Recording lag: the gap between filing and the index

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.

When a record counts

What fixes a lien is the moment the office takes the instrument in. That moment is earlier than the moment you can find it.

In Florida an instrument counts as officially recorded, and as notice to all persons, the moment the clerk affixes its official register number. Fla. Stat. 695.11¹ says so. It ties that same moment to priority: the lower number in the current series beats the higher one. Each instrument is entered in the Official Records register at the time of filing, with its filing number and the date and hour. A general alphabetical index sits beside it, direct and inverse. Fla. Stat. 28.222² sets that out.

New York runs on delivery rather than a number. An instrument is recorded in the order and as of the time it is delivered to the recording officer, and it is considered recorded from that delivery. RPL 317³ says so. An electronic filing is delivered at the receipt time printed on the notice the recording officer must send at once, so the timestamp lives on the notice, not in your memory. Under RPL 316⁴ the grantor and grantee index entries are made as instruments are delivered for record.

In New York, then, the recording moment and the index entry are the same event, because both key to delivery. What the statute does not time is the step after that, when the entry reaches a website a searcher can read. New York City's ACRIS data keeps the legal recording date in its own field, separate from a modified date field, which is the date a document record was modified.

The gap between the record and the line

Between the recorded instrument and the line you can read, time passes, and the length of that lag is practice rather than law.

Florida requires each county recorder to keep a current index of the Official Records on a public website, limited to names, date, book and page, comments and type of record. Fla. Stat. 28.2221(2)(a)⁵ says so. But how long a recorded instrument takes to reach that website is not fixed anywhere in the statutes. It is how a given office works, and this page will not guess a number that no law supplies.

A neighboring clock shows the shape of it. Broward's county property appraiser processes a recorded deed within 48 business hours, unless there is an issue with the deed. That is the appraiser's roll trailing the recorder, a different office from the index. It is one county's stated practice. It tells you the trailing is real. It does not tell you how long your index lags, because that is a different office doing a different job.

There is also a ceiling on what the website is. Under Fla. Stat. 28.2221(4), information retrieved electronically from the recorder's site is not admissible in court as an authenticated document, unless another law provides otherwise. New York City says the same thing in plainer clothes: reviewing its recorded documents is not necessarily the same as a title search, and documents filed before January 1, 1966 are not online at all. How a title searcher brings a search down to the day of closing is title practice, and it is not covered here. For what a blank line can and cannot mean, read what an empty result actually means.

Reading an as-of date

Every copy of a record is good through some date, and that date is the one that answers the reader's question.

ACRIS data extracts carry a good-through date, described as the date of the latest recording or correction the extract includes. Read it the way a bank statement is read: it shows what was true as of a day, not what is true now. A copy that is good through last Monday will not show a lien recorded on Tuesday, whatever the law says about when that lien took effect.

Other registers wear their as-of date in other ways. The FAA refreshes its aircraft registration download daily at 11:30 pm central time, so the download you pulled this morning is last night's picture. Florida's Department of State stamps each judgment lien certificate file with the date and time of filing, and a New York docket entry under CPLR 5018(c)⁶ carries the date and time the judgment-roll was filed and the date and time of docketing. Those stamps are there to be read. Most people never look.

An as-of date, on this page, means the last recording a copy of the record includes, not the day you looked at it. So the honest answer to whether a lien filed last week would show is that it depends on that date. To test a single line rather than trust the copy in front of you, see check any line yourself.