You can own a house in Texas and not own one inch of what is underneath it.
That is normal here, it is usually decades old, and most owners never find out until they try to sell. The title commitment comes back with an exception nobody expected, the buyer’s lender asks a question, and a closing that was two weeks out is suddenly a conversation about a deed signed in 1951.
What severed actually means
Texas treats land as two estates that can be owned separately. There is the surface estate, which is the house and the yard, and the mineral estate, which is the oil, gas and other minerals below. Once somebody sells or reserves the minerals, the two are severed and they stay severed. They do not rejoin on their own, and they do not rejoin because the house changed hands eight times since.
So the question is never whether your house sits over minerals. It is who was holding the mineral estate the last time anyone bothered to write it down.
The part that surprises owners
In Texas the mineral estate is the dominant one. The surface is servient to it.
The Supreme Court of Texas put the rule this way in Getty Oil Co. v. Jones, 470 S.W.2d 618 (Tex. 1971): “the oil and gas estate is the dominant estate in the sense that use of as much of the premises as is reasonably necessary to produce and remove the minerals is held to be impliedly authorized by the lease; but that the rights implied in favor of the mineral estate are to be exercised with due regard for the rights of the owner of the servient estate.”
Read the first half and the second half together, because both matter. The mineral owner, or whoever leases from them, has an implied right to use as much of your surface as is reasonably necessary to get at what they own. They do not need your permission. The Railroad Commission says the same thing plainly, that a lessee “has the right to conduct the activities set out above and otherwise reasonably use the surface without getting permission from the surface owner.”
The second half is the limit. Those rights are exercised with due regard for you, and reasonable necessity is a real boundary rather than a formality. But the starting position is not the one most homeowners assume.
Why your seller’s disclosure will not warn you
This is the gap that catches people.
Tex. Prop. Code § 5.008 requires a seller of residential property with not more than one dwelling unit to give the buyer the statutory seller’s disclosure notice. That form covers the condition of the property in detail. It does not ask about mineral or oil and gas interests at all.
So a severance that happened three owners ago produces no disclosure obligation on that form, generates no paperwork at any point in your ownership, and announces itself for the first time in a title commitment during a live contract. Nobody hid it from you. The form simply does not have a line for it.
Where the answer actually lives
Not with the Railroad Commission. The Commission says it “generally lacks jurisdiction” over mineral and surface ownership questions and recommends consulting an oil and gas or real estate attorney. Its records show permits, wells and production, not who owns what.
The answer is in the chain of title in the county clerk’s real property records, which means reading every deed back to the point where the minerals were split off and following each fraction forward from there. That is a mineral title run, and it is work. A landman or a title attorney does it properly. The title company will not do it for you as part of an ordinary residential commitment, which is exactly why the exception on Schedule B is often the first you hear of it.
If you want the cheap version before you ever list, pull your own deed and read it. A reservation is usually right there in the granting language, and the phrase to look for is some variant of the grantor reserving all oil, gas and other minerals.
Does it kill the sale
Usually not. It changes the paperwork and sometimes the price.
Most residential buyers in Texas are not buying for the minerals and their lender is not underwriting them. What the lender and the title company care about is whether the surface can be used as a residence without an unreasonable risk of disruption. A severance that is old, with no active lease and no production anywhere nearby, is routine and gets insured over.
What actually complicates a sale is an active lease, a producing well on or very near the property, a pipeline easement running through the lot, or a mineral owner who has recently been asking about access. Those are facts a buyer will price, and they should.
What the contract does about it
Texas has a promulgated form for this, which tells you how ordinary the situation is.
TREC No. 44-3, the Addendum for Reservation of Oil, Gas, and Other Minerals, lets a seller reserve either “all of the Mineral Estate owned by Seller” or an undivided interest in it. The important box for a residential seller is the surface one: the seller elects whether they “does does not waive rights of ingress and egress and of reasonable use of the Property (including surface materials).”
Leave that election blank and the form is not neutral about it. Failure to complete that section “will be deemed an election to convey all surface rights.” And if the seller does not reserve all of the mineral estate, they have to give the buyer the current contact information of any existing mineral lessee within seven days.
If you are reserving minerals you still own, waiving the surface rights is what keeps a residential buyer comfortable. You keep the royalty, they keep the certainty that nobody will be putting a pad in the back yard on the strength of your reservation.
Why this bites hardest in the Panhandle and West Texas
Severance tracks history, and the history is not evenly spread.
Around Amarillo, Lubbock and the Permian, mineral estates were being split off from surface estates while those towns were still filling in, so a plain residential lot can easily sit over minerals that have been separately owned and separately inherited for seventy years. Fractional interests get divided among heirs each generation, and a single tract can end up with dozens of owners nobody has a current address for.
In a Houston or Dallas subdivision platted in the 1990s the same question usually has a short, boring answer. In the Panhandle it often does not. If that is where your property is, this is how we buy houses in Amarillo when the title work turns up something unexpected.
What to do before you list
Pull your deed from the county clerk and read the granting language for a reservation. Pull the deed that conveyed to the person who sold to you, because the reservation is often further back than you think.
If you find one, do not panic and do not volunteer a discount. Find out whether there is an active lease and whether anything is producing nearby, because that is the difference between a paperwork item and a price item. Then ask the title company what exception they intend to take and whether they will insure over it.
If the answer turns the sale into a longer project than you have the patience for, a buyer who takes title as it is rather than as they wish it were is a reasonable way out, since they are pricing the exception instead of asking you to clear it. That is who actually buys houses for cash in Texas and what they are underwriting.
The short version
Surface and minerals are separate estates in Texas and severance is permanent. The mineral estate is dominant, with an implied right of reasonably necessary surface use that is exercised with due regard for you. Your statutory seller’s disclosure under § 5.008 does not ask about any of it, so it surfaces at title. Ownership lives in the county deed records, not with the Railroad Commission. TREC No. 44-3 handles reservations, and leaving the surface waiver blank is deemed an election to convey all surface rights. An old severance with no activity is usually insurable and barely moves the price. An active lease or a well next door is a different conversation.
This is general information about Texas law, not legal advice for your property. Mineral title is genuinely technical. Talk to a Texas real estate or oil and gas attorney before you rely on any of it.