If you have been served with a partition petition, or you received a notice about the court’s appraised value, you are on a clock. How long that clock runs depends entirely on which state the land sits in — and the number most websites publish is the one from the model act, not the one your legislature actually passed.

The differences are not small. Alabama gives a cotenant 30 days to elect a buyout, not the 45 days repeated across most national guides. Tennessee allows the court to use the county’s tax appraised value as the value of the land unless someone objects within 30 days — and on rural acreage, tax appraised value is often far below what the parcel is worth. Arkansas can waive the valuation hearing entirely if no one enters an appearance. Virginia has no cotenant buyout election at all; it uses a different remedy, so a 45-day window does not exist there in any form. And two states in our footprint, North Carolina and Oklahoma, never adopted the act, which means none of these protections apply.

This tool asks three questions — the state, what happened, and the date on your notice — and returns the deadline that applies under that state’s statute, what the window is actually for, and what you lose if it passes. Every figure is drawn from statute text verified against official state code sources in August 2026.

Nothing you enter is sent anywhere or stored. There is no email gate and no sign-in.

A deadline is not the whole picture

Knowing your date matters, but it is one piece of a larger situation. If the land came down through the family and the estate was never probated, you are likely dealing with heirs’ property — shared ownership among relatives where the deed still sits in a deceased person’s name. That carries its own set of problems: you cannot borrow against the land, one cotenant can force a sale of the whole parcel, and an outside buyer can acquire a single relative’s fractional share and file a partition action of their own.

Our heirs’ property guide covers all of it — how partition actions work, the full statute for each of the nine states that adopted the act, what to do when one heir will not sign, what clearing title involves, and a list of organizations that help families with this at no cost. If your situation is urgent, start with Section 7 of that guide, which names the legal aid groups and extension offices that take these cases for free.

This tool is educational and is not legal advice. It reports periods written in state statutes and cannot account for a court order that changes them, a law amended since publication, or the facts of your case. Confirm every date with a real-estate attorney licensed where the property is located — and do it before a deadline, not after.