§ 25-202.Actions for the recovery of title or possession of real estate or foreclosure of mortgages or deeds of trust as mortgages.

Land disputes and mortgage foreclosures get a longer clock than most civil claims: ten years after the cause of action accrues. The section carves out one group entirely — counties, cities, towns, villages, and a list of other public and irrigation districts face no deadline at all when recovering title or possession of a public road, street, alley, or other public grounds or lots. Government land held for public use doesn’t slip away through the ordinary limitations rules.

Subsection (2) narrows its focus to a different audience: subsequent purchasers and encumbrancers for value who need to know when a mortgage or deed of trust stops being enforceable against them. If the filed record of the mortgage or an extension states or lets you calculate a maturity date, the foreclosure claim accrues on that date. If no date can be pinned down from the filed record, the claim accrues no later than thirty years after the mortgage or deed of trust was made. And if the mortgage creditor files an affidavit — before the claim is otherwise barred — stating the debt is unpaid and the lien still valid, and records that affidavit with the register of deeds, the claim isn’t barred until ten years after the affidavit is filed.

That affidavit-triggered ten-year period is fixed. It isn’t extended by the debtor’s nonresidence, a legal disability, a partial payment, an acknowledgment of the debt, or a new promise to pay — the tools that extend deadlines elsewhere in this article (see sections 25-213, 25-214, and 25-216) don’t reach this specific window.