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Mississippi · MS

Sell your land in Mississippi.

Mississippi holds two land markets that barely resemble each other: Delta row-crop ground with a well and a pivot, and pine timber tracts in the piney woods. Layered over both is a title picture shaped by land held in families without deeds and by sixteenth sections the state cannot sell.

Tax sale type
Tax lien
Redemption period
2 years
Rate on redemption
1.5% per month (18% annually)
Closings handled by
Partial attorney

Figures describe Mississippi 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 Mississippi

The heirs property act arrived in 2020

Heirs' property is land that passed by intestate succession into a tenancy in common, owned by everyone in the bloodline and recorded by nobody. Historically any cotenant could file for partition and force a sale of the whole tract, and buyers of a fractional interest used that to reach land no family would have sold. Black farm families in the Delta and the hill counties lost ground that way for generations. Mississippi enacted the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act by Senate Bill 2553 in 2020, effective July 1 and applying to actions filed after that date. It requires notice posted on the property, a valuation before sale, and a buyout right for the other cotenants.

Sixteenth section land is leased, never sold

Section sixteen of each township was reserved for the support of township schools, and Mississippi never let those sections go. Article 8, Section 211 of the 1890 Constitution forbids their sale and limits leases to ten years for lands outside municipalities and ninety-nine years inside them; Miss. Code § 29-3-1 sets out how school boards classify and lease them, with the Secretary of State's office supervising. What changes hands on sixteenth section ground is therefore a leasehold, not the fee. That has real consequences: the term runs out, renewal is not automatic, rent must reflect fair market value, and financing is harder. If your parcel is sixteenth section or lieu land, know it before you agree to a price.

Delta row crop and piney woods timber

The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, the alluvial plain in the northwest of the state, is row-crop country — soybeans, corn, cotton, rice, catfish ponds — and its value per acre turns on soil class, drainage, and whether the tract has an irrigation well. Those wells draw on the Mississippi River Valley alluvial aquifer, which is declining in parts of the Delta, and withdrawals are permitted through the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality's Office of Land and Water Resources. The rest of the state is mostly forest, and there the question is stand age, species, and haul distance to a mill. The two markets have different buyers, different comparable sales, and different reasons a tract sits unsold.

Agricultural land is taxed on its use

In Mississippi the agricultural assessment follows the land's use rather than an election the owner files. Miss. Code § 27-35-50 directs that land used for agricultural purposes be appraised according to that use as of January 1 each year, regardless of its location, using the soil types, productivity and other criteria in the Department of Revenue's land appraisal manuals; the statute specifies an income capitalization approach with a capitalization rate of not less than ten percent and a moving average of not more than ten years. Agricultural purposes include timber production and livestock, not only crops. A change in use changes the appraisal going forward rather than triggering a recapture of earlier years.

Questions

Selling land in Mississippi

A tax sale happened on my Mississippi land. Is it final?

Not necessarily — Mississippi tax sales are set aside more often than owners expect, because the chancery clerk's notice duty is strict. Miss. Code § 27-43-3 requires the clerk to notify the reputed owner before the redemption period runs, by mail to the address found after diligent search and inquiry, and by publication at least forty-five days before expiration. The statute says if the clerk fails to send notice, the sale is void. Courts construe these notice provisions in the landowner's favor. If a sale has matured against your land, have the clerk's file examined.

How do we sell family land when nobody ever probated the estate?

You clear the title first, and in Mississippi that usually means opening an estate in chancery court or filing a chancery suit to determine heirs. Until the record shows who owns what, a title company will not insure and most buyers will not close. Where the tract is heirs' property held as a tenancy in common, the 2020 heirs property act governs any partition action, requiring valuation and offering the other cotenants a buyout. Heirs who agree can skip all of it by signing a deed together. We contract for land with heirship unresolved.

Does an irrigation well come with Delta farmland?

The well sits on the land, but the right to pump is a permit, not a deed. Most water withdrawals in Mississippi are permitted through the Department of Environmental Quality's Office of Land and Water Resources, and the permit is tied to the use rather than sold as a separate asset. In the Delta the Mississippi River Valley alluvial aquifer has declined in places, which is why permitting attention there is heavier than elsewhere. For a buyer the questions are whether the well is permitted, how deep it is, and what it yields.

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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