An easement in gross is a right to use another person’s land that belongs to a specific individual or company rather than to a neighboring parcel. The right is personal to its holder, not tied to any dominant estate, which is what sets it apart from the more common appurtenant easement. A utility company’s right to run power lines across your backyard is the everyday example: the company owns no adjoining land, but it holds a legally protected right to be there.
Because the benefit attaches to a person or business instead of a piece of property, an easement in gross follows different rules for who can transfer it, how it ends, and what happens when the underlying land changes hands.
How It Differs From an Appurtenant Easement
Every easement burdens a piece of land called the servient estate. The question is who or what enjoys the benefit on the other side.
An appurtenant easement connects two parcels. The benefited property, called the dominant estate, gains something from the burdened one. A driveway crossing one lot to reach another is the classic case. When the dominant estate sells, the easement travels with it automatically because the right belongs to the land itself.
An easement in gross has no dominant estate. There is only a servient parcel and a holder. That holder can be an individual, a utility, a railroad, a pipeline company, or any other person or entity named in the grant. This personal quality shapes almost everything else about the right.
Personal and Commercial Easements in Gross
Courts sort easements in gross into two buckets, and the classification does most of the legal work.
A personal easement in gross is a non-business privilege granted to an individual. A landowner might let a friend fish in a private pond or cross wooded acreage during hunting season. These arrangements can be informal, though putting them in a deed makes enforcement much easier. The defining feature is that the right is meant for one specific person, not for a commercial operation.
Commercial easements in gross serve business purposes and hold up much of the country’s infrastructure. Utility companies rely on them for power lines, gas pipelines, and fiber optic cables. Railroads use them to keep tracks in place across thousands of parcels without buying every acre underneath. Telecommunications providers string cable through neighborhoods on the same footing. The granting document usually makes the purpose clear, and when it doesn’t, courts look at the original intent behind the grant.
Can It Be Sold, Assigned, or Inherited?
Whether an easement in gross can move to a new holder depends almost entirely on which category it falls into.
Personal easements in gross are traditionally non-transferable. When the holder dies, the easement dies with them, and the servient estate is freed from the burden. Courts hold this line consistently. Allowing a personal favor to pass to heirs or strangers would saddle the landowner with obligations they never agreed to extend beyond the original grantee. Family members sometimes claim these rights after a death, but the answer is usually the same: personal means personal.
Commercial easements in gross work differently. Because infrastructure and business operations depend on continuity, these rights are generally transferable. When a telecommunications company is acquired, its easements move with it. A utility that restructures can assign pipeline easements to a successor. Without that flexibility, essential services would come to a halt every time a corporate owner changed.
The law here has shifted over time. Older courts stated flatly that benefits in gross were not transferable. American courts then carved out the commercial exception, and that exception has largely swallowed the rule. The modern trend treats transferability as the default for commercial rights and non-transferability as the exception that needs a specific reason.
Creating and Recording an Easement in Gross
An easement is an interest in land, so it generally must satisfy the statute of frauds and be put in writing. An oral permission may be honored between the original parties, but it falls apart the moment the land is sold. The written document should identify the servient estate, describe the permitted use, name the holder, and specify whether the easement is personal or commercial.
Recording matters enormously. An easement that sits in a drawer instead of the county land records is invisible to future buyers. If someone purchases the servient estate without notice of an unrecorded easement, they may take the property free of it. Recording puts the world on notice and protects the holder. For utility corridors and pipeline routes, companies almost always record immediately, because losing an easement to a subsequent purchaser could mean rebuilding millions of dollars in infrastructure.
Professional drafting for commercial easements can run from a few thousand dollars to well over ten thousand, depending on the complexity of the arrangement and the number of parcels involved. Government recording fees are modest by comparison, typically under a hundred dollars per document, though they vary by jurisdiction.
What the Holder Can Do, and What the Landowner Keeps
An easement in gross is not a blank check. The holder can use the servient estate only for the purpose described in the grant. Expanding beyond that scope is legally actionable. A utility with an easement for buried cable cannot decide on its own to put an above-ground substation on the same strip.
The landowner keeps full ownership of the servient estate and can use the easement area for any purpose that doesn’t materially interfere with the holder’s rights. Fences, gates, and landscaping are all permissible as long as the holder can still exercise the granted use. In practical terms, a landowner can farm over a buried pipeline or park cars on a utility access strip, but cannot pour a concrete foundation over it.
Most easements in gross are nonexclusive, which means the landowner can grant additional easements over the same area to other parties. Multiple utility lines from different companies often share the same corridor. Exclusive easements exist but are less common; they give the holder stronger rights and prevent the landowner from granting similar access to anyone else.
How an Easement in Gross Ends
Several events can terminate an easement in gross and return full use of the land to the owner.
- Death of the holder ends a personal easement in gross automatically. No court action is needed, though clearing the land records afterward is good practice.
- Abandonment ends the right when the holder stops using it and takes affirmative steps showing intent to give it up, such as removing equipment and never returning. Mere non-use is usually not enough; courts want clear evidence the holder walked away.
- Expiration ends any easement written with a fixed term or sunset clause.
- Merger ends the easement when the holder acquires the servient estate itself. You cannot hold an easement on your own property.
- Release ends the easement when the holder voluntarily gives it up, usually through a written document recorded in the land records.
- Corporate dissolution ends a commercial easement when the company holding it dissolves without assigning the right to a successor.
Foreclosure Can Wipe It Out
Holders face a less obvious threat: mortgage foreclosure on the servient estate. Under the “first in time, first in right” principle, a mortgage recorded before the easement takes priority. If the landowner defaults and the property goes to foreclosure, the lender can extinguish any easement created after the mortgage. This is particularly dangerous for conservation and utility easements. Sophisticated holders address it by requiring the existing mortgage holder to sign a subordination agreement that lets the easement survive foreclosure.
Eminent Domain and Compensation
An easement in gross is property in the constitutional sense. When the government condemns the servient estate through eminent domain, the holder is entitled to compensation for the loss of the interest. Unlike an appurtenant easement, which draws part of its value from the dominant estate it serves, an easement in gross has market value on its own and can be independently evaluated. A utility company whose pipeline corridor is condemned loses not just the right-of-way but potentially the infrastructure investment tied to it. The Fifth Amendment requires compensation for all property rights extinguished by condemnation, and holders stand alongside fee owners in line for payment.
Related Rights and a Different Meaning of “In Gross”
A close cousin of the easement in gross is the profit in gross, sometimes called a profit à prendre. Where an easement grants the right to use someone’s land, a profit grants the right to take something from it, such as timber, minerals, crops, fish, or game. Unlike personal easements in gross, profits in gross have long been treated as transferable, because their economic character as extraction rights made courts unwilling to treat them as purely personal.
The phrase “in gross” also appears in trademark law, where an “assignment in gross” refers to selling a trademark without the underlying business goodwill.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1060 – Assignment That is a separate area of law with its own rules and consequences, and it has no bearing on the property concept discussed here.