Land · Arkansas tax sale guide

Arkansas tax-delinquent land by county

Verified

Arkansas is the state where the most repeated description of the sale names a seller who does not exist. Guides schedule county tax sales across Arkansas, with dates, venues, and registration rules, for an event Arkansas law abolished in structure if not in name: section 26-37-101(a)(2) provides that tax-delinquent lands shall not be sold at the county level. The county collector's real work is upstream: taxes are payable from the first business day of March to October 15, the delinquent list is published by December 1 (section 26-37-107), the pre-certification notice runs thirty to forty days before certification (section 26-37-102), and unredeemed land is certified to the Commissioner of State Lands no later than July 1 of the following year, title vesting in the state on certification (section 26-37-101). The Commissioner alone sells, at public auctions held in the county or in regional groupings of adjoining counties, for no less than the full amount of taxes, penalties, interest, and costs due, and the sale cannot occur earlier than one year after certification (section 26-37-301). Two further rules separate the current law from most summaries. Redemption ends at 4:00 p.m. on the last business day before the sale and, since 2023, nothing follows it: auction sales are final, and the thirty day post-sale redemption in the Commissioner's old rules is dead. And the deed is a limited warranty deed, which makes the confirmation or quiet title action part of every purchase rather than an afterthought.

This page set covers the top 10 Arkansas counties by population, each verified against the Commissioner's official public auction catalog and the county's own collector record on November 9, 2026. The documented record is unusually complete at the top of the chain: every one of the ten counties was sold in a verified 2026 Commissioner auction. Pulaski County sold alone on Thursday, July 9, 2026 in North Little Rock; Lonoke grouped with Arkansas and Prairie counties on Tuesday, July 14 in Lonoke; Sebastian grouped with Crawford, Franklin, Logan, and Scott on Tuesday, July 21 in Fort Smith; Garland sold Tuesday, July 28 in Hot Springs; Benton and Washington shared one regional sale on Tuesday, August 11 in Springdale; Craighead sold Tuesday, August 18 in Jonesboro; Saline grouped with Grant, Hot Spring, and Perry on Tuesday, September 1 in Benton; White grouped with Independence, Jackson, and Woodruff on Thursday, September 3 in Searcy; and Faulkner grouped with Cleburne and Van Buren on Wednesday, September 9 in Conway. Every unsold parcel from those sales is now in the online post-auction channel. The honest gaps are stated on their pages: the Commissioner publishes no live auction registration terms and no bidder deposit anywhere in the material read, no 2027 dates exist yet, and Garland County's own collector page compresses the certification timeline into a two and four year wording that matches neither the statute nor the Commissioner's one year rule, flagged on its page rather than adopted.

Verify before you go: counties can move a date, change terms, cancel a sale, or pull parcels at any time. The official sale list is the final word.

The 10 counties

Each row links to that county's own page: selling office, venue or platform, deposit, payment terms, leftover channel, and sources. Where a county has not posted a dated sale, the row says so instead of projecting a pattern onto it.

How Arkansas tax-delinquent land sales work

• There is no county tax sale in Arkansas, and the statute says so in terms. Section 26-37-101(a)(2) provides that tax-delinquent lands shall not be sold at the county level. No Arkansas collector auctions land, sells a certificate, or takes a bid. The county collector publishes, holds, and certifies; the Commissioner of State Lands is the only seller in the state. Any guide, county page, or auction calendar that schedules a county tax sale in Arkansas is describing, loosely and wrongly, the Commissioner's auction of that county's parcels.
• The county year runs from March to the following July. Real property taxes are payable at the collector's office between the first business day of March and October 15 (section 26-36-201). Taxes unpaid after October 15 are delinquent and carry a ten percent penalty the collector extends (sections 26-36-201, 26-36-202). The collector delivers the delinquent real estate list to a legal newspaper of the county by no later than December 1 each year for publication (section 26-37-107), and thirty to forty days before certification publishes the pre-certification notice: the unredeemed parcels, the owners of record, the amount of taxes, penalties, interest, and cost needed to redeem, the date the redemption period expires, and warning that the lands will be forfeited to the state unless redeemed (section 26-37-102).
• Certification moves the land to the state, and title moves with it. The collector holds all tax-delinquent lands for one year after the date of delinquency. Lands whose taxes have not been paid for one year following the October 15 due date are forfeited to the state and transmitted by certification to the Commissioner of State Lands for collection or sale, no later than July 1 of the following year, with all taxes, penalties, interest, and costs due and the owner's name and last known address (section 26-37-101(a), (b)). On receipt of the certification, title vests in the State of Arkansas in care of the Commissioner (section 26-37-101(c)). From that point the county is out of the sale entirely.
• A certified parcel cannot be sold for at least a year, and the owner is told so twice over. After certification the Commissioner notifies the owner by certified mail of the right to redeem by paying all taxes, penalties, interest, and costs including the cost of the notice, and sends certified mail notice of the sale to all interested parties; if a homestead owner cannot be shown to have received the certified mail, actual notice by personal service at least sixty days before the sale is required (section 26-37-301). The sale date in the notice shall be no earlier than one year after the land was certified (section 26-37-301(b)(3)). The Commissioner then publishes the notice of sale in a newspaper of general circulation in the county, with the amount due, the owner, the legal description and parcel number, the interested parties, and the minimum bid rule (section 26-37-201), and publishes a Public Auction Catalog with parcel level amounts.
• The public auction is the Commissioner's, in the county or in a regional grouping of adjoining counties. In-person auctions take place in the county where the parcel is located, or at one location for adjoining counties where a single county lacks enough parcels to justify its own sale (section 26-37-202(c)). The parcel sells to the highest successful bidder only if the bid is at least the amount of delinquent taxes, penalties, interest, and the costs of the sale; the successful bidder pays all taxes, interest, penalties, and other costs (section 26-37-201). In 2026 the Commissioner ran these auctions from July into the autumn in exactly this form, several of them regional, and every county in this set was sold in one of them.
• Redemption ends the business day before the sale, and nothing follows it. At least thirty calendar days before an in-person sale, the Commissioner notifies the owner and all interested parties by regular mail of the right to redeem before 4:00 p.m. central standard time on the last business day before the date of the sale, paying all taxes, penalties, interest, and costs due including the cost of the notice (section 26-37-202(e)(1)(A)). Redemption payment is by certified funds, expressly including cash, card, electronic check, escrow check, money order, cashier's check, or certified bank check (section 26-37-202(f)). Since 2023, as the Commissioner's own auction announcements repeat, that deadline is the end of redemption altogether and auction sales are final. The thirty day post-sale redemption printed in the Commissioner's superseded 1989 rules, and repeated by secondary guides, is dead law; a buyer who prices an Arkansas parcel as if the former owner held a month to unwind the sale is pricing a right that no longer exists.
• The deed is a limited warranty deed, and title work is part of the purchase. If the parcel is not redeemed by the deadline and is sold, the Commissioner issues a limited warranty deed to the purchaser (section 26-37-202(e)(3)). It conveys the interest the state took by forfeiture; it is not marketable title on delivery, and buyers who need marketable title plan on a confirmation or quiet title action in circuit court under Title 26, Chapter 38. One buyer class is barred outright: an individual or entity whose home of record is outside the United States may not purchase a certified parcel, and a deed issued to one is cancelled within three business days of the determination, with all moneys paid forfeited (section 26-37-202(a)). Amounts bid above the amount due are excess proceeds administered under the Commissioner's Rules for the persons entitled; they are not the buyer's equity.
• Unsold parcels move online, then to negotiated prices, on a statutory ladder. If no one bids at least the amount due at the public auction, the Commissioner may sell the parcel at an unsold-property auction, which may be conducted online (section 26-37-202(b)(1)). Under the Commissioner's Rules (26 CAR 400-301), thirty calendar days after the initial auction every unsold parcel goes onto the unsold-property auction list at cosl.org, with bids accepted only online at auction.cosl.org. Within the first two years after the public auction, an unsold parcel is offered for at least the full amount of delinquent taxes, penalties, interest, and costs of sale (section 26-37-202(b)(2)(A)). At two years or more, the sale may be negotiated at a price the Commissioner determines to be in the best interest of the state and the local taxing units, and may be conducted online as a negotiated-price auction (section 26-37-202(b)(2)(B)). The current year's taxes, not yet delinquent, are not part of the amount due at any step.

One Arkansas fact decides most purchases: the owner's rights end before the sale, not after it. Redemption closes at 4:00 p.m. on the last business day before the auction, the sale is final, and no redemption period of any length follows the limited warranty deed. The diligence that matters in Arkansas therefore runs the other way from redemption states: not whether the owner will unwind your purchase, but whether the certification and notice behind it were clean, because the deed you hold is only as strong as the forfeiture that produced it.

Research the parcels before you bid

A sale list gives you the parcel, the date, and the opening terms. It does not give you the owner, the value, or the rest of the picture: liens, foreclosure status, and parcel history. PropertyRadar is the data platform for that layer. It carries owner records, assessed and market values, foreclosure and tax data, and property history for parcels across the country, searchable by address, owner, or county, including parcels that never reach a sale list.

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The dates on these pages are the free layer. The Pine membership is the paid layer, proven in New York: members pick their counties, get alerts when a sale is scheduled or a list posts, and receive the full property list with the analysis already done. Arkansas counties open from the interest list first, in the order readers join it.

Keep going

Once a deadline puts you in a sale, the Land Investor Due Diligence Toolkit is the checklist and bid worksheet to run on each parcel before you bid.