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Louisiana · LA

Sell your land in Louisiana.

Louisiana is a civil law state and nearly every term you know is the wrong one here: parishes rather than counties, successions rather than probate, immovables rather than real estate, predial servitudes rather than easements. The differences are not cosmetic. They change who must sign and what actually transfers.

Tax sale type
Tax lien
Redemption period
3 years
Rate on redemption
12% interest plus 5% penalty
Closings handled by
Partial attorney

Figures describe Louisiana generally. Counties administer their own sales and their own calendars — your county treasurer is the only source for a payoff figure or a sale date you can act on.

Local detail

What actually matters about land in Louisiana

Civil law is not just different vocabulary

Louisiana's private law descends from the French and Spanish codes rather than English common law, and the Civil Code governs. The transfer document is an act of sale. La. Civ. Code art. 1839 requires a transfer of immovable property to be made by authentic act or by act under private signature; in practice it is passed before a notary as an authentic act, with two witnesses. Louisiana notaries are commissioned officers with drafting authority a notary elsewhere does not have. Recording is decisive: under La. Civ. Code art. 3338, rights created by instruments affecting immovables have no effect as to third persons unless registered in the parish conveyance records. An unrecorded sale binds the parties and nobody else.

Usufruct and naked ownership split the signature

Louisiana splits ownership in ways common law does not. A usufructuary has the right to use property and take its fruits; the naked owner holds the ownership stripped of that use. La. Civ. Code art. 890 gives a surviving spouse a legal usufruct over the decedent's share of the community when the decedent leaves descendants, with the children as naked owners. To sell the full ownership, both sign. Forced heirship narrows it further: under art. 1493 forced heirs are descendants of the first degree who are twenty-three or younger at the decedent's death, or of any age if permanently incapable of caring for themselves or their estates through mental incapacity or physical infirmity.

Severed minerals come back after ten years

In Louisiana a severed mineral interest is generally not permanent. What a seller creates by reserving minerals is a mineral servitude, and La. R.S. 31:27 extinguishes it by prescription of nonuse for ten years; La. R.S. 31:28 starts that clock when the servitude is created. Good-faith operations to explore for or produce minerals interrupt prescription and restart the ten years, and production is not required — a well drilled in good faith counts. The practical result is that a mineral reservation from a 1970s deed may have expired back into the land, and a servitude kept alive by a producing well has not. Title work reads the well records, not just the deeds.

The coast is measurably smaller than in 1932

Coastal Louisiana has lost land at a scale that shows up in the title records. The USGS mapped a net loss of about 2,006 square miles between 1932 and 2016, roughly a quarter of the 1932 land area, driven by subsidence, canal dredging, saltwater intrusion, sediment starvation behind the levees, and storms. For an owner in the coastal parishes this is not abstract. A tract can be open water at high tide, its boundary can move, and land that becomes the bed of a navigable water body raises questions about who owns it. The Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority's master plan also puts specific projects on specific ground.

Questions

Selling land in Louisiana

My mother left a usufruct to my stepfather. Can I sell the land?

Not by yourself — you own the naked ownership, and the usufructuary's right has to be dealt with too. Under La. Civ. Code art. 890 a surviving spouse takes a legal usufruct over the decedent's share of community property when there are descendants, and the descendants take naked ownership. You can sell your naked ownership alone, which almost nobody buys, or both of you can join in the act of sale and convey full ownership. The usufructuary may also renounce. Either way the succession has to be opened and a judgment of possession recorded.

Louisiana changed its tax sale system. What happened to my redemption?

The three-year redemptive period is in the Constitution — Article VII, Section 25 — so it is not something the legislature can shorten. Act 774 of the 2024 session moved Louisiana from tax sales to a tax lien certificate system beginning January 1, 2026, with follow-on legislation adjusting adjudicated property procedure. The constitutional exception is property in New Orleans that was blighted or abandoned at the time of sale, where the period is eighteen months. Parish practice is still settling, so ask the sheriff and clerk of court where your parcel stands.

My Louisiana land has no road access. Do I have a right of way?

Possibly — Louisiana calls it a right of passage, and La. Civ. Code art. 689 lets the owner of an estate with no access to a public road claim passage over neighboring land, subject to indemnity for the damage caused. Article 692 addresses where the passage goes: generally the shortest route to the public road at the point least injurious to the intervening land. The right is not automatic paperwork; it is a claim, usually settled by a recorded conventional servitude or by suit. Buyers price unresolved access as the cost of resolving it.

Sources for the figures above

These are secondary references, accurate enough to orient you and not a substitute for the statute or your county. Tax procedure changes; nothing here is legal advice.

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