Congress Advances Bipartisan Bill to Help Families Keep Inherited Land

When a landowner dies without a will, land typically passes to all descendants as tenants in common — each heir owns an undivided fractional interest in the whole property, with no single heir controlling a specific piece of it. Without a partition agreement, any one co-owner — or anyone who has bought out just one heir’s fractional share — can petition a court to force a sale of the entire property, historically often at a courthouse auction for a fraction of market value.

USDA has called heirs’ property “the leading cause of Black involuntary land loss” in the United States, and researchers have linked the pattern to a roughly 90% decline in Black-owned farmland between 1910 and 1997 (Land Trust Alliance / UCS “Lost Inheritance” analysis) — though the HEIRS Act itself is race-neutral and applies to any family with heirs’ property, a pattern common in rural land across the South generally, including many of PlaceAcre’s own inherited-land sellers.

The bill creates two grant tracks through HUD: (1) grants to states that have adopted the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA) — a model law that gives co-owners a right of first refusal, requires a court-appointed appraisal instead of a lowball auction, and lets a judge partition the land in-kind (physically divide it) rather than force a sale whenever practical — to help residents cover the legal costs of establishing clear title or settling an estate; and (2) direct grants to legal aid clinics, law school clinics, and HUD-approved housing counseling agencies that already do this work.

$10 million per year is authorized for FY2026 through FY2030 — modest next to the scale of the problem, but the first dedicated federal funding stream of its kind.

The UPHPA adoption split in the table above tracks closely with where PlaceAcre buys land. Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Maryland, and Virginia have already adopted the model law, while Tennessee, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and South Carolina have not. South Carolina instead passed a narrower “Heirs’ Property Tax Relief Act,” signed May 15, 2026, that eases the title-clearing tax and appraisal burden for family transfers but doesn’t add UPHPA’s forced-sale protections.

For families in the non-UPHPA states, a HUD grant tied to state adoption is itself an incentive for state legislatures to catch up — a dynamic worth watching in 2027 legislative sessions.

The bill still needs a full House floor vote — unscheduled as of September 16, 2026 — and Senate action before it could become law. Passage is not guaranteed, and no enactment date should be implied; a companion Senate bill’s status was not confirmed as of this writing.

If the House passes the bill, it moves to the Senate, where no companion vote has been confirmed as of September 16, 2026. Landowners with heirs’ property today shouldn’t wait on federal legislation — existing state partition law, and in UPHPA states the protections already on the books, apply regardless of this bill’s outcome.