Montana mineral rights

Mont. Code Ann. § 15-36-310

The operator pays Montana's oil and natural gas production tax in full, for its own account and for the account of every other owner of the gross value of the product, including working interest, royalty interest, overriding royalty interest, carried working interest and production payment owners. Unless a lease or contract says otherwise, a royalty owner's pro rata share is deducted from the settlements under the lease or from the division of proceeds.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 15-36-310. This answers the question that decides whether a production tax is the operator's problem or the mineral owner's, and Montana's answer is that it reaches the royalty interest, as Oklahoma's and North Dakota's do. It matters more here than in those states because of the rate structure: the tax the royalty owner's share is computed at is the nonworking interest rate of 14.8 percent in every category, while the working interest owner paying the cheque may be at 0.5 or 9 percent on the same barrel. The opening words of subsection (2) are the exception worth reading, because a lease or contract can provide otherwise.

Montana Code Annotated, table of contents and section indexes

Montana has no dormant mineral interest act. No period of non use lapses a severed Montana mineral interest, there is no notice of intent to preserve to file and no notice of lapse to record. Where the owner of an interest cannot be found, Montana's answer is the opposite of extinguishment: a district court appoints a trustee to lease the interest on the absent owner's behalf and hold the money for them.

Checked July 30, 2026. Established by enumerating the code rather than from recollection, and by a different instrument from the ones used for Texas and New Mexico, because Montana's statute site has no full text search that could be reached. Every section heading in Title 70 (Property), Title 82 (Minerals, Oil, and Gas) and Title 15 (Taxation) was collected on 2026-07-30 by walking the Legislature's own chapter, part and section indexes: 954 headings in Title 70, 400 in Title 82 and 2,164 in Title 15, 3,518 in total. Not one contains the word dormant. The instrument was validated before the negative was relied on, which is the step that makes a zero mean something: the same enumeration returns three headings containing the word mineral, including the part titled Trusts for Unlocatable Mineral Owners, so the index does surface mineral-specific provisions where they exist. Every Title 82 heading containing terminat, abandon, forfeit or lapse was then read and none concerns a severed mineral interest: they are about abandoned wells and their reclamation, abandoned mine sites, bond forfeiture, permit termination, and the relocation of an abandoned mining claim. One of them is worth separating out because it is the thing most often confused with this question. Section 82-1-201 requires release of record on the forfeiture, cancellation or expiration of a lease, which is about an oil and gas lease ending, not about the mineral estate underneath it. What this does not exclude is a lapse provision whose section heading uses none of those words, or one sitting outside the three titles enumerated. Whether a severed Montana interest can be lost by adverse possession is a separate question and is not answered by this rule.

Mont. Code Ann. § 82-1-302

Where a Montana mineral interest is owned by someone whose whereabouts cannot reasonably be ascertained, another owner of an interest in the same minerals may petition the district court to declare a trust in that person's favour. On proof of a diligent but unsuccessful effort to locate them, and that a trustee is in the best interest of all the owners, the court appoints the clerk of court or the Department of Revenue as trustee and may authorise the trustee to execute a lease, ratification or division order on the absent owner's behalf.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 82-1-302, enacted in 1979 and amended in 1997. This is the provision that makes Montana's dormancy answer worth reading rather than just recording. Every other state on this record that has addressed the unfindable mineral owner has done it by taking something away or by holding money: Ohio, North Dakota and Michigan can end the interest, and Oklahoma routes the money to a state fund. Montana keeps the interest with its owner and supplies a trustee to act for them, so the tract can be developed without the absent owner losing anything. The petition is brought by another owner of an interest in the same minerals, not by the surface owner, which is a different alignment of interests again. Two limits are in the text: the court appoints the clerk of court first and the Department of Revenue only if the clerk declines, and the authority granted is to execute a lease or related instrument on the terms the court approves rather than to sell the interest.

Mont. Code Ann. § 82-1-304

All bonuses, rentals, royalties and other income from a Montana unlocatable owner trust are paid to the trustee and held until the owner claims them, and the trust stays in force until they do. Trustee and attorney fees may not be paid out of the trust proceeds. Half the interest earned goes to the Department of Revenue, or to the county general fund where the clerk of court is trustee, to cover administration.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 82-1-304. The rule that fees cannot be taken from the proceeds is the part worth knowing, because it is what stops the mechanism eating the absent owner's money while they are absent. Administration is instead funded from half the interest earned on the trust. The trust must be kept in force until the unlocatable owners have successfully claimed their share and filed the notice section 82-1-306 provides for, and the trustee distributes only on the order of the district court. Two limits: the funds are subject to Montana's abandoned property provisions in Title 70, chapter 9, which were not read for this record, so what happens to money nobody ever claims is not established here; and the trustee must invest prudently under the standard in section 72-38-902, which was also not read.

Mont. Code Ann. § 82-10-502

Montana's Surface Owner Damage and Disruption Compensation Act defines an oil and gas estate as an estate in or ownership of all or part of the oil and gas underlying a specified tract of land, and separately defines the surface owner as the person who holds record title to, or a purchaser's interest in, the surface. The two definitions sit beside each other and assume the two estates can be in different hands.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 82-10-502 in the Montana Code Annotated on the Legislature's own site, which stamps every page Montana Code Annotated 2025. Note the scope: these definitions govern that part of the code, which is the surface damage part, and are not a general statement of Montana property law. The same section defines the oil and gas developer or operator as the person who acquires the oil and gas lease for the purpose of extracting oil and gas, and defines lost land value as the value of the highest and best reasonably available use of the land directly used by operations, other than uses appurtenant to the mineral estate. Like New Mexico's pair of definitions this identifies the surface owner out of the record rather than by occupation, and the phrase "purchaser's interest" extends it to someone buying under contract. What is not on this record is the character of a severed Montana mineral estate in general property law, or any Montana authority on what the word minerals reaches in a particular deed.

Mont. Code Ann. § 70-21-304

Every Montana conveyance of real property other than a lease for a term not exceeding one year is void against a subsequent purchaser or encumbrancer of the same property, in good faith and for a valuable consideration, whose conveyance is first duly recorded. The section reaches encumbrancers expressly, including the assignee of a mortgage, lease or other conditional estate.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 70-21-304. This is a seventh distinct wording across the states on this record and its ancestry is stated in the code itself, which is unusual and useful: the section's history line traces it to the Compiled Statutes of 1887 and then to California Civil Code section 1214, based on Field Civil Code section 530. So Montana's rule descends from the Field code line rather than from the 1846 Revised Statutes model that Michigan's and North Dakota's near-identical sections come from. Two features distinguish it from those two in substance and not just in wording: it names encumbrancers alongside purchasers and reaches the assignee of a mortgage, lease or other conditional estate, and it carves out a lease of a year or less, which is the same carve-out Oklahoma makes although Oklahoma also requires actual possession for it. No Montana opinion classifying the state as a notice or a race-notice jurisdiction has been fetched, so no label is applied here.

Mont. Code Ann. § 70-21-302

Every Montana conveyance of real property that is acknowledged or proved, certified and recorded as the law prescribes is constructive notice of its contents to subsequent purchasers and mortgagees from the time it is filed with the county clerk. A certified copy of a recorded conveyance may be recorded in any other county with the same force as the original.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 70-21-302. The recording officer named in the current text is the county clerk, which is the office a Montana searcher deals with, and the section is the companion to the priority rule: it is what makes a recorded instrument bind someone who never saw it. Note the reach of the notice as the section states it, to subsequent purchasers and mortgagees, which is narrower on its face than Oklahoma's equivalent, which names purchasers, mortgagees, encumbrancers and creditors. Subsection (2) is the practical provision for land straddling a county line or for a chain that moved between counties: a certified copy of a recorded conveyance may itself be recorded in another county and has the same force there as the original would.

Mont. Code Ann. § 70-21-207

Letters patent from the United States or from Montana, and other documents issued under their authority that evidence or affect title to land, may be recorded in Montana without acknowledgment or further proof. Where the patent has been lost or is beyond the control of a party claiming title under it, a certified transcript of the issuing government's own copy may be recorded instead, and that record has prima facie the same force as the original until the original is recorded.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 70-21-207, whose history line runs back to the Civil Code of 1895 and to California Civil Code section 1160. This is the second route this record has found from a state page into the federal reservation record, and it is a different route from New Mexico's. New Mexico's recording statute names United States patents among the instruments that shall be recorded. Montana's instead makes the patent easy to get onto the record and supplies a substitute when the original is gone, which is the practical problem for a nineteenth century patent: a certified transcript of the issuing government's own copy is recordable in lieu of it. Read alongside the federal record on this site, that matters because the patent is the instrument which decides whether the minerals under a tract were ever conveyed into private hands at all. What this record does not establish is how much Montana land carries a federal mineral reservation, in acres or in proportion, and no figure for it is published here. Section 82-2-113 separately makes a United States patent for a mining claim conclusive evidence that Montana's location and record requirements were met; that provision concerns mining claims rather than oil and gas and was read but is not relied on above.

Mont. Code Ann. § 82-10-503

A Montana oil and gas developer or operator must give the surface owner, and any purchaser under contract for deed, written notice of planned drilling operations no more than 180 days and no fewer than 20 days before any activity that disturbs the land surface. The notice goes to the addresses shown in the county clerk and recorder's records, must disclose the plan of work well enough for the owner to evaluate its effect, and must enclose a copy of the surface damage part itself together with the state's guide to split estates where one is available.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 82-10-503. The requirement to enclose the statute itself is the same idea as New Mexico's, and Montana goes one step further by requiring a plain-language guide to split estates to go with it, which no other state on this record requires. The window is worth noting in both directions: not fewer than 20 days, so the notice is not a formality served on the morning of the work, and not more than 180 days, so a notice cannot be banked years in advance. Three limits are in the text. The surface owner may waive the notice. The surface owner, not the operator, is responsible for passing the operator's name and address to lessees and tenants who are responsible for surface operations. And before that notice is given, a person qualified under section 70-16-111 may already enter to investigate boundary evidence and perform boundary, well site location and access road surveys if that section's own notice requirements are met, which was not read for this record.

Mont. Code Ann. § 82-10-504

A Montana oil and gas developer or operator must negotiate in good faith and pay the surface owner compensation equal to the damages sustained for loss of agricultural production and income, lost land value and lost value of improvements. The surface owner may elect annual payments rather than a lump sum, except that harm from exploration alone must be compensated in a single sum, and an operator who misses an annual instalment by more than 60 days after notice owes twice the unpaid amount.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 82-10-504. Three provisions here have no equivalent elsewhere on this record. The surface owner can elect to take the money annually over time rather than as one payment, which changes what the compensation is for. The parties may enter a dispute resolution process including mediation at either party's request and on mutual agreement, which is a softer mechanism than North Dakota's fee shifting or Oklahoma's court-appointed appraisers. And subsection (1)(e) provides that a person may not reserve or assign damage and disruption compensation apart from the surface estate except to a tenant of the surface estate, so the right to be paid for surface damage cannot be split off and sold the way the minerals themselves were. Payments may cover only land directly affected by operations and production. What was not read is the rest of the part: sections 82-10-505 through 82-10-511, covering liability for damages to property, notification of injury, the offer of settlement and its rejection, the penalty for a notice violation, and the provision that these remedies are cumulative.