Mineral rights by state
Checked July 29, 2026 Updated July 29, 2026 no external claim on this page
Checked
Jul 29 2026
Jul 29 2026
The short answer
Mineral rights are governed by state law, and the differences between states decide almost everything that matters: whether a severed interest can lapse for non-use, whether an unleased owner can be forced into a pooled unit, what the operator owes the surface owner, and what the state taxes on production. Every state has a row below, whether or not its page has been written yet, and each row says where it stands.
Checked against the sources named below on .
The status of every state
Three states of knowledge, and the map on the front page uses the same three. A state that is lit has a page. A state being researched has someone reading its statutes. A state marked planned has neither yet, and clicking it brings you here rather than to an empty page dressed up as an answer.
| Code | State | Status | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|---|
| AL | Alabama | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-31. Ten rules, the severance tax and the State Oil and Gas Board, each dated and sourced. Alabama takes a severed mineral interest off the annual tax roll permanently in exchange for a few cents an acre paid once at the courthouse, and says a tax sale of the surface cannot in any manner whatsoever affect it; but that exemption is automatic only for interests severed after October 12, 1957, and conditional on an application for older ones. No dormant mineral act and no marketable record title act. The oil and gas chapter gives the surface owner nothing, not notice, not damages, not a bond, while an underground coal operator must repair or pay for subsidence damage to a home and replace a ruined water supply, and no deed can waive it. Forced into a unit, an owner keeps three sixteenths of the production free of every cost. Pore space goes with the surface and an old mineral reservation does not carry it. |
| AK | Alaska | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-31. Eight rules, the oil and gas production tax and the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, each dated and sourced. One of three states here, with Washington and Hawaii, where the severance was made by statute rather than by private deed, and the Alaska and Washington provisions are close enough in wording to share an ancestor: every contract, lease, grant and deed of state land carries a reservation the statute prints in full, keeping all oils, gases, coal, ores, minerals, fissionable materials, geothermal resources and fossils, plus the right to enter, build and occupy what is convenient. Nothing lapses for non use. The state may not exercise the reservation until it provides full payment for all damages, or posts a bond the director sets after a hearing where the owner will not settle. A landowner royalty is taken out of the main tax base and taxed under its own subsection at five percent for oil. And there are no counties: the state Department of Natural Resources keeps the land records. |
| AZ | Arizona | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-01. Seven rules, the severance tax on metalliferous minerals and the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, each dated and sourced. No dormant mineral act and no marketable record title act, established by enumerating two complete title indexes with controls rather than by any search, so nothing read can end an interest for inaction. What the state kept under land it sold depends on the DATE: one sixteenth for land sold between July 1954 and March 1968, where the state made the buyer its own agent and vested fifteen sixteenths of the oil and gas in them, and everything except common variety minerals for land sold after March 1968. Reserved minerals are closed to mining claims, and the surface owner has the first right of refusal on any exploration permit over them, which nothing else here gives them. Pooling is ordered on a just and equitable share standard with no royalty, no cost-free fraction and no risk penalty written into the statute. |
| AR | Arkansas | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-04. Sixteen rules, the severance tax and the Oil and Gas Commission, each dated and sourced, from eight chapters walked end to end through the mirror’s own Previous/Next chain, 351 sections. No dormant mineral act, and the negative is written by the statute itself: Ark. Code 18-11-105 forfeits a tenant-in-common’s interest after twenty years of silence, on published notice and a quiet title action, and subsection (d)(1) then says it shall not apply to mineral rights or other subsurface rights. The word mineral appears six times in that whole 54-section chapter and every appearance is a carve-out. What can move an interest is adverse possession, which needs possession as well as colour of title and paid taxes, seven years or fifteen on wild land. What Arkansas legislates instead is the money, through more mechanisms at once than any other state here though not at a higher floor, since Idaho, North Carolina and Alabama each set one eighth and a clock of their own: ONE EIGHTH is a floor in three separate statutes, a Pugh clause is written into 15-73-201 and only a bold-print waiver defeats it, 15-73-207 codifies the prudent operator standard while denying any fiduciary duty, royalties draw twelve percent after 180 days, and the Oil and Gas Lien Act makes a REQUIRED waiver of an interest owner’s lien void as public policy. The severance tax names the Fayetteville Shale in the statute and taxes it at one and a half percent for 36 months. The recording act is in TITLE 14, LOCAL GOVERNMENT, third state running where the rule is outside the title named for the subject. Two 2025 acts that postdate the mirror are on the page from the legislature’s own copies: Act 1024 created the minimum royalty section, Act 1012 put lithium inside the brine tax without changing its rate. |
| CA | California | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-31. Ten rules, the charge on production and the Geologic Energy Management Division, each dated and sourced. It can terminate a dormant mineral right and it is the hardest state here to lose one in: three conditions have to hold together for twenty years, so satisfying any one defeats the action, nothing happens unless the surface owner brings and wins a quiet title suit, and even then the court must let the mineral owner file a late notice as a condition of dismissal on paying the surface owner costs. The preserving notice needs no legal description. There is no oil and gas severance tax, only a per barrel charge set annually at whatever will fund the regulator and withheld from royalty owners; the severance California does tax by the tonne is lithium. Its operator duties are keyed to how close people are to the well rather than to who owns the surface, and they reach tenants. |
| CO | Colorado | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-29. Twelve rules, the severance tax and the regulator, each dated and sourced. One rule is published at partial confidence with its caveat visible, because the opinion behind its affirmative half is not reachable on any source this site is allowed to cite. |
| CT | Connecticut | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-03. Seven rules, no severance tax established and no minerals agency at all, each dated and sourced. The second state here with the UNIFORM Dormant Mineral Interests Act and twenty-four years ahead of Maryland, the other one: enacted 1987, twenty years unused and the fee owner may sue to terminate, on the same notice as a quiet title action, whether or not anybody knows where the mineral owner is, and no disability or lack of knowledge of any kind suspends the clock. A recorded decree merges the interest and its appurtenant surface rights into the surface estate in shares proportionate to surface ownership. Where it parts from Maryland is the rescue: a defendant may record a LATE notice and the court SHALL permit it on payment of the plaintiff litigation expenses, and unlike Maryland that rescue has no expiry date, though the plaintiff has fifteen days to move to continue as an ordinary quiet title action where the statute no longer protects you. A second route runs alongside and the act says so in terms: a forty year marketable record title act, 1967, whose excepted interests contain no mineral exception. Sand and gravel, road material and building stone are named minerals, which matters in a state whose industry is aggregate. And the surface answer is the most geologically specific provision on this record: the State NAMES forty-four traprock ridges and five amphibolite ridges and orders every town that has one to restrict quarrying on it. |
| DE | Delaware | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-03. It went on as the substitute for New Jersey, which was believed unbuildable that day and was built on 2026-08-04, so read this row on its own merits rather than as a stand-in. Six rules, no severance tax and a royalty instead, and the Secretary of Natural Resources and Environmental Control who may delegate the whole chapter to the State Geologist, each dated and sourced. Delaware has exactly ONE chapter of its code named for minerals across 1,310 chapter names, and it is called Minerals in Submerged Lands, and its first sentence says it applies to ALL LANDS within the boundaries of the State while every operative section in it describes tide and submerged lands. This record reports both and resolves neither. Mineral is defined by physical science rather than by a list: any natural inorganic substance with definite chemical and physical properties anywhere within the earth crust. Exploration data is CONFIDENTIAL and a state official who discloses it commits a criminal offence, which is the exact inverse of Massachusetts, read the same day, where a coal explorer must make its results public after a hundred and eighty days. A state lease carries a royalty of not less than twelve and a half percent of gross production, the federal onshore figure, after an allowance for oil treatment capped at five cents a barrel and unamended since 1966, with a state lien on production for arrears. Nothing lapses for non use, and Delaware is the plainest answer in its neighbourhood because it has none of the four title instruments its neighbours use: no dormant act, no marketable record title act, no land registration. The recording rule is the flattest here, priority from the time of recording without respect to when the deed was signed, asking nothing about notice, value or good faith. |
| FL | Florida | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-01. Eight rules, four severance taxes and the Department of Environmental Protection, each dated and sourced. A marketable record title act that REACHES severed minerals, and does it by saying nothing about them; Vermont is the other, on a forty year clock rather than thirty: the whole of chapter 712 contains no occurrence of mineral, phosphate, oil, gas or petroleum, and an act that clears everything its nine exceptions do not save reaches what it never names. Oklahoma and Utah are safe because their acts say so; Florida is not. The defence is a notice filed within thirty years of the root of title and refiled every thirty years after, and the statute says a person lack of knowledge of any kind may not delay or suspend the period. The state reserved three quarters of the phosphate, minerals and metals and half the petroleum in the land it sold, but released the right of entry on any parcel that is or ever has been under twenty acres. A silent owner drilled into a unit is carried at three hundred percent of costs. For an owner nobody can find the department becomes receiver without a court, and the money waits in the Minerals Trust Fund with an annual CPA audit and a newspaper notice. |
| GA | Georgia | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-04, and it took three attempts to get here because the first two reasons for leaving it out were both false. Eight rules, the severance tax and the Environmental Protection Division, each dated and sourced. Georgia has NO dormant mineral act. What it has is adverse possession of minerals by the SURFACE owner at O.C.G.A. 44-5-168, on seven years of neither working nor attempting to work the minerals nor paying the taxes on them, which is the shortest period on this record. Nothing vests on its own: it takes a petition in the superior court and in rem service including publication, so unlike South Dakota nobody loses a Georgia interest in silence. Two things in subsection (f) remove the section altogether, a lease for a specific number of years and a written lease to a licensed mining operator. The severance tax is the catch of the build. Title 48, Revenue and Taxation, has nineteen chapters and no severance chapter, and this record was about to publish that as a negative; the tax is at 12-4-54 in the conservation title, inside the drilling act, at three cents a barrel and a penny per thousand cubic feet, charged by the unit with no percentage, with a county and municipal local option of nine cents and two cents on top. Both dormancy rules ship partial because Georgia’s own portal holds 44-5-168 in a version effective 1 July 2026 whose text sits behind a CAPTCHA. |
| HI | Hawaii | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-02. Twelve rules, the general excise tax on geothermal and the Department of Land and Natural Resources, each dated and sourced. All minerals under state lands and under RESERVED LANDS are the State’s, and reserved lands is the term that decides everything: land owned or leased by any person in which the State or its predecessors reserved the minerals expressly OR BY IMPLICATION. So a privately owned Hawaii parcel can have State minerals under it, and finding out means reading the instrument that first put the land in private hands, which for most of the state means the Great Mahele of 1848. Every conveyance of state land must contain the reservation, the same device as Alaska and Washington. Minerals includes all geothermal and expressly excludes the sand, rock and gravel the islands actually quarry. Nothing lapses for non use, on an enumeration of all 1,036 chapter titles in the code. The occupier may elect ARBITRATION of both the damages and the RENT for their surface, with the winning bidder. Where geothermal is leased on reserved lands the surface owner has first refusal on the lease itself, and the board can hand the lease to the occupier with no auction at all. No severance tax: the mining royalty is declared to be in lieu of one, the aluminium royalty is pegged to the mainland price of virgin pig aluminium, and geothermal pays general excise tax at the producer rate of one half of one per cent. One statewide recording office, no counties, two systems inside it. |
| ID | Idaho | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-03. Thirteen rules, the mine license tax and the Department of Lands with the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, each dated and sourced. Nothing lapses for non use, established by enumerating fifty chapter titles across the mines and mining title and the property title with controls. What Idaho has instead is the most detailed written protection for a mineral owner on this record, nearly all of it from 2017 and amended in 2023: a one eighth royalty unless the lease says otherwise, statutory payment deadlines with interest, an eleven item check stub, a five year audit right and attorney fees to the prevailing party. Force pooled and silent, you get one eighth plus the highest per acre bonus paid to anybody in your unit. A mining claim owner can condemn a right of way across a neighbour in district court under an 1876 statute. Geothermal is declared sui generis, neither a mineral nor a water resource. And a landowner can immunise their ground against adverse possession by recording a declaration. |
| IL | Illinois | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-31. Seven rules, the hydraulic fracturing tax and the Office of Oil and Gas Resource Management, each dated and sourced. Several ways to lose a severed interest and not one of them a dormant mineral act, all of them turning on the OWNER being unfindable rather than on the interest being unused: a court trust that conveys to the surface owner after seven years whether or not anything was produced, and a statutory adverse possession route that can run in a single year where the severance is more than twenty years old. All of it turns on the owner being unfindable rather than the interest being unused. The only tax on production reaches hydraulically fractured wells alone and its rate rises with output. |
| IN | Indiana | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-31. Six rules, the petroleum severance tax and the Division of Oil and Gas, each dated and sourced. The fourth state here where a severed interest can lapse and by far the sharpest: twenty years of non use extinguishes it automatically, with nothing required of the person who benefits, and it reverts to the owner of the interest out of which it was carved rather than to the surface owner. Six things count as use and one of them is simply paying the tax on the interest. |
| IA | Iowa | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-01. Eight rules and the Department of Natural Resources, each dated and sourced. The first dormancy statute here that reaches ONE SUBSTANCE and never asks about use: a mineral interest in COAL is extinguished twenty years after its creation, transfer or preservation unless a claim is filed, whatever the owner did with it, and the creating instrument may set a SHORTER period. It reverts to the owner of the interest it was carved from, as Indiana does, not to the surface owner. The scheme runs off the tax roll: every severed mineral interest is assessed and taxed separately as real estate at not less than five cents an acre, and an owner whose interest was separately taxed at any time after 1 July 1971 is exempt from the filing altogether, which is the most generous of the five answers here to how property tax meets dormancy. The same tax roll is how an interest is lost: at a tax sale the surface owner may redeem the mineral owner out after ninety days, and that reaches every mineral and not only coal. No severance tax found, though the revenue title was not enumerated and the page says so. |
| KS | Kansas | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-31. Seven rules, the mineral severance tax and the Conservation Division of the Corporation Commission, each dated and sourced. It can lapse a severed interest after twenty years and it is the most forgiving state here that can: six things count as use including simply paying the tax, and an owner who misses the deadline still has sixty days from receiving actual knowledge that the interest lapsed, even where nothing was published. It also legislates into the lease itself, writing an implied covenant to explore and develop into every lease held by production, presuming it broken after fifteen years with no production from a subsurface part, and letting a court terminate the lessee rights to that part. Read it against North Carolina, which reaches the lease from the other end with a flat ten year statutory expiry and no covenant at all. |
| KY | Kentucky | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-31. Eight rules, the severance and production taxes and the Division of Oil and Gas, each dated and sourced. The only state here whose constitution supplies a rule of construction for old mineral deeds: where the instrument did not say how the coal was to be got out, section 19(2) presumes the parties meant only the extraction methods commonly in use in that area at the time. Nothing lapses for non use, but a court can lease a missing owner's minerals and, after seven years of commercial production, convey them to the surface owner. The oil tax is imposed ratably on everyone owning an interest in the oil; the coal and gas taxes say a party who only receives an arm's length royalty is not the taxpayer. |
| LA | Louisiana | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-31. Seven rules, the severance tax and the Department of Conservation and Energy, each dated and sourced. The one state here that is not a common law jurisdiction, and the difference is not cosmetic: its Mineral Code says ownership of land does not include ownership of the oil and gas under it, so there is no mineral estate to sever. What a landowner creates instead is a mineral servitude, royalty or lease, and all of them prescribe for nonuse at ten years, automatically, with nobody having to give notice, record anything or sue. No parish may levy a severance tax and the severer must withhold the state tax from royalty payments. |
| ME | Maine | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-03, and it is on the record because Georgia was believed unreachable and Maine was the planned substitute, a belief since retracted twice over, most recently on 2026-08-04 when Georgia turned out to be reachable through the verbatim-mirror allowlist this site already had. Seven rules, the mining excise tax and the Department of Environmental Protection, each dated and sourced. Nothing lapses for non use, on 64 title names and all 38 chapter titles of the Property title. The mining excise tax was rewritten by PL 2025 c. 469 into a flat five per cent of gross proceeds, and gross proceeds means federal gross income from mining under section 613 of the Internal Revenue Code, which is the same federal provision Idaho imports. It reaches metallic minerals only, so it does not touch the aggregate and dimension stone that most Maine extraction is. A mistaken belief about where the boundary ran does not defeat adverse possession, which is the opposite of Oregon. And the unclaimed property act defines mineral proceeds and gives them no period of their own, which is exactly what Idaho did. |
| MD | Maryland | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-03. Twelve rules, no severance tax found and the Department of the Environment Mining Program, each dated and sourced. Maryland adopted the UNIFORM Dormant Mineral Interests Act and says so: the purpose of the subtitle is to make uniform the law among the states. Connecticut has the same instrument and took it twenty-four years earlier, so what separates Maryland is which of the act options it chose, and it chose the hardest. Twenty years unused with nothing recorded and a surface owner can sue to terminate, with the interest merging into the surface estate. Two clocks: between twenty and forty years the court must let a mineral owner file a late notice on paying the litigation expenses of the surface owner, and at forty that rescue is gone. Injecting for disposal or storage is expressly not use, the opposite of Nebraska. A separate trust route conveys the interest of a missing mineral owner to the surface owners after five uncontested years. Hydraulic fracturing has been prohibited outright since 2017, and there is no compulsory pooling anywhere in the oil and gas subtitle. |
| MA | Massachusetts | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-03. Eight rules, no severance tax established and the Land Court alongside the Department of Environmental Protection, each dated and sourced. The third land title registration state here and the first whose statute ANSWERS the question the other two leave open. A judgment of registration binds the land and quiets the title, conclusive against all persons whether named or merely included in the general description to all whom it may concern, not openable for absence, infancy or disability, reviewable for one year for fraud alone and not even that once an innocent purchaser for value appears, after which it stands forever. A registered owner then holds free of everything except what is noted on the certificate and seven survivals, and a severed mineral interest is not one of the seven. No Massachusetts decision was read, so the page prints the text and refuses the holding. On minerals as such the Commonwealth is nearly silent and the silence was measured: 699 chapter names carry no mineral, quarry, dormant or marketable, and three real property chapters were read end to end, 309,528 characters, with the word mineral appearing three times and all three inside a conservation restriction definition. The one chapter called Mining Regulation and Reclamation is about COAL alone, with an Anthracite Coal Mining Reclamation Fund and a duty on an explorer to make its results PUBLIC a hundred and eighty days after exploration ends. |
| MI | Michigan | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-30. Eight rules, the severance tax and the supervisor of wells, each dated and sourced. A state here where a severed interest can lapse, asking less of the surface owner than any other that can: its 1963 act vests an abandoned oil or gas interest in the surface owner as of the date of abandonment, with no notice to the owner and no procedure for the surface owner to follow. Also the first state here with no surface damages statute found. |
| MN | Minnesota | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-01. Thirteen rules, both production taxes and the DNR Division of Lands and Minerals, each dated and sourced. Minnesota does not ask whether a mineral interest has been used. It asks whether the owner ever recorded a statement saying who they are, which every severed mineral owner has had to do since 1970, and an interest whose owner never did forfeits to the state rather than to the surface owner, after a show cause proceeding and a judgment. It is the only state here where the state itself is the destination, the only one that then lets the former owner recover the interest fair market value out of the general fund, and it charges 40 cents an acre a year, with a minimum bill however small the fraction, simply to hold one, with having paid that forming half the defence to the forfeiture. Two registries, county recorder and registrar of titles, and no general surface damages statute found. |
| MS | Mississippi | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-04. Twelve rules, the severance tax and the State Oil and Gas Board, each dated and sourced, from eight chapters walked end to end, and the negatives here are the point. NO DORMANT MINERAL ACT, established on four chapters read whole rather than searched: 89-1 land and conveyances, 62 sections, does not contain the word mineral once; 89-5 recording, 32 sections, contains it only in the duty to cancel a dead lease off the record; 89-12 unclaimed property, 32 sections, never names mineral proceeds at all; 15-1, where Mississippi keeps its limitation periods, 43 sections, does not mention minerals either. The word dormant appears in none of roughly 250 sections read. The only way to lose an interest is ten years of ACTUAL adverse possession under 15-1-13, which needs no colour of title and no tax payment, the opposite of Arkansas next door. The surface owner gets nothing: the phrase surface owner appears ZERO times across all 75 sections of chapters 53-1 and 53-3. Royalty remedies are real but conditional, and the contrast with Arkansas is the lesson: interest runs at 120 days and the rate must be printed on the disbursement document, but the lien at 53-3-41 binds third parties only from the filing of a financing statement and dies one year later, where Arkansas’s attaches automatically and cannot be waived. Six percent on both oil and gas, 1.3 percent for a horizontally drilled well, and that reduction applies to OIL as well as gas. The tax chapter opens on timber. Currency controlled per SECTION against the legislature’s own index: nothing cited was enacted upon in 2025 or 2026, and the bills that would have prohibited adverse possession, or settled pore space ownership, all died in committee. |
| MO | Missouri | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-03. Eight rules, no severance tax found and the Department of Natural Resources Land Reclamation Program, each dated and sourced. Nothing lapses for non use, on the widest enumeration this record has run: all 468 chapter titles of the Revised Statutes, with dormant, sever, marketable and mineral appearing in none of them. What Missouri has instead is chapter 444, Rights and Duties of Miners and Mine Owners, which is nineteenth century lead district practice sitting in the property title. A landowner who lets a stranger dig must post the terms in their office in the county, and anybody who digs after that is deemed to have agreed to them. A landowner who does not post hands the digger an exclusive right to that working for three years with a right of way, at a royalty fixed by what other miners pay on the same land or on the nearest land in different ownership. All ore dug belongs absolutely to the landowner unless an express contract says otherwise. Every severed mineral interest must be assessed and taxed separately, and that tax is expressly not a lien on the land. Recording turns on actual notice rather than on a race. |
| MT | Montana | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-30. Ten rules, the production tax and the Board of Oil and Gas Conservation, each dated and sourced. One of two states here that tax a royalty owner and a working interest owner at different rates on the same barrel, and the one that sets the royalty rate higher: every incentive rate belongs to the working interest and a nonworking interest pays 14.8 percent in every category. Alaska splits the rate the other way. No dormant mineral statute, and where an owner cannot be found a court appoints a trustee to lease on their behalf rather than ending the interest. |
| NE | Nebraska | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-31. Eight rules, both production levies and the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, each dated and sourced. The fifth state here where a severed interest can be lost for non use, on a twenty-three year period rather than twenty, and the only one where nothing happens until the surface owner files and wins a suit in equity. Using the pore space counts as holding on; paying the tax does not, even though Nebraska separately lets a severed interest be entered on the county tax list. Both the severance tax and the conservation charge are deducted from the royalty owner in terms. |
| NV | Nevada | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-01. Six rules, the net proceeds of minerals tax and the Division of Minerals, each dated and sourced. The state where this site’s usual questions mostly do not apply, and two exhaustive full-text reads say so rather than one impression: the conveyancing chapter runs to 203,318 characters and never uses the word mineral, and the reclamation chapter never uses the phrase surface owner. The split here is CONSTITUTIONAL rather than conveyanced, because Article 10 section 5 taxes the net proceeds of a mine instead of the mine, so the county assesses only the SURFACE of a patented claim and even that comes off the roll on an affidavit of a hundred dollars of development work measured over the federal assessment period. Nothing lapses for non use. What can take a claim is the tax roll: one that falls to the county may be prospected by any citizen on a petition and deeded to them. And the tax rate tracks the mine PROFIT MARGIN, two percent to five, while royalties pay a flat five however marginal the mine paying them is. |
| NH | New Hampshire | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-03. Seven rules, the excavation tax and a regulator that is not a state agency, each dated and sourced. The Granite State has no mining title: all 67 titles of the Revised Statutes Annotated were enumerated and mineral, mining, oil and gas appear in none of them, and chapter 477 was read whole, 94,985 characters, with dormant and marketable at zero against a control of record 78. What New Hampshire legislates is EARTH, meaning sand, gravel, rock, soil or construction aggregate, and it is exempt from property tax in exchange for an excavation tax of two cents per cubic yard, which is a volume charge rather than a percentage and the only one here. Dimension stone is expressly not earth, so the granite the state is named after sits outside both the permit regime and the tax. The severed interest is an earth excavation right, recognised inside a tax definition, and registering a claim at the registry of deeds is what moves the bill. And the regulator is the town planning board, the selectmen, the board of adjustment or the county commissioners, so there is no central permit file to search. |
| NJ | New Jersey | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-04, the fiftieth and last state. Eleven rules, no severance tax and a Department of Environmental Protection, each dated and sourced. New Jersey has an oil and gas act and almost no oil and gas: 13:1M was read end to end, eighteen sections, and the word tax appears in it twice, both times as the municipal tax map used to say where a well is. The chapter is only visible in a browser, because from a plain fetch Title 13 returns seven subtitle names and Oil and Gas Wells is not among them. A drilling permit issues only on a written finding of no adverse consequence to groundwater or surface water, no significant degradation of landscape, no threat to public health and safety and no substantial air and noise pollution, four absences with no balancing; and 13:1M-18 then lets any municipality or county PROHIBIT drilling and extraction of oil, natural gas or uranium outright, with the State able to object only that the ordinance is unreasonable, which is the opposite pole from North Carolina. The unclaimed property act carries the full uniform mineral proceeds definition and gives it no period, so royalties fall to a three year residual, which New Jersey shares with Idaho, Maine, South Dakota and Tennessee; what it adds is 46:30B-47(a), under which mineral proceeds shall not be aggregated and shall be reported separately, so a small accrual stays visible under a name instead of being swept into a total. The priority rule splits inside one sentence, race-notice against buyers and pure notice against judgment creditors. Nothing lapses for non use across 228 sections read end to end, and possession takes thirty years, sixty on woodlands or uncultivated tracts, the longest wait on this record. The one rule newer than the mirror, P.L.2024 c.88, is cited to the enrolled act on a .us host and therefore has the best sourcing on the page. |
| NM | New Mexico | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-30. Nine rules, the severance tax and the Oil Conservation Division, each dated and sourced. The first state page to use the federal record: New Mexico's recording statute names United States patents in terms. Also the first whose statutory text is quoted from an allowlisted mirror, disclosed in gold on every affected rule, because the state's official publisher could not be extracted. |
| NY | New York | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-31. Six rules, the permit fee and the Division of Mineral Resources, each dated and sourced. Nothing read lapses an interest for non use. Its answer to the owner who never signed is compulsory integration, and the category you fall into by doing nothing is integrated royalty owner: the lowest royalty in any existing lease in the unit with a one eighth floor, no liability for charges, taxes or fees, and, notwithstanding any other law, no liability for personal injury or property damage claims arising from the well. That last protection is on no other state page here. No permit may issue for a well using high volume hydraulic fracturing, defined at three hundred thousand gallons of water and reaching vertical wells, nor since a later amendment for one using carbon dioxide. No severance tax; the only charge is a one off permit fee scaled by depth. |
| NC | North Carolina | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-02. Sixteen rules, the severance tax on energy minerals and the Division of Energy, Mineral and Land Resources, each dated and sourced. North Carolina extinguished ancient severed mineral claims NINE separate times between 1965 and 1985, county by county, each statute giving the surface owner a marketable title free of the interest, declaring the interest null and void, and allowing two years to record a sworn notice; the last of those windows shut on 1 January 1988 and one section, for Avery County, fixes no date at all and still rolls on thirty years. Whether the first four reached the whole state or only the counties their subsection (d) names is unresolved on the face of the text and the page says so instead of guessing. Its marketable record title act spares minerals in five words and never mentions them again. There is no dormant mineral act, established by enumerating 396 chapter titles and reading six chapters whole. What it legislated instead is the LEASE: every one expires at ten years, reverts to the surface owner six months after production stops, cannot be waived by any assignment or force majeure clause, pays at least twelve and a half percent free of pre and post-production costs, and carries a seven day right of rescission. The operator is presumed to have contaminated every water supply within half a mile, arbitration clauses that keep you out of the county court are void, and a landman may not operate in the state without registering. Priority of title is a pure race, first to the register of deeds, and knowing about the earlier deed does not matter. And the regulator reports that no application to drill has ever been received. |
| ND | North Dakota | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-30. Thirteen rules, both oil taxes and the Oil and Gas Division, each dated and sourced. The second state here where a severed interest can lapse, and stricter than Ohio on timing: the statement of claim that saves an interest is normally due before the twenty years expire. It guarantees a force-pooled owner a cost-free royalty, which Alabama does too, and its surface damage statute shifts attorney's fees to an owner who beats the developer's offer in court. |
| OH | Ohio | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-30. Thirteen rules, the severance tax and the Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management, each dated and sourced. The first state here whose answer to whether a severed interest can lapse is yes: it has an operative Dormant Mineral Act whose exceptions section covers coal and not other minerals, which is the exact reverse of Oklahoma. Carries the first case law fetched as the court's own PDF. |
| OK | Oklahoma | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-30. Twelve rules, the gross production tax and the Corporation Commission, each dated and sourced, all read from the Legislature's own complete-title PDFs. The first state here with a marketable record title act, which expressly does not reach severed minerals, and the first with forced pooling and with unclaimed royalty proceeds on the record. |
| OR | Oregon | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-02. Seventeen rules, the six per cent privilege tax and DOGAMI, each dated and sourced. Oregon has a dormant mineral act whose policy section says its purpose is to remove encumbrances that stop a landowner developing property in a way that increases the state’s tax base, and an operative section listing exactly two things that stop it: a statement of claim recorded in the last thirty years, or acquisition in the last thirty. Production, a lease and paying the tax on the interest are all absent from that list. It carries a second and much older route as well: a co-owner of a mine who misses the annual assessment work loses title by a certificate the county clerk issues that is equivalent to a deed, with no court in it. Illinois is the other state here with two routes, both of them inside one act. The proof of either sits in the Mineral and Mining Record, a separate county book. |
| PA | Pennsylvania | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-31. Seven rules, the well fee and the Office of Oil and Gas Management, each dated and sourced. Pennsylvania has a statute called the Dormant Oil and Gas Act which says in terms that it is not there to vest the surface owner with title to severed oil and gas; what it does instead is declare a trust for owners nobody can find. It is also the only state here with no tax measured on the value or volume of production at any level of government, charging a flat per-well fee set by county ordinance instead. |
| RI | Rhode Island | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-03. Five rules, no severance tax established and no minerals agency at all, each dated and sourced. Rhode Island took half of Connecticut answer and left the other half: its 1995 marketable record title act is Connecticut 1967 act nearly word for word, down to the sui juris voiding sentence, the pipe valve road wire list of physical facilities that save an easement, and the section penalising a notice of claim recorded to slander title, and neither excepts minerals. What it did not take is the Uniform Dormant Mineral Interests Act that sits beside it in Connecticut. Dormant returns zero across all 2,781 Rhode Island chapter names, and so do mineral, mining, quarry, earth, sand and gravel; three core property chapters were then read end to end, 93,935 characters, with the same result. So nothing lapses for non use here and a forty year record chain that never mentions the interest still can end it. Ten years of quiet peaceful actual possession does not merely bar the action, it gives a good and rightful title forever, relied on as CONCLUSIVE TITLE, and the owner stops that clock by serving and recording a notice the POSSESSOR then has to sue on, which is the exact inverse of Connecticut, where the owner must sue within a year. The surface use rule here is published at partial confidence with its caveat visible, because it rests on an index rather than on a chapter read whole. |
| SC | South Carolina | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-03. Nine rules, no severance tax established and the Department of Environmental Services mining programme, each dated and sourced. South Carolina abolishes possession as notice by statute, which nothing else here does: no possession of land described in an instrument required to be recorded operates as notice of it, and actual notice substitutes for registration only when it is of the instrument itself or of its nature and purport. That is the exact inverse of Maryland, whose statute makes possession inconsistent with the record title constructive notice of what inquiry would reveal. Nothing lapses for non use, on 63 title names and 77 chapter titles enumerated with controls. A lessee who will not release a lapsed oil or gas lease within thirty days of written demand owes the lessor an attorney fee and all damages from being unable to lease meanwhile. An integrated owner may elect to surrender the leasehold at a price the department fixes, and the royalty carved out of a carried share is one eighth except where the State holds it, when it is one sixth. |
| SD | South Dakota | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-04, and it is here because a ruling made with one tool was withdrawn: sdlegislature.gov returns a shell to a plain fetch and renders completely in a browser, so the only thing this state was ever waiting on was somebody opening it. Thirteen rules, three severance taxes and the Board of Minerals and Environment, each dated and sourced. It is the first state on this record that can lose a mineral interest THREE ways at once: twenty-three years of non use vests title in the surface owner on the date of abandonment with no court involved, a 1947 marketable title act bars any and all interests of any nature whatever and never says the word mineral, and a court may put an unlocatable owner’s minerals in trust with the county treasurer as trustee and lease them out. Chapter 43-30B then closes the trap it opened: no act under the trust counts as use, so the money accumulates for the missing owner while the clock that will take their title keeps running. The notice burden is the inverse of North Dakota’s, whose act defines a reasonable inquiry and lists four searches the surface owner must make; South Dakota makes maintaining an address of record the MINERAL owner’s obligation and treats failing to do it as a waiver of the right to be posted the notice at all. Against all that, its surface damages act is the most openly one-sided here, instructing courts to give surface owners the maximum constitutionally permissible protection regardless of when the estates were split, with treble damages for refusing to negotiate in good faith and punitive damages for skipping the notice. Gold is charged by the ounce rather than by value, a royalty owner pays a further eight per cent withheld at source, and the conservation tax is the one an operator is forbidden to pass on. |
| TN | Tennessee | on the record | Built 2026-08-04, the second of the five states the verbatim-mirror allowlist unblocked. The dormant mineral interests act at 66-5-108 is here in full, twenty years, and so is the thing that makes the page worth reading: paying the taxes is one of the five statutory uses that stops the clock, but 67-5-809(d), in the TAX title, bars an owner who never identified the interest’s location with the county property assessor from claiming tax payment as a use. Nothing in the dormancy act hints at that. Tennessee is also the second state running whose oil and gas severance tax is not in the title named after taxes: 3 percent at 60-1-301, while the chapter actually headed Severance Taxes reaches only coal and aggregate. The mirror states it is current only to 2 January 2024, the stalest of the five, so the control was run against Tennessee’s own bill record: no enacted amendment to 66-5-108 was found, the one 2026 bill that would have touched it died in subcommittee, and a change to 67-7-207 that the mirror does not show is named in public on the page. |
| TX | Texas | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-30. Nine rules, the production tax and the Railroad Commission, each dated and sourced. The three case-law topics come from opinions the Supreme Court of Texas publishes itself, and the dormancy negative records the search that establishes it so a reader can repeat it. |
| UT | Utah | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-31. Seven rules, the severance tax and the Division of Oil, Gas and Mining, each dated and sourced. Utah has the statute that kills an old mineral interest quietly in states that allow it, a marketable record title act voiding every claim older than a forty year root of title with no notice to anyone, and it then expressly may not be applied to minerals or to the development, mining, production and access rights that go with them. That exception is the widest of the acts here that refuse minerals: Oklahoma protects the interest severed from the fee, North Carolina protects the rights of any owners of mineral rights, and only Utah names the access and production rights as well. Nothing else read lapses an interest. The surface duty is an accommodation standard plus compensation, but every head of damage is limited to what is unreasonable and a contract can displace the whole duty. Pore space is vested in the surface owner. The severance tax runs in two tiers on per unit value, names a royalty interest in the imposing sentence, and takes federal, state and tribal royalties out of the base. |
| VT | Vermont | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-03. Nine rules, no severance tax established and Act 250 in place of any mining regulator, each dated and sourced. Vermont abolished its oil and gas law and then wrote a dormant mineral act into the hole it left: all six subchapters of the Natural Gas and Oil Conservation chapter were repealed on 8 June 2023, and 29 V.S.A. 563 was added effective 6 June 2024, deeming an interest abandoned once it has gone ten years unused AND no statement of interest has been filed in the preceding five. That second limb makes preservation a recurring five year duty, which nothing else here does. An abandoned interest reverts to and merges with the surface, and the owner who originally severed the estate is exempt forever. The forty year marketable record title act at 27 V.S.A. 601 to 606 was read in full and not one of its eight exceptions is minerals, which makes Vermont a second Florida. A mine or quarry granted in severance from the ownership of the soil must be recorded within thirty days in a book kept for that purpose, and is then set in the town grand list as real estate in its own right. And a slate quarry working before 1970 and registered by 1 January 1997 is, if it lies idle, deemed held in reserve and NOT deemed abandoned, which is the only provision on this record that legislates non use in the owner's favour. |
| VA | Virginia | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-31. Twelve rules, the local severance license taxes and the Division of Gas and Oil, each dated and sourced. The first state here that holds every answer to fragmented ownership at once: an old mineral claim can be extinguished, by a lawsuit resting on a presumption that the minerals were never there and not by any lapse for non use, except on lands west of the Blue Ridge Mountains; a court can lease for coal owners nobody can find, where after five years the money and not the estate goes to unclaimed property; and two thirds of the coal can have a court lease the share of a known owner who has refused. No state severance tax at all, only license taxes a county or city may choose to levy on the severer. |
| WA | Washington | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-01. Twelve rules, the business and occupation tax on extracting and the Department of Natural Resources, each dated and sourced. A complete twenty-year dormant mineral act, and the only part of Washington mineral law that can take something from an owner: the surface owner serves sixty days notice, the county treasurer must hand them the mineral owner address off the tax roll without charge, and on filing the claim the interest is conclusively presumed extinguished. Paying the tax counts as use, and so does recording a mortgage or transfer, and the protection cannot be waived while the clock runs. A statute prints a mineral reservation into every deed of state land, the same device as Alaska and older. No severance tax anywhere in the excise tax title. Hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas is prohibited outright, and the department says there is no oil and gas production in the state at all. |
| WV | West Virginia | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-31. Seven rules, the severance tax and the Office of Oil and Gas, each dated and sourced. Its own answer to fragmented mineral ownership: no statute lapses an interest and none appoints a substitute for a missing owner, but three quarters of the royalty owners can consent to development and bind the rest, and the holdout is paid the highest royalty percentage anybody else in the tract negotiated, free of post-production expenses. |
| WI | Wisconsin | on the record | On the record since 2026-08-01. Ten rules, the net proceeds occupation tax and the Department of Natural Resources, each dated and sourced. A severed interest lapses after twenty years unused, and then Wisconsin does something with the consequence that nothing else here does: the lapse can be cured at any time, with no deadline, until the surface owner records a claim first, so it is a race rather than a clock. Lose the race and three years in circuit court still follow, and only then does the interest revert and MERGE into the surface title. Any waiver of the section is void, flatly. A metalliferous mineral conveyance cannot be recorded unless it fully discloses the royalty terms and every parent company behind it. The tax is progressive on net proceeds rather than on production, and royalties paid to the mineral owner are deducted before it is computed. |
| WY | Wyoming | on the record | On the record since 2026-07-31. Six rules, the severance tax and the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, each dated and sourced. Nothing read in the mineral title or the property title lapses an interest for non use. What Wyoming has instead is an entry condition that reaches every split estate in the state, which is what separates it from the conditions Washington and Alaska attach to their own reserved minerals: an operator may not enter for oil and gas operations until it holds written consent, an executed surface use agreement, a statutory waiver, or a bond posted to the commission for the surface owner, and it must reasonably accommodate existing surface uses. Damages reach lost production and income, lost land value and lost improvements, a late instalment is doubled, and the right to be paid may not be severed from the surface. When a second severable resource appeared Wyoming barred severing the wind from the surface at all, while leaving the mineral estate untouched. |
What a state page has to answer before it ships
The build refuses to publish a state until it answers the four questions every reader arrives with, each with its own source and its own date:
- Severance. Can the mineral estate be split from the surface in this state, and what is it once it has been?
- Dormancy. Does this state have a statute that lapses or extinguishes a mineral interest nobody has used?
- Surface use. What does an operator owe the owner of the surface it drills on?
- Records. Where is ownership recorded in this state, and how is it searched?
A state with three of those four is not published with the fourth left blank. It waits, and its row above says so.
Why the order is what it is
The states on the record so far, listed as the registry lists them rather than in the order they were read, are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Two things have driven that: where the mineral markets and the public records are, and whether a state would make the record say something it could not already say.
The second reason is the one worth explaining. A state that answers every question the same way as the last one teaches a reader very little. So after the first states established what a severed estate is and where it is recorded, the next ones were chosen for contrast: one whose marketable title act refuses to touch minerals, one whose dormant mineral act extinguishes them, and one that does the same on a stricter timetable. The differences between those answers are the reference work; a list of states that all agree would not be.
The 50 rows above will not fill in alphabetical order. They fill in the order that puts a real answer in front of the most people, and that teaches the most per state read.