Marcellus royalties, Dunham Rule title questions, and the deduction fight on your check stub. Three things that decide what a Pennsylvania interest is really worth, and almost nobody explains any of them.
Pennsylvania produces more natural gas than every state except Texas, and it has the thinnest, most generic set of mineral owner resources of any major producing state. Search for help with a Pennsylvania royalty question and you will find a listings directory, a state agency PDF, and a realtors' association blog post. That is the whole field. So we wrote the page we would want if we owned minerals in Washington or Susquehanna County.
Berlin buys Marcellus and Utica royalties and non producing minerals across Pennsylvania. We are a Tulsa company and we will say so plainly rather than pretending to a Pittsburgh address. What we bring is underwriting: we price the specific wells, the specific unit, and the specific lease language, and we show you the arithmetic. What follows is the Pennsylvania law that decides most of that arithmetic.
This is the first thing to check and the last thing anyone tells you.
In most states, a deed reserving "all minerals" reserves the oil and gas along with everything else. Pennsylvania is different. Under the Dunham Rule, a deed that grants or reserves minerals without naming oil or natural gas specifically is presumed not to include oil and gas. The rule dates to Dunham v. Kirkpatrick, 101 Pa. 36 (1882), and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reaffirmed it in Butler v. Charles Powers Estate, 65 A.3d 885 (Pa. 2013), where the disputed reservation covered "minerals and Petroleum Oils." The presumption is rebuttable, but only by clear and convincing evidence of contrary intent.
The practical consequence is severe and runs both directions. Families who have believed for four generations that great grandfather kept the gas may own nothing. Surface owners who assumed the gas was gone may own all of it. Before you sell, and certainly before you accept a lowball on the theory that your title is doubtful, have someone read the actual instrument.
We do that read free, on any Pennsylvania deed, whether or not you ever sell to us. Send it to Ask a Landman or text a photo to 918-984-1645.
Owners in the southwest counties compare notes with relatives across the state line and cannot understand why the same operator pays differently. Here is why.
The Guaranteed Minimum Royalty Act, 58 P.S. section 33, requires every Pennsylvania oil and gas lease to guarantee the landowner at least a one eighth royalty. Owners naturally read that as a floor on the check. It is not, quite.
In Kilmer v. Elexco Land Services, Inc., 605 Pa. 413, 990 A.2d 1147 (2010), the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held unanimously that the Act permits royalty to be calculated at the wellhead using the net back method. Under net back, the downstream sale price is reduced by gathering, compression, processing, and transportation before the one eighth is applied. So a check can be less than one eighth of the price the gas actually sold for and still comply with the statute.
There is a countervailing line. In SWN Production Co. v. Forest Resources, 2013 PA Super 307, the Superior Court held a lease structure whose net royalty falls below one eighth can violate the Act. The margins are genuinely unsettled. But the working rule for a Pennsylvania owner is that deductions are lawful here, and the lease language is what controls how far they go.
Compare West Virginia, where the Supreme Court of Appeals has held the opposite in Wellman, Tawney, and most recently Romeo v. Antero Resources in June 2025. Same basin, same operators, opposite rule. It is the single largest legal difference in Appalachia and it moves what an interest is worth.
Our royalty statement decoder explains each deduction line, and Act 66 of 2013 gives you a right to see them itemized. See below.
Act 66 of 2013 amended the Oil and Gas Lease Act and added 58 P.S. section 33.3, which requires a royalty payment to be accompanied by disclosure of: the lease, property, or well identification and county; the month and year of production; the total volume sold in barrels, Mcf, or gallons; the price per unit; severance taxes and any other deductions; the net value of total sales; your interest expressed as a decimal or fraction; your share of the total value of sales before deductions; your share of the sales value after your proportionate deductions; and the payor's contact address and telephone number.
If your operator is not providing that, you are entitled to it. Our free letter templates include a demand for an itemized accounting you can send by certified mail.
Act 66 also provided that a division order may not amend or supplement the lease, which matters because division orders arrive looking official and owners sign them without reading. And it authorized operators to integrate contiguous leaseholds for horizontal development unless a lease expressly prohibits it.
Two absences worth knowing.
No severance tax. Pennsylvania is alone among major producing states here. Instead, Act 13 of 2012 imposes an unconventional gas well impact fee on producers, collected by the Public Utility Commission and distributed to local governments and state agencies. The fee is a per well annual amount that steps down as the well ages and varies with the price of gas. None of it flows to royalty owners, and none of it reduces your check.
No dormant mineral act that extinguishes ownership. Ohio, Kansas, and North Dakota all have statutes that can strip a severed mineral owner of title after a period of nonuse. Pennsylvania does not. The Dormant Oil and Gas Act of 2006, 58 P.S. sections 701.1 and following, allows a court to appoint a trustee to lease the interests of unknown or unlocatable owners, and the statute says expressly that it is not its purpose to vest the surface owner with title. Payors must remit funds to the trustee within six months of the funds coming due.
For a Pennsylvania heir, that is good news: a great grandparent's severed interest almost certainly still exists, even if nobody has touched it in ninety years. The money may be sitting in suspense or with a trustee. See our unclaimed royalties guide.
Pennsylvania imposes an inheritance tax on Pennsylvania real property regardless of where the decedent lived. Mineral and royalty interests are real property. Under 72 P.S. section 9116, the rates are zero percent to a surviving spouse, 4.5 percent to lineal descendants and ancestors, 12 percent to siblings, and 15 percent to everyone else.
An heir in Arizona who inherits Susquehanna County royalties from an aunt owes Pennsylvania 15 percent, and typically finds out from a notice rather than from an advisor. Pennsylvania also does not follow federal Section 1031 deferral for individual income tax purposes, so the exchange strategy that works elsewhere does not work the same way here.
This is the most consequential and least discussed fact for out of state Pennsylvania mineral heirs. Our page on taxes when you sell covers the federal side, and our executor and trustee page covers the fiduciary side. Neither substitutes for a Pennsylvania CPA.
Everything above traces to a public source. Read them yourself.
Last reviewed August 2026. Statutes and case law change. Berlin Royalties is a mineral buyer and a landman shop, not a law firm, and this page is general information rather than legal advice about your lease or your deed. For a Pennsylvania title or lease dispute, hire a Pennsylvania oil and gas attorney.
Our Marcellus Shale basin page sets the Pennsylvania and West Virginia rules side by side, and the Utica page covers the deeper formation beneath much Pennsylvania acreage.
Both are fine, and both start the same way. Send a check stub, a lease, a deed, or a county and a family name. We will run the records, tell you what you own, tell you what it is worth and how we got there, and tell you if we think you should keep it. Free, and no obligation of any kind.
If the interest came through an estate, start with selling inherited minerals before probate is done or transferring inherited minerals. If you are holding a lease offer, use the free lease offer check.
The largest natural gas field in the United States by production. Southwest Pennsylvania is wet gas and NGL rich; the northeast is dry gas with the best per-well economics in the country.
Deeper and less developed in Pennsylvania than in Ohio, which means much of the Utica potential under Marcellus acreage is still undrilled inventory a buyer should be paying you something for.
Shallower sands stacked above the Marcellus, occasionally targeted and frequently the subject of old shallow leases that still cloud title.
The southwest wet gas counties and the northeast dry gas counties are where we concentrate, but we review every Pennsylvania inquiry.
Everything a Pennsylvania 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 Pennsylvania guideThe things owners here most often wish they had read first. All free, none of it gated.
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