§ 16.028.Adverse Possession with Recorded Instrument: 25- Year Limitations Period

The strongest provision in the subchapter, and the only one that hands the possessor a stated quality of title.

A person, regardless of disability, may not maintain an action to recover real property held for 25 years before the action began in peaceable and adverse possession by another who holds it in good faith and under a deed or other instrument purporting to convey the property that is recorded in the county where any part of the property is located.

Subsection (b) is the remarkable part. Adverse possession of any part of the property held under the recorded instrument extends to all of the property described in it — even though the instrument is void on its face or in fact.

So a possessor occupying one corner of a thousand-acre tract, under a deed that never conveyed anything, takes the whole tract after 25 years.

Good faith is the check on that. The possessor must have believed the instrument conveyed the land. Someone who knew the deed was worthless is outside the section, and the forged-deed problem is answered that way rather than by an express exclusion like the one in the five-year provision.

Subsection (c) states the outcome in terms nothing else in the chapter uses: the claimant has a good and marketable title, regardless of a disability arising at any time in the adverse claimant or anyone claiming under them.

Marketable title is the practical objective of the whole exercise. A possessor who cannot sell or mortgage the land has won little, and this is the section that makes the title bankable.

Note the drafting difference from its companion. That section bars a suit after 25 years; this one says the action may not be maintained for property held 25 years before the commencement of the action, which measures backwards from filing rather than forwards from accrual.