Powder River Basin oil, legacy Green River gas, and a state that defines royalty by statute as free of production costs. Wyoming is one of the best places in the country to be a mineral owner, and almost nobody explains why.
The top search result in the country for selling Wyoming mineral rights is a University of Wyoming extension magazine PDF. That is not a criticism of the extension service, which does good work. It is an indictment of every company in this business, including the ones sending you mail. Nobody has bothered to write a serious page for Wyoming owners, so we did.
Berlin buys Wyoming minerals and royalties, concentrated in the Powder River Basin and the legacy gas basins. We are a Tulsa company. We are not going to invent a Casper address to seem local, and it turns out not to matter: the companies currently ranking for these searches are almost all single office operations in Fort Worth. What matters is whether the buyer understands what you own.
Most of the fight between royalty owners and operators in this country comes down to one question: can the operator subtract the cost of getting the product to market before calculating your share? Most states answer it with case law that shifts over decades. Wyoming answered it by statute.
W.S. section 30-5-304 defines royalty as the mineral owner's share of production free of the costs of production, and it expressly excludes from "costs of production" three things:
Read carefully, that is a first marketable product rule with a defined downstream carve out. The costs of making the gas marketable in the first place, gathering, dehydration, and compression, are costs of production and are not deductible. Costs incurred after the gas enters the market pipeline, and plant processing, are outside the definition and may be charged.
Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. v. Followill, 2004 WY 80, 93 P.3d 238, applies the statute. Between the statute and that case, a Wyoming royalty owner has a clearer and stronger position than an owner in North Dakota, Pennsylvania, or Kansas, where the default runs the other way.
If your Wyoming check shows gathering or compression deductions, that is worth a question. Our royalty statement decoder explains the line items and our letter templates include a certified mail demand for an itemized accounting.
Wyoming has no state individual income tax. There is no Wyoming tax on capital gain from selling Wyoming minerals, by a resident or a nonresident, and no nonresident withholding at closing.
For an out of state seller this is unusually clean. Compare Colorado, which withholds 2 percent of the sales price on nonresident sales of real property over $100,000, or West Virginia, which withholds 2.5 percent. In Wyoming there is nothing to withhold and no state return to file over the sale. You still owe federal capital gains tax, and your home state may tax the gain, so run it past a CPA. See taxes when you sell mineral rights.
The generosity on income tax is balanced on the production side, and owners should understand it because it comes off before their royalty is figured.
Combined, Wyoming's total production burden runs to roughly the low teens as a percentage, among the highest in the country. Mill levies vary by county and are reset annually, so confirm current figures with the Wyoming Department of Revenue rather than relying on any published summary, including this one.
Unlike Kansas, North Dakota, and Ohio, Wyoming has no dormant mineral act. A severed Wyoming mineral interest does not lapse for nonuse. An interest your great grandmother reserved in 1948 and nobody has touched since is still yours.
That may not stay true forever. During the 2025 interim, a Wyoming legislative committee studied the question and commissioned a state by state comparison of dormant mineral statutes. Nothing has been enacted, and we are not predicting anything. But if you own unused Wyoming minerals, this is worth watching, and there is no downside to having something recorded in your name at the county in the meantime.
This is the part most offers get wrong.
In a single zone play, an interest is worth roughly what its wells will produce. In the Powder River Basin, one section can carry Turner, Parkman, Sussex, Shannon, Frontier, Niobrara, and Mowry targets at different depths. An interest with one producing Turner well may have five or six additional locations beneath and around it that nobody has drilled.
A mailer buyer prices your interest off the check you are receiving today. That systematically undervalues stacked pay acreage in Converse and Campbell Counties, and it is the single most common way Powder River owners get underpaid. When we underwrite a Wyoming interest, remaining locations by bench are an explicit line in the analysis, and we show it to you.
The same logic runs in reverse in the mature Green River gas basins, where the value is in a long, flat, predictable tail rather than in future drilling. Both are legitimate assets. They are valued differently, and a buyer who applies the same multiple to both is not doing the work.
Last reviewed August 2026. Rates and mill levies change annually. Berlin Royalties is a mineral buyer and a landman shop, not a law firm or a tax advisor, and this is general information rather than advice about your interest.
Also see our Powder River Basin page for how stacked pay changes valuation, and the DJ Basin page for the Laramie and Goshen County extension.
Send a check stub, a lease, a deed, or a legal description. We will run the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission records and the county records, tell you what you own, tell you what has been permitted nearby, and give you a number with the reasoning shown. Free, no obligation, and we will tell you if holding is the better move.
If you are weighing a lease offer instead of a sale, use the free lease offer check. If the interest came through an estate, start with transferring inherited minerals.
Wyoming's most active oil play. Stacked Turner, Parkman, Sussex, Shannon, Frontier, Niobrara, and Mowry targets under the same acreage in Converse and Campbell Counties, which means one interest can be drilled many times.
Legacy tight gas across Sublette, Sweetwater, and Lincoln Counties, including Jonah and Pinedale. Long lived, gas price sensitive, and frequently undervalued because the decline curves are flat and boring.
The northern extension of the DJ into Laramie and Goshen Counties, sharing geology with Weld County, Colorado but not sharing Colorado's regulatory regime.
Old fields with long production histories, small decimals, and title chains nobody has looked at since the interests were created.
Converse and Campbell are the current center of gravity, but we buy across Wyoming including the legacy gas basins.
Everything a Wyoming 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 Wyoming guideEvery oil and gas operator in Wyoming, with contact information, refreshed from the state regulator. Free to search, and useful whether or not you ever sell anything.
The things owners here most often wish they had read first. All free, none of it gated.
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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.