Every claim about a recorded document can be verified against the register it came from, free, by anybody, in a few minutes. This page is the procedure. If a line cannot be checked this way, the honest conclusion is that it should not have been relied on.
Listen instead
The same material, read aloud and told more loosely than it is written. Nothing is said in it that this page does not also say.
That same recording, with the writing lit line by line as it plays and the sections listed beside it, is on its own page.
What a line has to give you
A statement about a recorded instrument is checkable only if it carries the things that identify the instrument.
Start with the office it was recorded in. Next, the identifier that office assigned, which in New York City is a City File Number and which the ACRIS master table calls crfn. Then the date it was recorded, which ACRIS names recorded_datetime. And the it was recorded against, which is a borough, a block and a lot.
A figure with no document behind it is an assertion. There is no way to test it and no reason to accept it.
A four step procedure for verifying a claim about a recorded document. One, start from the parcel rather than the name, because the land records are indexed by borough, block and lot. Two, pull the document by its file number and read the parties and amount off the instrument itself. Three, read its recorded date, which ACRIS names recorded_datetime, and place it against whatever it is being compared to. Four, look for later instruments against the same parcel naming the same party, which is where a satisfaction or assignment will be. Three questions the register will not settle: what is owed today, whether two people are married, and whether a particular satisfaction retired a particular mortgage.
Steps one to three confirm a document exists and says what it is quoted as saying. Only step four can show that it has already been retired.
The two dates are not the same date
ACRIS carries both and they answer different questions.
One of them, document_date, is the date on the face of the instrument, the day somebody signed it. Its companion, recorded_datetime, is described in the dataset as the legal date the instrument was recorded. runs from the second. Weeks can separate them.
So a claim that quotes a date is incomplete until it says which of the two it means, and a great many of them never do. Anything about who beats whom is a statement about recorded_datetime, and nothing else will do.
The amount field means one thing
ACRIS names it document_amt and describes it as the principal debt or obligation.
Read that as the at recording. It is not a balance and it is not updated. No field in the dataset holds a balance. A page that reports the amount on a is reporting this number, and the correct way to read it is as the figure the instrument stated on the day it was stamped.
How far the data actually runs
Both ACRIS tables carry a field called good_through_date, described as the date of the latest recording or correction included in the extract.
One field settles a question people usually argue about. Anything recorded after it is not missing from the register and is not an error in the register. It is outside the copy of the data that was searched.
New York City's own guidance puts the other edge at 1966: documents earlier than that are not in ACRIS and are held at the Land Records Research Library instead. A search of a system that starts in 1966 cannot tell you about 1962.
The procedure, four steps
Take one line and spend five minutes on it. You are not trying to check everything. It is to find out whether checking is possible at all.
Start from the parcel rather than the name, because the land records are indexed by borough, block and lot. The legals table holds exactly those fields. Pull the document by its file number and read the parties and the amount off the instrument, not off a summary of it. Then read its recorded date and place it against whatever it is being compared to. And last, look for later instruments against the same parcel naming the same party, because that is where a or an will be, and a claim that ignores those is counting a document that may already have been retired.
Four steps, and the fourth is the one that changes answers.
What the register will not settle
Three questions look checkable and are not, and it is worth knowing them before spending an afternoon.
What is owed today, because no field holds it. Whether two people are married, which decides an entireties question under EPTL 6-2.21 and is recorded nowhere in the land records. And whether a satisfaction retired a particular mortgage, which RPL 3212 leaves as an inference in any county that indexes by block, since the statute does not require the mortgage's own record to be marked.
Those are answerable, but not from an index. They need the instruments, and sometimes they need facts from outside the register entirely.
What this does not cover
One city's system, named because it is the one whose field names can be quoted exactly.
Every county publishes differently. Broward's official records, the Florida property appraiser files and the Department of State's filings each have their own identifiers, their own coverage dates and their own idea of what a date means. What transfers is the procedure above. The field names do not.
Nobody writing this is a lawyer and none of it is advice. What a page can do is narrower, and in this one case it is enough. It can tell you the four things a line must carry before it is worth believing, and how to get behind it when it does.
satisfactionThe recorded document that says a mortgage has been paid off. It is its own instrument with its own recording date, and a raw search of the register lists it alongside the mortgage it retires rather than instead of it.registerThe county office's public index of documents recorded against land, and the documents themselves. Deeds, mortgages, satisfactions, assignments and liens all sit in it, in recording order.face amountThe figure written on the instrument when it was recorded. It is what the register shows. It is not the balance, and nothing in the public record updates it as the debt is paid down.assignmentThe recorded transfer of a mortgage or other claim from one holder to another. The claim does not change; the party entitled to be paid does.priorityThe order in which claims against a property are paid out of a sale. It is set by the date each claim was recorded, not by the date the underlying debt arose.mortgageA recorded interest in property given as security for a loan. The face amount is what the instrument states, which is not the same as what is still owed.parcelOne identified piece of land, as the county defines it. Recorded documents are keyed to the parcel, not to the person, which is why a search by name and a search by lot can disagree.
Sources
Every section named above, with how current the text we read was. Read any of them yourself.
EPTL 6-2-2, New York Consolidated Laws, Estates, Powers and Trusts Law - EPT § 6-2.2 When estate is in common, in joint tenancy or by the entirety. Current through January 01, 2026. Read the section, opens in a new tabBack