An easement in gross is a legal right that lets a specific person or company use someone else’s land for a defined purpose, without owning any neighboring property. The most familiar example is a utility company’s right to run power lines or bury pipelines across private land. What makes this type of easement distinctive is that the right belongs to the holder personally, not to a parcel of land, and that single feature drives nearly every rule about how it transfers, how long it lasts, and what happens when the holder dies or the burdened property is sold.
How It Differs From an Easement Appurtenant
Easements come in two basic forms, and the distinction matters because the two follow completely different rules.
An easement appurtenant involves two parcels of land. The property that benefits is called the dominant tenement, and the property burdened by the right is the servient tenement. If your only way to reach the public road runs through your neighbor’s driveway, that driveway easement is appurtenant: it benefits your land specifically. Sell your property and the easement transfers automatically to the new owner, because the right is attached to the land itself.
An easement in gross has only one parcel involved, the burdened property. There is no dominant tenement. The right belongs to a person or entity in their individual capacity, not as the owner of neighboring land. When a cable company holds an easement to run lines under your backyard, that right exists because the company needs access, not because the company owns a lot next door. This personal quality is the defining feature.
Common Examples
Utility and Other Commercial Easements
Utility easements are the most widespread kind. Electric companies, gas providers, water districts, and telecommunications firms routinely hold them to install and maintain infrastructure across private land. The utility poles along the edge of a residential lot and the “buried cable” markers in a yard are the physical evidence of easements in gross.
Other commercial versions include pipeline easements for oil and gas transport, billboard easements that let an advertising company place a sign on privately owned land, and railroad easements for tracks that cross private property. They share the same structure: the holder is a business using someone else’s land for a revenue-generating purpose, and the right exists independently of any property the business owns nearby.
Personal Easements
Personal easements in gross are granted to individuals rather than businesses. A landowner might give a friend the right to fish in a private pond, hunt on wooded acreage, or cross the property to reach a public trail. These are less formal and often arise between people who know each other. The transferability rules below treat them very differently from their commercial cousins.
Conservation Easements
A conservation easement is a specialized form of easement in gross that restricts future development of land to protect its environmental, agricultural, or scenic value. A landowner voluntarily agrees to limit certain uses, and a land trust or government agency holds the easement. The landowner still owns the land and can use it within the agreed limits, but neither the current owner nor any future owner can develop it beyond what the easement permits. These easements are typically permanent, survive the sale of the property, and can produce significant tax benefits for the landowner who grants them.
How an Easement in Gross Is Created
Express Grant
The most straightforward route is an express grant. The property owner signs a deed or easement agreement giving the right to another party. The document should spell out where the easement sits on the property, what the holder can and cannot do, and how long the right lasts. Vague language is where disputes start. “Access to the north side of the property for utility maintenance” is far better than “access to the property,” because it gives both sides something concrete to point to if a disagreement arises.
Express Reservation
An express reservation works in the opposite direction. A person selling land keeps a specific right for themselves by writing it into the deed at the time of sale. Someone selling a large parcel might reserve a personal easement to continue accessing a creek for fishing. The reservation must be clearly stated in the sale documents; courts are skeptical of claimed reservations that do not appear in writing.
Prescription
An easement by prescription is the property-law equivalent of squatter’s rights. If someone uses another person’s land openly, continuously, and without permission for a period set by state law, they can acquire a legal easement. State statutes set these windows anywhere from a few years to more than twenty. Creating an easement in gross by prescription is uncommon because the use has to be hostile to the owner’s interests, not something the owner allowed. Courts are also more reluctant to grant prescriptive easements in gross than prescriptive easements appurtenant, because the personal nature of the right makes it harder to justify a permanent burden on someone else’s property.
Why Recording Matters
An easement does not have to be recorded to be valid between the original parties, but recording matters enormously for everyone else. Once an easement is filed with the county recorder’s office, it becomes part of the public land records. Any future buyer of the burdened property is then considered to have constructive notice, meaning they cannot claim they did not know about it even if they never read the recorded document. An unrecorded easement can become unenforceable against a later buyer who purchases the property without knowledge of it, which gives both parties strong reasons to record.
Who Can Transfer or Inherit the Right
Whether an easement in gross can be sold, assigned, or inherited depends almost entirely on whether it is commercial or personal. This is the single most consequential rule in the whole area.
Commercial easements in gross are freely transferable under modern law. A utility company can sell or assign its easements to a successor company, and those easements survive mergers and acquisitions. The Restatement (Third) of Property recognizes that while courts historically treated easements in gross as non-transferable, the commercial exception has effectively become the default rule.
Personal easements in gross are generally not transferable. If a landowner grants a friend the right to hike across the property, the friend cannot sell that right to a stranger or leave it to an heir. A personal easement typically ends when the holder dies. That is why landowners granting personal easements rarely worry about the right outliving the relationship that created it.
The original agreement controls when it addresses the question directly. The parties can write transferability restrictions into a commercial easement or, less commonly, make a personal easement assignable. If the document is silent, courts fall back on the commercial/personal distinction.
What It Means for the Property Owner
What You Can Still Do With Your Land
Granting an easement in gross does not mean losing control of your property. You retain full ownership and can use the land in any way that does not unreasonably interfere with the holder’s rights. If a utility company has an easement for underground cables along the east edge of your lot, you can still landscape that area, let your children play there, and even plant a garden over it, so long as you do not dig into the cables or block the company’s access for maintenance.
The flip side matters just as much. You cannot obstruct or interfere with the holder’s authorized use. Building a fence across an access easement, paving over utility markers, or planting trees whose roots will damage buried infrastructure can all create legal liability.
Who Pays to Maintain the Easement Area
The general rule is that the easement holder is responsible for maintaining the easement area. A utility company must keep its equipment in safe condition, repair damage caused by its operations, and restore the surface after digging. The property owner has no obligation to maintain infrastructure that exists for someone else’s benefit. If both parties use the easement area, upkeep is typically split in proportion to each party’s use. As with most easement questions, a written agreement can override these defaults and should address maintenance explicitly.
Scope Limits and Overburdening
An easement holder cannot exceed the scope of the original grant. This is where things get contentious in practice. If a utility company has an easement for a single buried cable and later wants to install a cell tower on the same strip of land, that expansion goes beyond the original purpose. The property owner can seek a court order limiting the use to what was originally authorized. Courts evaluate overburdening claims by looking at the easement’s stated purpose, how the current use compares to past use, and the actual burden on the property. A holder who consistently exceeds the granted scope risks having the easement modified or, in extreme cases, terminated.
How an Easement in Gross Ends
An easement in gross can end in several ways. The route matters whether you are the holder trying to preserve a right or the property owner hoping to clear an old encumbrance.
- Expiration. If the easement was created for a fixed term, it simply ends when the time runs out. No action from either party is needed.
- Release. The holder can voluntarily give up the right by signing a written release. Recording the release with the county clears the encumbrance from the property’s title.
- Death of the holder. A personal easement terminates when the holder dies, since the right cannot pass to heirs. Commercial easements held by businesses survive changes in ownership and leadership.
- Abandonment. Mere nonuse is not enough. The holder must take affirmative action showing an intent to permanently give up the easement. A utility company removing all of its equipment and filling in its trenches could count. A company that simply stops using the lines for a few years while keeping the infrastructure in place has not abandoned the easement. Courts set a high bar here because abandonment permanently extinguishes a property right.
- Merger. If the holder acquires ownership of the burdened property, the easement is extinguished, because a person cannot hold an easement on their own land. Both interests merge into a single, full ownership.
- Mutual agreement. Both parties can agree to terminate at any time. The agreement should be in writing and recorded to keep the title clean.
Property owners sometimes discover old easements on their title that appear defunct. If the holder is a company that no longer exists or a person who died decades ago, clearing the title may require a quiet title action in court. Even an obviously dead easement can cloud a title until a judge formally extinguishes it.