Louisiana is the only state in America where mineral ownership expires. If your family's minerals have not produced in ten years, you may already own nothing. Before you sell, or before you assume you have something to sell, read this.
Louisiana is legally unlike every other state where minerals are bought and sold, and the difference is not a technicality. It decides whether you own anything at all.
Louisiana is a civil law jurisdiction. Its property law descends from the French and Spanish codes rather than from English common law, and its Mineral Code, Title 31, is its own animal. The most important consequence is one that Texas and Oklahoma owners find genuinely hard to believe the first time they hear it: in Louisiana, severed mineral rights expire.
Berlin buys Louisiana minerals and royalties, concentrated in the Haynesville parishes of the northwest. This page exists because we could not find another buyer's page that explains Louisiana law correctly, and a Louisiana owner who does not understand prescription is an owner who can be badly taken advantage of.
Under La. R.S. 31:27, a mineral servitude is extinguished by prescription resulting from nonuse for ten years, along with confusion, renunciation, expiration of its term, and extinction of the grantor's right. La. R.S. 31:28 governs when prescription begins to run. La. R.S. 31:85 and related provisions address mineral royalties.
Read that plainly. If a Louisiana landowner sold the surface in 1974 and reserved the minerals, and there has been no production and no good faith drilling operation on that tract in any ten year window since, the minerals went back to the landowner automatically. No lawsuit. No filing. No notice to the family. The servitude simply ceased to exist.
What interrupts prescription:
The doctrine has real complexity around unitization, partial use, servitudes created in favor of multiple parties, and the category of imprescriptible interests. This is not a page that can substitute for a Louisiana mineral title examination.
What we can tell you: before you spend a minute wondering what your Louisiana minerals are worth, find out whether you still have them. The full rule, what interrupts the clock and what does not, is on our Louisiana ten year rule page. We will run that history for you free, from the parish conveyance records and the state's production files, and we will tell you the answer whether or not it means we can buy anything.
A buyer in Texas is buying a perpetual mineral estate. A buyer in Louisiana is buying a servitude with a running clock.
That difference has to show up in the price, in both directions.
A Louisiana servitude under a producing Haynesville unit has its clock reset continuously by production, and is worth what the production and the remaining locations are worth, essentially like anywhere else. A Louisiana servitude on non producing acreage with, say, four years left on its prescriptive period is a fundamentally different asset from non producing acreage in Oklahoma, and it should be priced as one.
Any buyer who quotes you a Louisiana number using a Texas or Oklahoma framework has not done the work. Ask them about prescription. The answer will tell you a lot.
Louisiana's compulsory unitization regime is run by the Commissioner of Conservation, and unleased mineral owners inside a unit have specific statutory protections under La. R.S. 30:10, which was substantially amended in 2022.
The risk charge structure:
| Operation | Risk charge |
|---|---|
| Unit wells, substitute unit wells, cross unit wells | 200 percent of the owner's allocated cost share |
| Alternate unit wells, subsequent unit operations | 100 percent |
The notice requirements favor the owner and are worth knowing. Before the risk charge attaches, the drilling owner must send a registered mail notice containing an AFE dated within 120 days, the proposed location and objective depth, an estimate of the owner's ownership, and available logs, core data, production data, and test data. The operator must reconcile actual costs against the estimate within 60 days of receiving invoices.
And on deductions, unleased owners won. In Self v. BPX Operating Co., 2023-CQ-01242 (La. June 28, 2024), the Louisiana Supreme Court answered a Fifth Circuit certified question and held that negotiorum gestio under La. C.C. art. 2292 does not apply to a unit operator selling an unleased mineral owner's share, because La. R.S. 30:10(A)(3) confers statutory authority to make the sale. The operator is not managing the owner's affairs without authority, so the gestio framework that would have allowed cost recovery does not apply. Unleased owners in Louisiana compulsory units are therefore protected from post production cost deductions in a way leased royalty owners are not.
For leased royalty owners, the Louisiana default is that post production costs are shared, with allocation left to the contract. The lease is what controls. Our royalty statement decoder explains the deduction lines and our letter templates include a demand for an itemized accounting.
If you are holding a unit operator's notice or an election letter, send it to Ask a Landman or text a photo to 918-984-1645. We read these constantly and we will tell you free what it does and what your deadline is.
Louisiana severance tax comes off before your royalty is calculated, so the rates are not academic.
The July 1, 2025 oil rate change is recent. Confirm current figures with the Louisiana Department of Revenue before relying on them.
Louisiana is a community property state and a civil law jurisdiction with concepts that do not exist elsewhere, notably usufruct and naked ownership. A surviving spouse frequently holds a usufruct over minerals while children hold naked ownership, which means neither of them alone can convey a clean title and both have to be at the table.
This trips up out of state heirs constantly, and it trips up out of state buyers too. It is entirely workable. It just has to be handled by someone who has done it. We wrote the whole subject up, usufruct, naked ownership, judgments of possession, the small succession affidavit, and forced heirship, at Louisiana succession and mineral rights. See also selling inherited minerals before probate is done, and use a Louisiana succession attorney for the actual work.
Last reviewed August 2026. Louisiana mineral law is genuinely distinct and the prescription doctrine has substantial complexity this page does not attempt to cover. Berlin Royalties is a mineral buyer and a landman shop, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice about your servitude or your succession. For a Louisiana title or prescription question, hire a Louisiana oil and gas attorney.
The Haynesville continues into East Texas; see our Haynesville page and the basin index.
Tell us the parish and the family name. We will run the conveyance records and the production history, tell you whether the servitude is alive, tell you what it is worth if it is, and tell you plainly if it prescribed years ago. Free, no obligation, and we do the research whether or not there is a deal in it.
The deepest, hottest, most prolific dry gas play in the Lower 48, running under DeSoto, Red River, Bossier, Caddo, Bienville, and Sabine. LNG demand on the Gulf Coast sits directly behind it.
Shallower tight gas above the Haynesville across north Louisiana, often held by the same lease and frequently the reason a servitude has stayed alive.
Central and southern Louisiana oil plays with long histories and episodic drilling cycles. Real assets, valued off what exists rather than what is promised.
Century old south Louisiana production, salt dome fields, and the deeply fractional ownership that comes with it.
The Haynesville parishes lead, and every one of Louisiana's 64 parishes now has its own page: what produces there, what it means for value, and the servitude question that comes first. We review interests statewide.
Everything a Louisiana owner needs in one place: who owns what under state law, how royalties must be paid and by when, what a buyer can and cannot deduct, the tax treatment of a sale, and the deadlines that quietly cost people their minerals. Free, and no sign-up.
Read the Louisiana guideThe things owners here most often wish they had read first. All free, none of it gated.
Free, no obligation, and no pressure. We reply within one business day, usually faster.
Prefer the phone? Call or text 918-984-1645 and you will get Stephen, the owner, not a call center. If we miss you, we text back the same day.