Blog · September 30, 2026
What Is an Easement in Gross?
An easement in gross benefits a person or an organization, not a neighboring parcel. There is no dominant estate. Utility easements are the common example. The right does not travel with whichever house happens to be next door unless the document says it does.
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A holder instead of a dominant lot
When the electric company, the pipeline company, or a named person holds the easement, and no parcel is named as the land being benefited, the easement is in gross. The servient land is still burdened. There is simply no Lot 9 whose buyer automatically becomes the holder. If a neighbor tells you they own the utility easement because they own the next house, they are describing an appurtenant easement. Check the grantee. If the grantee is a utility, the neighbor does not hold it, and you do not negotiate a release with the neighbor. You look to the utility and to the release formalities in the document. Personal easements in gross, granted to an individual for a dock or a path, raise a second question the document must answer: whether that person can assign the right or whether it dies with them.
What the plat is doing
Subdivision plats often dedicate utility easements in gross to the public or to the utilities serving the plat. The easement is real, it runs with the servient lots, and the holder is the utility or the public, not the lot across the street. The hatch on your side yard is that kind of burden. It allows the uses in the dedication, often lines, poles, and access to maintain them. It does not give the neighbor a garden easement. It does not give you a veto over a pole the grant allows. Read the list of purposes. A blanket phrase for utilities is broad. A phrase for a sanitary sewer only is narrower. County GIS may show poles from a different layer and miss the hatch, or the reverse. Platbookmapper links to the GIS and does not interpret the grantee.
Location still matters
In gross describes who benefits. It does not describe where the easement sits. A blanket easement in gross covers a whole parent tract until it is located. A strip easement in gross is a defined strip. Do not treat in gross as meaning unlocated, and do not treat a defined strip as something you can slide. If a utility has not used a blanket easement, the location question is sensitive and local, and it is not solved by picking a convenient edge with a measuring wheel. A wheel is not a survey. If you are building, get the instrument and a survey of any defined strip, and ask the utility before you assume a blanket easement will be moved for your garage.
What to do next
- Read the grantee. A company or a person, with no dominant lot, signals in gross.
- Do not ask a neighbor to release a utility’s easement.
- Read whether a personal easement in gross can be assigned.
- Keep the location clause separate from the in-gross label.
The mix-up to avoid
Treating a power easement as the neighbor’s driveway right, or a driveway right as if it belonged to the power company. The grantee sentence sorts them. The hatch alone does not.
Questions people ask
Does an easement in gross end when the company is sold?
Commercial easements in gross are generally transferable with the business or the system, if the law and the document allow assignment. A corporate sale does not wipe the easement off your lot. A release would.
Can an easement be both?
The categories are the two classic ones. A document can also grant a utility easement and, in another sentence, an appurtenant driveway. Read them as two grants. One hatch on a plat can even represent overlapping rights. The notes have to be unpacked.
Find the county map
Open Platbookmapper and pick the county that taxes the land. Use that viewer to get the parcel id, then match it to the recorded plat if you need the easements and lot numbers.
Not a survey. County GIS and tax parcel maps are assessment and planning layers. They are not a substitute for a recorded plat, deed, or licensed survey.