Selling a house with a lien on it in Arkansas

A lien does not freeze the title. You can sign a deed on a house that has liens against it, and the deed conveys. What it does not do is leave the liens behind. Recording is constructive notice under Ark. Code Ann. 14-15-404, which means a buyer cannot later say they did not know about a recorded claim.

That is why the buyer's side almost always requires the liens cleared at closing rather than after. It is also why the words in the deed matter. Under Ark. Code Ann. 18-12-102 a conveyance using the phrase grant, bargain and sell carries a covenant against encumbrances, limited to those done or suffered from you as the seller. Sign that and leave a lien behind, and the covenant is the buyer's claim against you. Improvement district assessments are the one carve-out in that statute: they run with the land to the new owner.

The ordinary path is simpler than any of that. The title company finds the lien, gets a payoff figure, pays it from the proceeds at closing, and records the release. You receive what is left.

Unpaid property taxes behave differently from the liens below, and this site covers them elsewhere rather than twice. The ordinary split of the current year's tax bill between you and the buyer at closing is covered in our guide on property tax proration in Arkansas. The delinquent path, where unpaid taxes eventually move the parcel toward the Commissioner of State Lands, is covered on our page about selling a vacant house.

Priority among ordinary liens is a question of order, not fairness. Ark. Code Ann. 18-40-102 says a mortgage is a lien from the time it is filed for record, and not before. Whoever recorded first is paid first, and everyone else lines up behind.

Ask your lender for the payoff figure in writing, and keep the date you asked. That date matters for what comes next.

Getting the release recorded afterward is where sellers get stuck, and Arkansas gives you a real remedy. Under Ark. Code Ann. 18-40-104 a lender who does not clear the record within sixty days after being requested to forfeits a sum not exceeding the amount of the mortgage, recovered by a civil action. Three things about that rule get misreported. The clock runs from your request, not automatically from your payoff, so make the request and date it. It takes full satisfaction, which an open credit line at a zero balance is not. And the penalty is a ceiling a court may award, not an automatic fine that anyone collects for you. In most Arkansas counties, which now record electronically, the release itself is a separate recorded document rather than a note in the margin of the old record.

The same statute carries a self-help route that is worth knowing about and rarely mentioned. Once those sixty days have passed, a satisfaction affidavit can be recorded with the same effect as the lender's own acknowledgment. Only three people may sign one: the attorney who prepared the original instrument, an attorney representing either side of the satisfaction, or a licensed employee of the title company that tendered the payoff. If a lender has gone quiet on you, the title company that sent the money may be able to fix it without the lender.

Under Ark. Code Ann. 16-65-117 a circuit court judgment is a lien on your real property in the county where it was rendered, from the date of rendition, where the clerk keeps a permanent office and the judgment is filed there. Against someone who has no actual notice of it, the lien instead dates from when it was recorded and indexed. Two further limits surprise people. A district court judgment is not a lien on land at all until it has been filed and indexed with the circuit clerk. And a judgment is a lien only in the county where it is filed: a judgment entered in one Arkansas county does nothing to a house in another until a certified copy is filed there too.

The lien lasts ten years. What is easy to miss is that the debt and the lien are on separate clocks. Ark. Code Ann. 16-65-117 provides that acts which toll the underlying judgment do not extend the lien, so a judgment can remain collectible as a debt after it has stopped being a lien on your house.

Anything you read about reviving an Arkansas judgment lien by writ of scire facias is out of date. Act 986 of 2025 abolished the writ. Revival now runs through filing a notice of outstanding judgment and serving the debtor by first class mail, and it has to happen within ten years of the judgment or of the previous notice. Revival does continue the lien; what the ten year rule fixes is the deadline to ask.

Then there is the homestead, which is where most of the published advice goes wrong. Article 9 of the Arkansas Constitution exempts a homestead from judgment liens, with a listed set of exceptions: purchase money, specific liens you granted, laborers' and mechanics' liens for improving that same property, taxes, and fiduciary defalcations. The number you will see quoted alongside it, twenty five hundred dollars, is the trap. The same article says the homestead may never be reduced below a quarter acre in a city or eighty acres in the country, without regard to value. For a typical Central Arkansas lot of a quarter acre or less, that floor controls and the dollar figure never comes into play. On a larger city lot the value cap can shrink the protected area back toward a quarter acre, but it cannot cut below it.

One real limit deserves more attention than the dollar figure does. The exemption requires being married or the head of a family. Head of a family is broader than it sounds and does not mean married: Arkansas courts look at whether you actually support someone, whether that person depends on you, and whether you stand in a position of authority, so an unmarried owner supporting a parent can qualify while an owner supporting nobody generally does not. Separately, Amendment 79 is often described as a homestead exemption in the same breath. It is a credit on your annual property tax bill and offers no protection from any creditor.

The most common belief about contractor liens in Arkansas is the wrong way round. Paying your general contractor every dollar you owe does not, by itself, stop a subcontractor or a supplier who went unpaid from filing against your house. The legislature is blunt about this. The notice form Arkansas requires contractors to give states in capital letters that a lien may be filed even though the full contract price may have been paid to the contractor.

What actually protects an Arkansas homeowner is the notice, not the payment. For residential property of four units or fewer, Ark. Code Ann. 18-44-115 allows no lien unless the owner actually received the required pre-construction notice, delivered personally or by certified mail. That requirement reaches subcontractors and suppliers as well as the contractor you hired, and one copy from any of them satisfies it for all. There are narrow exceptions, including a payment bond.

A 2021 change is worth knowing if a contractor skipped the notice and is now threatening one. Act 984 of 2021 rewrote the consequence: a residential contractor who failed to give the notice may not take the benefit of the lien, and faces a fine, but is no longer barred from suing on the contract itself. The older and harsher version expressly blocked any action at law or in equity, and it is still what most published summaries describe.

Priority changed even more recently. Act 479 of 2025 struck the words in preference to from a subsection of Ark. Code Ann. 18-44-110 and replaced them with subject to, so a mechanic's lien now attaches subject to encumbrances that were already there rather than ahead of them. It still outranks encumbrances that come after it, and the same act gives construction funding mortgages a priority of their own. Sources written before spring 2025 state the old rule.

A federal tax lien exists once the IRS assesses a tax, demands payment, and goes unpaid. Under 26 U.S.C. 6321 it reaches all of your property without anything being filed anywhere, and it dates back to the assessment rather than to the demand. Filing matters for a different reason: under 26 U.S.C. 6323 the lien is not valid against a purchaser until the IRS files a notice of it, and in Arkansas that notice is filed with the circuit clerk of the county where the property sits, under the Uniform Federal Lien Registration Act at Ark. Code Ann. 18-47-202.

Those two rules together dispose of the claim that the IRS is always paid first. A mortgage recorded before the notice was filed generally keeps its place ahead of the federal lien, to the extent the lender had actually advanced the money. A later draw on an open line of credit is a different question.

Selling is expressly contemplated. Under 26 U.S.C. 6325 the IRS can issue a certificate of discharge that removes the lien from one specific property, on Form 14135, with the instructions in Publication 783. A discharge is not a release: it frees that house and does not reduce what you owe. Publication 783 asks you to apply at least forty five days before the transaction date, and that number is routinely misreported as a processing time. It is a submission lead time. The IRS publishes no guaranteed turnaround, which is a reason to start the paperwork early rather than a reason to expect a date.

Two of the five discharge routes need no payment to the IRS. One applies when the property still subject to the lien after your sale is worth at least double the debt plus everything ahead of it, which is no help to a seller whose house is the only asset. The other applies when the government's interest in your house has no value, because the debts ahead of it exceed what the house will bring. So an IRS lien on a house with little equity is not automatically the dead end it looks like, though the application still has to be made and granted. Separately, once the IRS finds the tax satisfied or legally unenforceable, a release of the whole lien is due within thirty days. That clock starts from the finding, not from the day your payment clears.

One Arkansas specific: the homestead protection described above does not stop a federal tax lien, and it does not stop a federal levy either. Federal law overrides the state exemption. A principal residence does carry its own federal protection, though, because it cannot be seized without written approval from a federal judge.

Child support works differently from an ordinary judgment and catches people off guard at closing. Each unpaid installment becomes a final judgment by operation of law as it comes due, without anyone going back to court. That is not the same thing as a lien on your house. Under Ark. Code Ann. 9-14-230 the lien has to be recorded, and it does not relate back, so it binds the property from the recording forward rather than from the day the payments stopped. Once recorded it reaches property the parent acquires afterward, so long as that property is not exempt under the Arkansas Constitution, and it covers support payable through the court registry or the state clearinghouse. It runs until three years after all the children covered by the order reach majority, are emancipated or die, which can outlast the ordinary ten year judgment lien entirely.

Two details matter to a sale. If the lien was filed in a county other than the one that issued the order, and the certified payment record was not filed with it, it covers only payments that came due after that county's recording. And the statute gives the parent who owes support a way to clear it: an affidavit sworn under penalty of perjury and notarized, filed together with a certified record of the support account. Generally that is proof the other side can still rebut, but for a good faith purchaser for value it is conclusive.

Arkansas is unusual here, and most of what is written about Arkansas associations is simply wrong. For an ordinary subdivision there is no Arkansas statute creating an assessment lien at all, outside of time shares, which are governed separately. If your association has a lien, it is because the recorded bill of assurance for your subdivision says it does, and Arkansas courts have enforced that language as a continuing charge running with the land since at least 1975. Read the declaration, not a statute.

Arkansas has adopted neither the Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act nor the Uniform Condominium Act, contrary to several widely circulated association guides. The Horizontal Property Act at Ark. Code Ann. 18-13-101 and following applies to condominiums, and only where a master deed was recorded to create the regime.

For those condominiums, Ark. Code Ann. 18-13-116 does two things at a sale. Unpaid assessments are paid out of the sale price ahead of other charges, except past due taxes and payments due under duly recorded mortgages. And the purchaser is jointly and severally liable with the seller for what was owed up to the closing. That second rule is a buyer's problem as much as a seller's, and it is a reason a condominium sale should surface the association's ledger early. Note what this is not. Chapter 13 creates no recordable lien, no perfection step and no foreclosure procedure for assessments. It is a payment priority and a personal liability, and it sets no ceiling on what a purchaser can inherit. Note that the statute was amended in 2025 with a delayed and partly optional application, so two versions can apply depending on when the regime was organized.

What Arkansas does not give an association is a super priority ahead of a recorded mortgage. The condominium statute expressly excepts recorded mortgages, and for ordinary subdivisions there is no statute to grant one. An association also cannot use the nonjudicial foreclosure process, which Arkansas limits to a narrow set of lenders, attorney trustees and state agencies. That process reaches only mortgages and deeds of trust carrying a power of sale, which an assessment covenant is not. An association would have to go to circuit court.

Everything above assumes the sale produces enough to pay what is recorded. When it does not, the transaction stops being about paperwork and starts being about consent, and this is the honest limit of what any cash buyer can promise.

Arkansas has no statute requiring a lienholder to accept less than it is owed. Nothing forces the issue, which means every holder short of full payment has to agree separately, and any one of them can refuse. The IRS has a defined route for this, as described above. A private lienholder simply decides.

So the real answer depends on arithmetic we can do with you on the phone in a few minutes, using your payoff figures rather than an estimate. Sometimes the number works and the sale closes normally. Sometimes it does not, and the useful thing we can do is tell you that plainly and early rather than tie your house up while we try. If that is where your numbers land, an attorney and your lender are better next calls than we are.