Encroachments on property happen when something physical from a neighboring lot — a fence, a shed corner, a tree limb, a driveway edge — crosses the legal boundary line and sits on your land. Most are accidental, traceable to an old survey or a contractor who eyeballed the line. They still matter, because an encroachment can block a sale, scare off a lender, and if left alone long enough, hand part of your lot to the person using it.
What Counts as an Encroachment
An encroachment is an unauthorized physical intrusion onto someone else’s property. It violates the owner’s right to exclusive possession of everything inside the boundary lines. The intrusion doesn’t have to be deliberate, and in practice it rarely is: a contractor works from an outdated survey, a homeowner guesses where the line falls, landscaping creeps outward over the years.
What makes an encroachment legally serious is that the law treats it as a continuing trespass. Someone cutting across your yard once is a single act; a shed sitting on your land is an intrusion that renews every day it remains.1Legal Information Institute (LII) / Cornell Law School. Continuing Trespass That ongoing quality is what separates encroachments from everyday neighbor annoyances and what gives the affected owner real legal leverage.
Structures
Structural encroachments are the costly ones. A fence six inches over the line is the textbook case, but the category also includes sheds, retaining walls, garages, home additions, and sometimes parts of the primary residence itself. Once concrete is in the ground, correcting the mistake becomes expensive fast.
Trees and Landscaping
Overhanging branches and spreading root systems both qualify, even though no one deliberately planted them in the wrong spot. Gardens, hedgerows, and paved walkways tend to drift across boundaries as homeowners expand what’s already there. These feel minor next to a misplaced garage, but they are still legal intrusions and can escalate if ignored.
Overhangs and Airspace
Property rights extend upward, not just across. Roof eaves, gutters, second-story balconies, and awnings that project over a neighbor’s lot intrude on that neighbor’s vertical rights even when nothing touches the ground. An overhang can prevent the adjoining owner from building up to their own line.
Easements and Rights-of-Way
Many lots carry recorded utility easements or public rights-of-way giving a utility or municipality access to a defined strip of land. Building a deck, planting a large tree, or putting a permanent structure inside one of those strips creates an encroachment against the easement holder. The utility or local government can typically require removal at the homeowner’s expense. Before any project near a lot edge, pull the deed and plat map and check for recorded easements.
Why Encroachments Matter When You Buy, Sell, or Refinance
A marketable title is one free of disputes or threats of litigation, so a buyer can take ownership with confidence.2Legal Information Institute. Marketable Title An encroachment punches a hole in that confidence. When a survey shows the neighbor’s shed two feet onto your lot, buyers see risk and their attorneys see a possible lawsuit. The usual results are a lower offer, a demand that you resolve the issue before closing, or a buyer walking away.
Lender Thresholds
Lenders won’t fund a loan on a property with a serious title defect, because the property is their collateral. Fannie Mae, whose guidelines most conventional lenders follow, does accept certain minor encroachments. Hedges and removable fences on adjoining property are generally fine. Eaves, overhanging projections, or driveways extending one foot or less onto a neighbor’s lot are also treated as minor, but only if there is at least a ten-foot clearance between the buildings on the property and the affected boundary.3Fannie Mae. Title Exceptions and Impediments Anything beyond those limits can block financing until the problem is cleared.
Title Insurance Exceptions
Standard title policies generally exclude problems that would only show up through an accurate survey rather than a public records search. When the title company does learn about a specific encroachment, it lists that encroachment as an exception in the policy, meaning any loss or legal cost tied to it falls on the owner.
Encroachment coverage can be added back through endorsements. The American Land Title Association’s ALTA 28 series specifically covers encroachments into easements, setback lines, and boundaries. The ALTA 28.1 endorsement insures against loss from an improvement on the insured land that encroaches onto adjoining property or an easement, and it also covers the reverse case where a neighbor’s improvement encroaches onto your land.4American Land Title Association. Common Endorsements for Commercial Transactions These endorsements typically add $50 to $250 to policy cost and are one of the few ways to shift the financial risk of an encroachment onto an insurer.
The Clock You May Not Know Is Running
Ignoring an encroachment doesn’t make it go away. It can make it permanent. Adverse possession allows someone who physically occupies another person’s land to eventually gain legal title to it if certain conditions hold for a long enough period.5Legal Information Institute. Adverse Possession
The use generally has to be hostile (without the owner’s permission), open and notorious (visible to anyone who looks), actual and exclusive (the occupier is using it and not sharing control), and continuous through the statutory period. “Hostile” here doesn’t mean aggressive. It means unpermitted, which is why giving a neighbor written consent to keep their fence where it is stops the clock.
The required period varies widely by state. A typical statute requires seven years of occupation under color of title or 20 years without it, but the full range across states runs from 5 to 30 years.5Legal Information Institute. Adverse Possession Some states shorten the period when the occupier has been paying property taxes on the disputed strip.
Even where full adverse possession doesn’t apply, long-term use can harden into a prescriptive easement. The requirements are similar, with one key difference: the use doesn’t have to be exclusive. A prescriptive easement doesn’t transfer ownership, but it gives the user a permanent right to keep using the land the same way. If a neighbor has been driving across the corner of your lot to reach their driveway for 15 years, a court could grant them the right to keep doing so indefinitely. From a sale standpoint, that is nearly as damaging as losing the strip outright.
Confirming the Boundary
Before you negotiate anything, you need to know where the line actually is. The only reliable way to confirm an encroachment is a professional boundary survey. A licensed surveyor locates physical markers like iron pins or concrete monuments at the corners, compares them against the legal description in the deed, and uses GPS receivers and total station instruments to measure the boundaries precisely. The deliverable is a certified survey map showing every structure, fence, and improvement relative to the legal lines, including any overlap.
Residential boundary surveys typically run $1,200 to $5,500, depending on lot size, terrain, and how much archival research the surveyor needs to do. Wooded or hilly parcels take longer and cost more. Without a current survey, any conversation about the boundary is guesswork.
Resolving an Encroachment
Most encroachments get resolved without a courtroom. The important thing is to act before the problem ages into something worse.
Start With a Conversation
Many encroachments are genuinely accidental, and the neighbor has no idea their fence or shed is on the wrong side of the line. A calm conversation with a copy of a current survey in hand resolves more disputes than lawyers do. The goal of that first talk is agreement on the facts: where the line sits, where the structure sits, and how far across the boundary it reaches.
Put It in Writing
If talking doesn’t produce a solution, send a formal letter, ideally through an attorney. A written notice places the neighbor on official record of the encroachment, describes the crossing, and requests resolution by a specific date. The paper trail does two jobs. It shows you aren’t sleeping on your rights, which undermines any later adverse possession claim. And it builds the documentation you’ll need if the dispute reaches mediation or court.
Negotiate a Formal Agreement
When removing the structure isn’t practical, neighbors can formalize the situation. Three options come up most often, and the differences between them matter.
A boundary line agreement adjusts the property line itself to match the structure’s actual location, by way of a new deed signed by both owners. The change is permanent. If either property carries a mortgage, the lender must approve, because altering the lot can trigger the loan’s acceleration clause. The new deed has to be recorded with the county, and some municipalities also require planning commission approval.
An encroachment agreement leaves the boundary alone but grants written permission for the structure to stay, usually with conditions. A common term lets the structure remain as long as it stands in good condition, but requires the encroacher to pull back to the true line if the structure is ever replaced. These agreements should be recorded so they bind future owners of both properties.
A revocable license grants permission to encroach but reserves the owner’s right to pull that permission at any time. Because the license can be revoked, it creates no permanent interest in the land and defeats any adverse possession claim. The tradeoff is that the encroacher has no long-term certainty.
Each option should be drafted with a real estate attorney, and each should be recorded with the county. An unrecorded agreement won’t bind a buyer who had no way of knowing it existed.
Legal Action
When negotiation fails, the remaining tools are judicial. The affected owner can seek an injunction compelling removal, file a trespass claim for damages, or bring a quiet title action asking the court to determine who actually owns the disputed strip.6Legal Information Institute. Quiet Title Action If the owner prevails in a quiet title action, no further challenges to title on that ground can be brought. Litigation is slow and expensive, which is why the negotiated options exist. But when a neighbor refuses to acknowledge the issue, or claims the land through adverse possession, court is sometimes the only path left.
Buying or Selling With an Encroachment on the Table
If you’re selling a property with a known encroachment, deal with it before you list. Removing the structure or recording a formal agreement in advance eliminates one of the most common reasons closings collapse. Disclosing a known encroachment alongside its resolution is far better than having a buyer’s surveyor discover the problem during due diligence.
If you’re buying, insist on a current boundary survey as part of due diligence. A survey from ten years ago won’t show the neighbor’s new deck or a fence that was rebuilt two feet closer to the house. Make sure your purchase contract includes a title contingency that lets you review the survey and back out or renegotiate if a significant encroachment turns up. Ask your title company about an ALTA 28 series endorsement, especially if the survey shows anything close to or crossing a boundary line.
Hoping no one notices is the worst strategy on either side of the transaction. Encroachments don’t resolve themselves, and the legal exposure only grows the longer the structure sits.