# U.S. Mineral Rights Law Atlas, release 2026.10.1

Published by American Mineral Registry on October 6, 2026. Licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Landing page: https://americanmineralregistry.com/research/mineral-rights-by-state

## What it is

For each of the 50 states and D.C.: the type of rule that governs unused severed mineral interests, the nonuse period where there is one, whether the interest can end without a step by the surface owner, the preservation filing, whether the state has forced pooling and surface damages statutes, and, from release 2026.10.1, what its law says when the owner of record has died, is unknown or cannot be found, with statute and court decision propositions kept apart. Every field carries its own evidence label and source ids.

## Coverage

- Jurisdictions reviewed in this release: 51 of 51
- Consequential fields checked against official text or searched: 152 of 153

## Review

Researched and checked by American Mineral Registry against the official text wherever it could be read; review completed October 1, 2026. Reference research, not legal advice.

## Files

- law-atlas-2026.10.1.csv: one row per jurisdiction
- law-atlas-2026.10.1.json: full records, categories and the source register
- law-atlas-2026.10.1.xlsx: the same data with README and dictionary sheets
- law-atlas-sources-2026.10.1.csv: every source with pinpoint, access date and access route
- data-dictionary.csv: every column defined
- CITATION.cff, citation.bib, citation.ris

## Earlier edition

The June 2026 edition (Zenodo version DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20935348, concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20935347) is kept unchanged in archive/. It contains errors this release corrects; see https://americanmineralregistry.com/research/changes.

## Limits

General information about statutes, not legal advice or a title opinion. Unresolved jurisdictions have no published rule and are not counted as having none. Statute text and government data keep their own terms.