A hereditament is any property interest that can be inherited at the owner’s death, covering both the physical land and buildings and the invisible rights attached to them. The word comes from English common law and shares a root with “heir.” You will most often see it in a real estate deed, a title insurance policy, or a property tax notice, where it works as a catch-all for every right connected to a piece of land. It sounds archaic. It still shapes how property is transferred, taxed, and fought over.
The Two Kinds of Hereditaments
Property lawyers split hereditaments into two categories, and the distinction matters because they create very different risks for a buyer or heir.
Corporeal Hereditaments
Corporeal hereditaments are the tangible parts of a property. Under Blackstone’s description of English property law, “land” in its legal sense includes the surface soil along with everything permanently above and below it: buildings, trees, minerals, and the airspace directly overhead. Whoever owns the surface owns everything in a line between that surface and the center of the earth, a principle still felt whenever a mining or drilling dispute reaches court.
In practice, this covers the ground itself, any house or structure on it, crops growing in the soil, and resources like coal or gravel underneath. Fixtures count too, including built-in shelving or a permanently installed fence. If you can see it, walk on it, or dig it up, it belongs in this category.
Incorporeal Hereditaments
Incorporeal hereditaments are the invisible rights tied to the land. You cannot touch or occupy them, but they carry financial weight and survive changes of ownership. Courts protect them as vigorously as they protect the physical ground.
The most common examples are:
- Easements, which allow someone other than the owner to use part of the property for a specific purpose, such as crossing a neighbor’s land to reach a public road or running utility lines underground.
- Profits à prendre, which allow someone to enter another person’s land and take something from it, such as harvesting timber, extracting minerals, or fishing a river that runs through the property.
- Rentcharges, which allow a holder to receive periodic payments from land the holder does not own or occupy, with the power to seize goods on the land if payment falls behind.
- Restrictive covenants, which limit how the property can be used and bind every future owner. A covenant barring commercial activity in a residential subdivision is a familiar example.
These rights travel with the land rather than with any particular owner. When property changes hands, the new owner inherits both the benefits and the burdens of every incorporeal hereditament already attached to it. A recorded easement binds a buyer even if the buyer never saw the document that created it. This is the principle of constructive notice: if the interest appears in the public record, every later purchaser is treated as knowing about it.
Why Deeds Still Say “Lands, Tenements, and Hereditaments”
Real estate deeds have used this phrase for centuries as a deliberate catch-all. Each word widens the net. “Lands” covers the physical ground. “Tenements” adds buildings and other structures a person can hold or occupy. “Hereditaments” sweeps in everything else that can be inherited, including the incorporeal rights above. Together, the three words are meant to leave nothing out.
The language persists because dropping it can create problems. If a deed described only the “land” at an address, a court might conclude that certain intangible rights, such as a shared driveway easement or a water-access right, were never transferred to the buyer. Including “hereditaments” ensures that every known and unknown interest passes along with the physical ground. Title insurance companies and recording offices expect this precision, and the broad phrasing protects buyers against third-party claims that try to exploit gaps in the property description.
Hidden Interests and Title Risk
The incorporeal side of ownership is where deals go sideways. A buyer can inspect the roof and the foundation, but an unrecorded easement or a prescriptive right earned through decades of use is invisible until someone asserts it. Finding out after closing that a neighbor has a legal right to cross your backyard, or that a utility company can dig up your driveway, is the kind of surprise that leads to litigation.
Standard title insurance policies protect against interests that do not appear in the public record, but they generally do not cover easements and other encumbrances already recorded. The reasoning is simple: a recorded interest is available for anyone to find before buying, so the insurer treats it as the buyer’s responsibility to check. Unrecorded interests created by long-term use or necessity occupy a gray area that varies by jurisdiction. Buyers who discover an undisclosed easement after purchase may have a claim for breach of the deed’s warranty against encumbrances, and in some cases may try to unwind the sale, but these remedies depend heavily on local law and the specific deed language.
A thorough title search before closing is the single best defense against costly surprises. Every invisible right layered onto a parcel is a hereditament that the next owner inherits, welcome or not.
How Hereditaments Pass After Death
The word literally means “something that can be inherited,” and the rules governing that inheritance depend on how the property is owned. Not everything goes through probate. Several ownership structures allow real property to transfer automatically at death:
- Joint tenancy with right of survivorship. When one co-owner dies, the surviving co-owner takes full ownership without a court proceeding. The survivor files paperwork to establish sole title but does not need the executor’s involvement.
- Transfer-on-death deeds. Roughly half of U.S. states allow owners to record a deed naming a beneficiary who receives the property at death, bypassing probate.
- Revocable trusts. Property placed in a living trust passes to the named beneficiary under the trust’s terms, and the successor trustee handles the transfer without court supervision.
- Homestead protections. In some states, a deceased person’s primary residence automatically transfers to a surviving spouse or children regardless of what the will says.
Property that does not fall into one of these categories passes through probate, where a court oversees distribution according to the will or, if there is no will, under the state’s intestacy laws. Incorporeal hereditaments follow the same path as the land. If you inherit a parcel through probate, you also inherit every easement, covenant, and profit à prendre attached to it.
Tax Basis of Inherited Property
When someone inherits a house or tract of land, the federal tax code resets the property’s cost basis to its fair market value on the date the previous owner died. This is the stepped-up basis rule. If a parent bought a house for $80,000 and it was worth $400,000 at death, the heir’s basis becomes $400,000. Selling it shortly after for that price would trigger zero capital gains tax.
The rule works in reverse. If the property lost value between purchase and death, the basis steps down to the lower fair market value, which can mean a smaller loss deduction than the original owner would have had.
Federal estate tax applies only to estates above the basic exclusion amount, which for 2026 is $15,000,000 per individual. A married couple can shield up to $30,000,000 through portability of the unused exclusion between spouses. Most inherited property passes free of federal estate tax under this threshold.
Hereditaments in Property Tax
Outside the inheritance context, government authorities use “hereditament” to define the basic unit of property for local taxation, mainly in jurisdictions shaped by English law. Under the UK’s General Rate Act 1967, the general rate for any area is calculated at a uniform amount per pound of rateable value for each hereditament.
Identifying a single hereditament is usually straightforward, but it gets complicated when one building has multiple occupants. An office tower with ten separate leases might be treated as ten hereditaments, each with its own valuation and tax bill, rather than one. The leading UK case on where to draw these boundaries, Woolway v Mazars (2015), looked to geographic contiguity and unity of occupation. Property owners sometimes argue their space should count as a single unit to access a more favorable assessment.
U.S. local property tax systems generally do not use the word, but the underlying problem is the same. Every assessor’s office has to decide what counts as a single taxable parcel, how to value it, and how to account for the various interests layered on top of the physical land. The terminology differs; the problem does not.