Does Your State Have the Heirs Property Act?

As of October 2024, 23 states and the District of Columbia have enacted the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA), starting with Nevada in 2011 and most recently Arizona, signed in April 2024. States that have adopted it add a co-owner buyout right, a mandatory independent appraisal, and a preference for an open-market sale over a courthouse auction.

Which states have adopted the UPHPA, and when?

Twenty-three states plus the District of Columbia had enacted a version of the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act as of this article’s publication, according to the National Agricultural Law Center’s Heirs’ Property State Survey, which tracks each state’s governing partition statute. The list below reflects each state’s own enactment year, not the year the underlying reform text was drafted.

Georgia was the second state to adopt the reform, and the Georgia Heirs Property Law Center has used it to help clients buy out an opposing heir’s interest rather than lose the property to a forced sale, in one case for $11,500. If your land sits in one of these states, that buyout math, not an auction, is the backdrop for any partition dispute among co-owners. AMM Land Sales works with sellers on parcels like this; see how selling inherited land works if a buyout among co-owners isn’t realistic and the family wants to sell instead.

Two dates in that table need a caveat. Arizona’s law took effect 90 days after its 2024 legislative session closed, later in 2024 but still before this article’s publication, according to Berk Law Group. And the District of Columbia’s version, signed by the mayor in November 2022, did not become law until the required 30-day congressional review period ran, pushing its effective date into early 2023. The U.S. Virgin Islands, a territory rather than a state, had also adopted the act by 2018, according to a New York City Bar Association report, but it is not counted in the 23-state total above.

What rights does the UPHPA give an heir who wants to keep the land?

The UPHPA gives any co-owner who does not want the property sold the right to buy out the co-owner who filed for partition, at a price set by an independent court-ordered appraisal rather than a number either side proposes. According to Bond, Schoeneck & King, the court must order that appraisal unless the co-tenants agree on a value themselves, then notify all parties within 10 days of the appraisal being filed and hold a hearing within 30 days to set the fair market value.

Once the court sets that value, the co-owners who want to keep the land typically have 45 days to elect the buyout and then additional time to pay their share into the court, per the same source. If more than one co-owner wants to buy, the court divides the purchase proportionally among them based on their existing ownership shares. This is the mechanism that lets a family member who inherited a fractional interest, sometimes a small one bought years earlier by a relative who has since died, stay in the deal instead of being cashed out at whatever price a partition auction happens to bring.

None of this applies unless the property first qualifies as heirs’ property, and most UPHPA states use the same basic test: the co-owners hold title as tenants in common, there is no written agreement governing how the property can be divided or sold, and at least 20% of the ownership interests are held by relatives or by someone who acquired their share from a relative, according to Beresford Booth’s summary of Washington’s law. A partition action involving unrelated business partners or an LLC’s members, for example, would not trigger the UPHPA’s protections even in a state that has adopted it; it would run under that state’s ordinary partition statute instead.

What happens if no one buys out the co-owner who wants to sell?

If the buyout window closes without a purchase, the court moves to deciding how the property itself gets divided or sold, and the UPHPA tilts that decision toward keeping the land whole within the family where possible. Courts applying the act must weigh factors such as whether the property has sentimental, cultural, or historic value, and whether a sale would leave any co-tenant without a home, according to the NC REALTORS legislative summary of the model act’s text.

Only if the court finds that dividing the physical land (“partition in kind”) would harm the co-owners as a group does it order a sale. Even then, the UPHPA requires an open-market sale, not the sheriff’s-sale auction that older statutes use: the court appoints a disinterested real estate broker to list the property at or above the appraised value and market it using ordinary commercial practices, per the same summary. That single change, an open-market listing instead of a courthouse auction, is the one most attorneys point to as the biggest driver of higher proceeds for heirs, since a courthouse-steps sale draws fewer bidders and has historically closed well under what the same land would bring listed for sale to the general public.

How is a forced sale different in a state without the UPHPA?

In a state that has not adopted the UPHPA, any tenant in common, even one who holds a tiny fractional share, can generally still force a partition action, but the rest of the process runs on older rules that were largely unchanged for close to a century. There is usually no requirement for an independent appraisal before a sale, no statutory right for the other co-owners to buy out the filer’s interest first, and the property is more likely to be sold at a public auction rather than listed on the open market.

The Uniform Law Commission designed the UPHPA specifically to close that gap, noting that under the older rules, speculators could “acquire a small share of heirs’ property in order to file a partition action and force a sale,” according to the commission’s Partition of Heirs Property Act committee page. California illustrates the before-and-after: before it adopted the act, Talkov Law notes California’s ordinary partition statute let a single co-owner force a sale with few protections for the rest of the family, until AB 633 took effect in January 2022 and added the buyout right and appraisal requirement described above.

Which states still don’t have the UPHPA, and could that change?

Roughly half the states, including populous ones like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, had not enacted the UPHPA as of this article’s publication, even though several had bills introduced. North Carolina’s version, Senate Bill 548, was still moving through committee in the 2023-2024 session and had not reached the governor’s desk. Rhode Island’s legislature had likewise not passed its own UPHPA bill despite years of introductions, so a claim that Rhode Island is already on the list, which shows up in some older secondary summaries, is not accurate as of this writing.

New Jersey, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Indiana also had UPHPA bills pending without a final vote as of late 2024. Momentum has generally run toward adoption, not away from it: 11 states had the law by late 2018, according to a New York City Bar Association report supporting its passage, and that number roughly doubled over the following six years. If your land sits in a state without the UPHPA, check that state’s specific partition statute, in the guides for selling problem land, before assuming a buyout right exists; in a non-adopting state, it usually does not unless the co-owners agree to one in writing.

A state without the UPHPA is not necessarily without any tool for clearing a heirs’ property title. The National Agricultural Law Center’s survey tracks four other routes some states offer alongside ordinary partition: a judicial estate administration proceeding, informal probate under a state’s version of the Uniform Probate Code, a simple affidavit of heirship filed directly with the county recorder, and a Marketable Record Title Act that can clear old, undocumented claims after a set number of years. None of those substitutes for the buyout right and appraisal that the UPHPA specifically adds once a partition action is actually filed, but they matter for a family trying to get a deed clean enough to sell before any co-owner goes to court at all.

Whether or not your state has adopted the UPHPA, a family that cannot agree on a buyout still has the option to sell the land outright and split the proceeds instead of litigating a partition action to its end. AMM Land Sales makes cash offers directly to owners in all 50 states, including land in Georgia and other early-adopting states, on any category of vacant land; it is not a brokerage, charges no commission, and pays closing costs, with every purchase closing through a licensed title company. That doesn’t require heirs’ property status to change or a court to weigh in first, since AMM makes offers directly to whichever co-owners can convey a clear title once the family has decided selling is the right outcome.