To find a right of way on your property, start with the paperwork you already have: your deed and title insurance policy will list most recorded easements, and county land records, a call to 811, and a licensed survey will catch what those documents miss. Rights of way created by long use or by a landlocked neighbor’s need for access can exist without ever appearing in a title search, so a thorough check combines paper records with a physical look at the land.
Start With Your Deed and Title Insurance Policy
Your property deed contains the legal description of your land, and any recorded rights of way are usually spelled out inside it. Look for phrases like “subject to an easement for ingress and egress” or “right of way for public utilities.” Those are direct signals that someone else holds a legal interest in part of your property.
Your title insurance policy is just as useful. Turn to the section labeled “exceptions” or “exclusions” in Schedule B. These are items the title insurer specifically declined to cover because they’re legitimate claims held by others that surfaced during the title search. Each exception typically references a recorded document by its book-and-page or instrument number. Write those numbers down. You can use them to pull the original easement documents from county records, which will tell you the purpose, width, and location in far more detail than the deed reference alone.
If you’ve misplaced your closing packet, your title company or the closing attorney can usually provide copies. You can also order an independent title search from a title company outside of a sale, though you’ll pay a fee.
Know What You’re Looking At
Rights of way come in two basic flavors, and identifying which one you have tells you who can enforce it. An easement appurtenant benefits a neighboring property, runs with the land, and transfers automatically when either parcel is sold. An easement in gross benefits a specific person or entity, most commonly a utility company, rather than an adjacent lot. Utility easements survive changes in ownership as long as the utility still needs the access.
Search County Land Records
When your personal documents leave gaps, county land records fill them in. Every deed, plat map, and easement agreement recorded against your property lives in a county office, and those records can reveal rights of way created decades before you bought the place. The office goes by different names depending on where you live: County Recorder, Register of Deeds, or County Clerk.
Start with your Assessor’s Parcel Number or legal address. Search recorded deeds not just on your property but on adjacent parcels, because a neighbor’s deed may contain language granting them a right of way across your land. Pull subdivision plats too, the maps filed when a larger tract was divided into lots. Plat maps often show designated easements for utilities, drainage, and access roads that still bind every lot in the subdivision.
Separately recorded easement agreements are another common find. These stand-alone documents spell out the purpose, dimensions, and sometimes the duration in more detail than any deed reference. County offices charge modest per-page fees for copies, typically a few dollars per page.
Online GIS Maps
Many counties now offer free Geographic Information System maps through their assessor or planning department website. These interactive maps let you type in an address and toggle data layers that may include utility easements, road rights of way, and drainage corridors. The level of detail varies widely by county. Some show easement boundaries overlaid on aerial photos. Others show nothing beyond parcel lines.
GIS maps are useful for a visual sense of what’s on your property, but they carry disclaimers for a reason. The data is approximate and hasn’t been field-verified by a surveyor. Treat what you find on a GIS map as a lead worth confirming, not as legal proof of an easement’s exact location.
Call 811 to Locate Underground Utilities
One of the simplest and most overlooked steps is calling 811, the free national “Call Before You Dig” service. When you contact 811, your local utility companies send crews to mark the approximate locations of buried gas, electric, water, sewer, and telecommunications lines on your property with paint or flags, usually within a few business days.
The 811 service doesn’t identify the legal boundaries of a utility easement, but the markings tell you where utility infrastructure actually runs. If a line of paint flags cuts across your backyard, there’s almost certainly a utility easement underneath it. That gives you a concrete starting point for pulling the recorded easement documents from county records. The service is free and available nationwide.
Order a Professional Property Survey
When you need to know exactly where a right of way sits on the ground, not just that one exists on paper, hire a licensed land surveyor. A survey translates the legal descriptions buried in deeds and plat maps into a physical map of your property with precise measurements. Where a deed might say “a 20-foot wide utility easement along the northern boundary,” the survey shows exactly where that 20-foot strip falls relative to your house, fence, and shed.
A standard boundary survey establishes your property lines and plots recorded easements. That’s enough for most homeowners who need to know where they can and can’t build. Expect to pay roughly $1,200 to $5,500 for a residential boundary survey, depending on lot size, terrain, and how complicated the title history is.
When an ALTA Survey Makes Sense
For more complex situations, an ALTA/NSPS Land Title Survey goes further. The current standards, effective February 23, 2026, require the surveyor to locate not just recorded easements but also evidence of unrecorded use by others, such as worn paths, driveways, and utility locate markings observed in the field.
The surveyor must also document surface clues that suggest underground easements, like vent pipes, utility cuts, and filler caps, and produce a summary of every easement identified in the title evidence along with a note on whether its location was confirmed on the ground. ALTA surveys typically run from $2,500 to $10,000 and are most common in commercial transactions, but they’re worth considering if you suspect unrecorded rights of way or are planning a major construction project.
Look for Rights of Way That Aren’t Recorded
Not every right of way appears in a deed or a county database. Some are created purely through long-term use or through the physical layout of neighboring parcels. These won’t show up in a title search, which is exactly what makes them dangerous to overlook. Walking your land and thinking about its history is part of the search.
Prescriptive Easements
A prescriptive easement forms when someone uses part of your land openly, continuously, and without your permission for a period set by state law. The required timeframe ranges from 5 years in some states to 20 years in others. If a neighbor has driven across your back corner to reach their garage for that long without ever asking, they may have acquired a legal right to keep doing so.
The key elements are that the use was visible (not hidden), continuous (not sporadic), and hostile to your rights as owner (meaning without permission). If you granted permission, even informally, the clock resets. Walk your property and look for well-worn footpaths, tire tracks through grass, gravel roads you didn’t build, and overhead utility lines serving someone else’s property. Each can signal a prescriptive claim.
Easements by Necessity
An easement by necessity arises when a parcel has no legal access to a public road. The classic scenario: a larger tract gets subdivided, and one of the resulting lots ends up landlocked. The law presumes the landlocked owner has a right to cross the surrounding land to reach a road, even if no easement was ever written into the deed.
Two conditions must be met. Both properties were once part of the same larger parcel, and the lack of access was created when that parcel was divided. Most courts require strict necessity, meaning the property must be genuinely landlocked with no other legal route out. A minority of jurisdictions apply a looser “reasonable necessity” standard that also covers situations like utility access. If your land once belonged to the same owner as an adjacent landlocked parcel, an easement by necessity could exist whether anyone recorded it or not.
Why Locating Them First Matters
Finding every right of way before you build, fence, or landscape is the whole point of this exercise. Local building departments routinely deny permits for structures within recorded easements, and if you build without a permit, the easement holder or your municipality can require you to tear the structure down at your own expense. An easement holder who gets blocked can go to court for an injunction forcing removal, and courts grant these routinely. Compensatory damages for lost use, punitive damages in cases involving intentional obstruction, and the other side’s attorney’s fees are all on the table in various jurisdictions. A few hundred dollars spent on a records search or survey is trivial compared to the cost of demolishing a structure a court has ordered you to remove.