreement to sell or otherwise, to waive, relinquish or release the lien other than upon payment in full, nor to agree to a clause applying another state's law to these rights, and any such required waiver or clause is VOID as a matter of the public policy of this state. Waiver is possible only where the first purchaser posts a letter of credit in a form and amount satisfactory to the owner, or agrees to a satisfactory prepayment or escrow arrangement and performs it.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 15-72-1102, 15-72-1103 and 15-72-1109 on the verbatim mirror. This subchapter was reached only because chapter 72 was walked end to end: it is the eleventh subchapter of a chapter about oil and gas conservation, nothing in the chapter heading points to a lien, and an index would have had to be read to the bottom to find it. How the lien is enforced, and how it ranks in an operator's insolvency, are matters of 15-72-1107 and 15-72-1110 which were read but are not summarised here.

Ark. Code Ann. § 18-28-403(a)(1)(A), with §§ 18-28-401 and 18-28-402

Arkansas gives mineral proceeds a subchapter of their own rather than leaving them to the residual clause of the unclaimed property act, which is what Tennessee, Idaho, Maine and South Dakota do. Ark. Code 18-28-401(3) defines mineral proceeds as all obligations to pay resulting from the production and sale of minerals from this state and for the acquisition and retention of a mineral lease to produce minerals located in this state, and 18-28-401(2) defines mineral as oil, gas, uranium, sulphur, lignite, coal and any other substance ordinarily and naturally considered a mineral in this state, regardless of the depth at which it is found. The first obligation arrives long before abandonment. Ark. Code 18-28-402 requires a holder of mineral proceeds to ESTABLISH AN ESCROW ACCOUNT where the person entitled to receive them is unknown or has not been located within ONE YEAR after the funds became payable or distributable, held for the benefit of the rightful recipient, with a person showing sufficient proof of identity and marketable title to be paid promptly the sum accumulated for their benefit. Multiple accounts may be commingled provided separate records of each deposit and withdrawal are kept. A holder who violates the section faces a civil penalty of up to two thousand five hundred dollars, and the Auditor of State may conduct random audits of the escrow accounts. Then Ark. Code 18-28-403 presumes mineral proceeds abandoned where they have remained unclaimed for longer than THREE YEARS after becoming payable or distributable, whereupon they go to the Auditor of State and into a dedicated Abandoned Mineral Proceeds Trust Fund rather than into general unclaimed property. The reporting requirement is what makes them findable: the holder must give the Auditor the owner's name and last known address, the applicable well name, uncontrolled lease name or unitised area name as recognised by the Oil and Gas Commission, and either the county, section, township and range of the well or of the land from which the minerals were severed. So an Arkansas heir who knows the land but not the ancestor's exact name has a legal description to search on. One diversion exists: on the petition of the county attorney of the county where the minerals were produced, published at least once in a legal newspaper of general circulation, proceeds held under leases executed by court-appointed receivers are remitted instead to that county's general fund.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 18-28-401, 18-28-402 and 18-28-403 on the verbatim mirror, with chapter 28 of Title 18 walked end to end through the Previous and Next chain, thirty-seven sections. The chapter has no subchapter 3: the walk runs from 18-28-231 to 18-28-401, and 18-28-301 was fetched directly and is the host's not-found page.

Ark. Code Ann. § 14-15-404, with §§ 14-15-402, 14-15-411 and 14-15-414

Arkansas is a notice jurisdiction and the rule is not where a reader would look for it. Ark. Code 14-15-404 sits in TITLE 14, LOCAL GOVERNMENT, because Arkansas writes its recording law as duties of the county recorder rather than as a doctrine of property, and Title 18, Property, does not contain it. Subsection (a)(1) provides that every deed, bond or instrument of writing affecting the title in law or equity to any real or personal property in the state, which is or may be required by law to be acknowledged or proved and recorded, is constructive notice to all persons FROM THE TIME THE INSTRUMENT IS FILED FOR RECORD in the office of the county recorder of the proper county. Subsection (b) supplies the consequence of not filing: no such instrument made after 21 December 1846 is good or valid against a subsequent purchaser of the real estate for a valuable consideration WITHOUT ACTUAL NOTICE of it, nor against a creditor of the person who executed it who obtains a judgment or decree that may be a lien, unless it has been duly executed, acknowledged or proved as required and filed for record in the county where the real estate is situated. That is a notice rule rather than a race or race-notice rule: a later purchaser who knew about the earlier unrecorded deed takes subject to it however quickly they record, and one who genuinely did not know takes free of it. The moment that counts is FILING rather than the recorder getting round to transcribing, and Ark. Code 14-15-411 obliges the recorder to endorse the precise time of filing on the instrument. Two further practical points. Ark. Code 14-15-402(b) sets physical requirements for acceptance, including the paper size, a two and a half inch margin at the top right of the first page for the file mark, the title of the document and the names of grantor and grantee, with instruments executed before 1 January 2004 exempt and the recorder holding a discretion to waive for good cause. And Ark. Code 14-15-414 requires the recorder to keep the indexes, which are what a mineral title search actually runs on.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 14-15-404 on the verbatim mirror, with subchapter 4 of chapter 15 of Title 14 walked end to end through the Previous and Next chain, twenty sections. This section was found only after Title 18 had been walked and shown not to contain a priority rule. It is the third state running on this record where the operative provision is outside the title named for the subject, after Georgia's severance tax in the conservation title and Tennessee's severance tax in the oil and gas title.

Ark. Code Ann. § 15-74-101

A division order is the document that tells a royalty owner what fraction of a well the payor believes they own, and in most states its contents are whatever the payor chooses to put in it. Arkansas legislates them. Ark. Code 15-74-101(a) requires all division orders, and any declaration of interest in gas, between the purchaser of gas production and the owner of the production, or between purchasers or the owner and the royalty interest owners, to contain five things ON THE FIRST PAGE: the name and address of the owner of royalties; a space for the owner's social security or tax identification number, the other information needed to meet the requirements of the Internal Revenue Service or other governmental agencies, and a space for the owner's signature; the acreage under which the royalty owner has an interest and the fractional or decimal interest the royalty owner owns in the pool; the TOTAL AMOUNT OF NET MINERAL ACRES in the area subject to the division order; and the effective date of the division order. The fourth of those is the one worth the section, because a decimal interest on its own cannot be checked by anybody. Given the total net mineral acres in the unit and the acreage the owner holds an interest under, a royalty owner can do the division themselves and see whether the decimal they have been sent is right. Read with Ark. Code 15-72-305(a)(2), which allocates production to each tract in the proportion its area bears to the total area of the drilling unit, the two together let an owner reconstruct the arithmetic. The limit is the same one that runs through the Arkansas gas provisions: subsection (b) excludes any producing unit or well that produces liquid hydrocarbons only, liquid hydrocarbons associated with the production of gas, or gas produced in association with liquid hydrocarbons.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 15-74-101 on the verbatim mirror. It is filed here as a records rule rather than a payment rule because what it produces is a document a mineral owner can check their own ownership against, which is the same job the county indexes do from the other direction.