Land · Louisiana tax lien guide

Louisiana tax sales by parish

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Louisiana is the state in this project where the sale itself changed species. Effective January 1, 2026, under the constitutional amendment in Act 409 of 2024 and the implementing Acts 774 of 2024 and 411 of 2025, a parish no longer auctions property or a percentage of property for unpaid taxes: the tax collector auctions the tax lien, at a price fixed at the face value of the delinquent taxes, interest, and costs, with bidders competing only by bidding the monthly interest rate down from one percent to a floor of seven tenths of one percent. The winner receives a recorded tax lien certificate, the owner keeps the property, and the lien is extinguished by payment of the termination price until, no earlier than three years after recordation and only after statutory notice and suit, a court judgment sends the property to a sheriff's judicial sale whose surplus, after the holders and lienholders are paid, belongs to the owners. The ten pages below track the largest Louisiana parishes, the platform and date each one actually published for 2026, and the separate channel each one keeps for property adjudicated before 2026.

The local variation sits inside that fixed frame, and in 2026 it is mostly about publication discipline. East Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and Caddo published dated online lien auctions and ran them; New Orleans published that the system had changed and that its first lien certificate auction was not yet scheduled; and several large parishes published no 2026 lien auction date at all in their official pages, which these records report as a gap rather than papering over it with a secondary calendar. Two traps recur statewide: official sheriff pages that still describe the repealed ownership bid down system, and the assumption that the old adjudicated property platform runs the new lien sales. It does not, anywhere verified here. Read the state frame first, then the page for the parish that holds the parcel.

Verify before you go: a city or town 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 parishes

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

How Louisiana tax lien auctions work

• Louisiana collects delinquent property taxes through tax lien auctions under R.S. 47:2154, as rewritten by Act 774 of 2024 and Act 411 of 2025 and authorized by the amendment of Article VII, Section 25 of the state constitution effective January 1, 2026. What is auctioned is the tax lien, never the property and never a percentage of the property.
• Taxes are due December 31 and delinquent the next day, bearing interest at one percent per month on a noncompounding basis, and the delinquent obligation is secured by a lien and privilege with priority over all other encumbrances (R.S. 47:2127). If impositions, interest, and costs remain unpaid ninety days after delinquency, the lien must be offered at auction.
• The tax collector, in most parishes the sheriff as ex officio tax collector, sends delinquency notice by certified mail by the first Monday of February and advertises the consolidated delinquent list in the official journal (R.S. 47:2153). The auction is advertised on or before May 1 of the year after assessment, and in practice the 2026 auctions ran in June and July.
• The price is fixed at the face value of the certificate: the delinquent impositions plus interest and costs accrued before issuance, with the five percent penalty assessed at auction excluded from face value (R.S. 47:2154(C) and R.S. 47:2122). Bidders compete only on the monthly interest rate, bidding it down from one percent in one tenth of one percent increments to a floor of seven tenths of one percent; the lowest rate wins (R.S. 47:2154(D)).
• Within thirty days after the auction the collector records a tax lien certificate for the winning bidder or, if there is no bidder, for the political subdivision, and interest accrues on the face value at the winning rate, or at one percent per month on a subdivision certificate, on a noncompounding basis (R.S. 47:2154(E) and (F)). The holder gets no possession, no eviction right, and no rent.
• Any person may extinguish the lien at any time by paying the termination price to the tax collector: face value, the five percent penalty, termination recording costs, interest at the certificate rate, the holder's notice costs up to five hundred dollars, and any subsequent impositions the holder paid (R.S. 47:2243).
• The holder must send notice to every interested party at least six months and no more than one year before suing (R.S. 47:2156), and may sue only after the later of three years from recordation of the certificate or six months after that notice, and in all events within seven years of recordation, after which the lien is perempted (R.S. 47:2266.1 and R.S. 47:2155(C)). Payment remains possible until thirty days after the last party is served in the suit.
• A judgment is executed by the sheriff on a writ of fieri facias at a judicial sale. After sale costs, the sheriff pays the plaintiff holder, then other certificate holders, then recorded mortgage and lien holders, and then the owners, with undeliverable surplus deposited in the court registry and surplus unclaimed after one year handled under the Unclaimed Property Act (R.S. 47:2267).
• Property adjudicated to a parish or city before January 1, 2026 is a separate legacy channel, sold or donated under local ordinance at public sale, with or without a minimum bid, after notice that gives interested parties sixty days or six months to redeem or sue (R.S. 47:2201, R.S. 47:2202, and R.S. 47:2206). A parish or city may also convert adjudicated title into a tax lien certificate held by itself (R.S. 47:2201(B)).

Since January 1, 2026 Louisiana auctions the tax lien and not the property: the buyer pays the face value of the delinquent taxes, interest, and costs, competes only by bidding the monthly interest rate down from one percent to a floor of seven tenths of one percent, and can reach the property itself only through a court suit filed no earlier than three years after the certificate is recorded, ending in a sheriff's judicial sale whose surplus belongs to the former owners.

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. Louisiana jurisdictions open from the interest list first, in the order readers join it.

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