A lien is a recorded claim against a property that has to be paid before clear title can pass. Liens are public record in every state, and you can find most of them free by searching the county recorder's index by parcel number. The catch is that no single office holds them all: property tax liens live with the treasurer, judgment liens with the court clerk, and code enforcement penalties with the city, sometimes for years before anything is recorded. A complete lien search is six searches, not one.
Below is the order I run them in, with Washington offices and statutes as the worked example. Every county has the same six doors under slightly different names. This is a lookup inside the public records guide for real estate, and it is not legal advice.
Why there is no single lien search
The "free lien search by address" sites at the top of the results are resellers. They license the recorder's index in bulk, on a lag, and they do not carry the liens that never get recorded. The offices themselves are free.
| Lien | Who files it | Where it lives | Recorded against the parcel? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mortgage / deed of trust | Lender | County recorder | Yes |
| Mechanics (construction) lien | Contractor, within 90 days of last work (RCW 60.04.091) | County recorder | Yes |
| Judgment lien | Anyone who won a money judgment (RCW 4.56.190) | Superior court clerk, by name | No, attaches on entry of judgment in the county |
| Property tax lien | County treasurer, attaches every January 1 (RCW 84.60.020) | Treasurer's tax roll | No, it exists by statute |
| Federal tax lien | IRS (Notice of Federal Tax Lien) | County recorder, by name | Yes |
| HOA / condo assessment lien | Association, by statute (RCW 64.90.485) | The association's ledger; recorded only when it forecloses | Usually not |
| Code enforcement lien | City or county (KCC 23.24.070) | City case file first, recorder last | Only at the end |
Two of the seven never hit the recorder until the very end, and one of them (judgments) is indexed by the debtor's name rather than the property. That is why an address search alone can come back clean on a house with $30,000 of problems.
The six searches
1. The recorder, by parcel number
Start here. The county recorder (the auditor in most Washington counties) indexes every recorded document by grantor and grantee, and in King County you can search the Landmark records portal by name or by the first ten digits of the parcel number. Documents recorded since August 1, 1991 are online; older ones are on microfilm at the archives, per the Recorder's Office. Uncertified copies print immediately.
Search by parcel, not by address. Addresses get retyped; the parcel number does not. Pull every document type, then read for deeds of trust, mechanics liens, federal tax liens, notices of trustee's sale, and a lis pendens, which is not a lien but tells you a lawsuit over the title is pending.
2. The treasurer, for taxes
Property taxes are a lien from January 1 of each year by operation of statute, and nobody records them. The King County property tax portal shows the balance and the delinquent years by parcel number, free. Three years delinquent puts the property on the county's foreclosure track, which is the whole subject of the tax delinquent property list.
3. The court, for judgments and tax warrants
A money judgment becomes a lien on all the debtor's real property in the county where it is entered. It is indexed by the person, not the parcel, so you need the owner's name from step 1 (or from an owner lookup). Washington's statewide case search is free; the county clerk's portal has the judgment itself. Search every spelling of the name and any prior owner in the last ten years, because the judgment follows the person and attaches to whatever they owned at the time. State tax warrants land here too: the Department of Revenue files them with the superior court clerk under RCW 82.32.210, where they act like a judgment.
4. The recorder again, by name, for federal tax liens
The IRS files a Notice of Federal Tax Lien with the county recorder against the taxpayer's name, not the parcel. Run the owner's name through the recorder's grantor index, separately from the parcel search. This is the search most address-only tools skip.
5. The association
Condo and HOA assessment liens exist by statute the moment a payment is late, and they are almost never recorded until the association starts foreclosure. The only source is the association: ask for a statement of account (an estoppel or resale certificate). If you are buying, make it a contingency.
6. The code enforcement record
This is the one that surprises people, and it is the one I built a tool around. A city's civil penalties can become a lien on the property, and King County's code says the notice and order itself is recorded with the recorder when it is served (KCC 23.24.040). But that is the end of a process that runs for months or years inside the city's case system first, visible to anyone who looks up the code violation record and invisible to a title search.
Our database holds 87,671 code violations across seven Puget Sound markets as of August 2026. Here is how far up the ladder they got:
| Enforcement stage (case status) | Cases |
|---|---|
| Notice of violation issued (Seattle) | 1,592 |
| Citation issued (Seattle) | 227 |
| Referred to law department (Seattle) | 193 |
| Civil penalties assessed (Shoreline) | 24 |
| Filed on title (Shoreline) | 31 |
Shoreline is the one city in our set whose case system carries a status literally named "FILED ON TITLE," and it applies to 31 of the city's 2,137 cases. Everything above that row is enforcement pressure a lien search cannot see. That gap is why code violations lead pre-foreclosure filings rather than following them, and it is the whole argument of the code enforcement liens post: by the time the lien records, the owner has been under pressure for a long time.
Reading what you find
- A lien with no release is open. Look for a reconveyance (deed of trust), a satisfaction (judgment), or a release (tax lien) recorded later against the same parcel or name. No release means it is still there, even if it was paid.
- Priority is by recording date, with exceptions. Property tax liens outrank everything, code enforcement liens often sit at the same rank in Washington cities, and a mechanics lien relates back to when the work started. This matters when the house is headed to foreclosure, because junior liens get wiped and senior ones survive.
- A lis pendens is not a lien. It claims nothing. It warns that a lawsuit could change who owns the property.
- Deed type hints at trouble, badly. A quitclaim looks like a distress transfer and is not one; we tested it in quitclaim vs warranty deed.
Paying someone to do it
| Option | Cost | What you get | What it misses |
|---|---|---|---|
| The six searches above | Free, about an hour | Everything the county holds | HOA balances; anything not yet recorded |
| Title company preliminary report | Usually free once you are under contract; a fee otherwise | Recorded liens, checked by someone insured to be right | Code cases that have not recorded; HOA |
| Online lien search sites | Per-report fee or subscription | The recorder's index, resold on a lag | Judgments by name, treasurer, HOA, code enforcement; anything recorded since their last pull |
The aggregators are built on the same county extracts that every property data tool licenses. They are convenient for a batch. They are not more complete than the county, and they are usually less current.
Frequently asked questions
Are liens public record?
Yes. Recorded liens (mortgages, mechanics liens, federal tax liens) are public at the county recorder. Judgment liens are public at the court clerk, and property tax status is public at the treasurer. HOA assessment liens are the exception in practice, since they are rarely recorded until foreclosure.
How do I find out if a house has a lien on it for free?
Search the county recorder's index by parcel number, then by the owner's name; check the treasurer's tax portal for the parcel; search the court's judgment index for the owner. All three are free in nearly every county, and none requires more than the free login some portals ask for.
Can I search for liens by address?
Partly. Recorder and treasurer portals search by parcel number, so convert the address first at the assessor's site or a county GIS map. Judgment and federal tax liens are indexed by name, so an address search cannot find them.
Do liens show up on a title search?
Recorded ones do. A title search is a search of the recorder's index plus the tax roll, so it catches mortgages, mechanics liens, tax liens, and recorded code enforcement liens. It does not see an open code case whose penalties have not been recorded yet, or an HOA balance.
Does a code violation put a lien on a house?
Not by itself. A violation starts a case; the case can produce civil penalties; unpaid penalties or the city's abatement costs can be assessed as a lien and recorded. In our data that final step is rare, 31 of 2,137 cases in the one city that publishes it, but the pressure before it is not.
How do I find out if there is a lien on my property in Washington?
Run the parcel number through your county auditor's recorded-document search, check the treasurer's tax lookup for the same parcel, and search your own name in the superior court clerk's index. If you have received a notice of violation, add the city's code compliance portal, because penalties can become a lien before you see it on title.
The recorder tells you what already attached to the house. The code enforcement record tells you what is about to. Our free map shows the open cases across seven Puget Sound markets, no account needed.