Maryland Waterfront Rights, Also Known as Riparian Rights

By Dawn Riley, Associate Broker, Realtor, Master Certified Negotiation Expert (MCNE) and Pricing Strategy Advisor (PSA) | Published September 29, 2026

When you buy on the water in Maryland, you buy the land. You do not buy the water. You don’t even buy the sand the tide covers twice a day. What comes with the land instead is a set of rights called riparian rights, and they are worth understanding before you write an offer.

I get this question on almost every waterfront showing. We walk down to the pier on a creek off the Patuxent, and somebody asks, “So how far out do we own?” The honest answer surprises people. The deed usually stops at the water’s edge. More exactly, it stops at the mean high water line, and everything below that line belongs to the State of Maryland.

Who owns the shoreline in Maryland?

Under Maryland’s public trust doctrine, the State of Maryland holds title to the land below the mean high tide line in trust for the public. That covers the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay and the Patuxent, plus every tidal creek and cove that feeds them. It also covers the strip of beach between high tide and low tide.

“In trust” is the important phrase. The State doesn’t own that ground the way you own your house. It holds it for everyone. Boating and fishing are the classic public uses, and the State can’t simply sell the bottom to one owner and shut the rest of us out.

Mean high water is not the wrack line you noticed last Tuesday. It’s an average. NOAA calculates it from tide readings taken over a 19-year cycle called the National Tidal Datum Epoch, and a surveyor ties your shoreline to that number using a nearby tide station or benchmark. So the legal line can sit a few feet from where you’d guess by eye. On a gentle marsh shore it can sit a long way off.

What riparian rights actually are

Riparian rights are the rights that come with owning land that touches navigable water. In Maryland they are written into law at Environment Article §16-201. I read that section with buyers. It’s short, and it’s plainer than people expect.

In everyday terms, a Maryland waterfront owner has:

• The right to reach the water from their land, and to get from there to navigable water.
• The right to build into the water to keep that access, such as a pier, once it is permitted.
• The right to protect the shore from erosion, with a living shoreline as the starting point.
• The right to new land that builds up naturally along the shore. The legal word is accretion.

There is also a right to reclaim “fast land” lost to erosion, but it is narrow. The statute limits it to land lost after January 1, 1972, and the owner carries the burden of proving when it washed away. If an old plat shows your lot line 40 feet out in the Bay, don’t count on getting that ground back.

One more piece of §16-201 buyers like. Once a pier or other improvement is legally built, it belongs to the owner of the land it’s attached to. The bottom stays the State’s. The pier is yours.

What riparian rights don’t give you

They don’t make you the owner of the water. You can’t fence off your cove. You can’t order a licensed waterman to move his crab pots out of the water in front of your house, and you can’t stop kayakers from paddling past the end of your pier.

They also have limits on land. The right to build a pier is not the right to build any pier you like. The Maryland Department of the Environment and the Board of Public Works decide what goes on State bottom, and Calvert County adds its own review through the Critical Area program. Your neighbor’s riparian rights limit yours as well. On a narrow creek, piers have to fit side by side without blocking anyone’s path to the channel.

Waterfront, water view and water access are different things

This is where I see the most confusion. It is also where buyers lose real money.

Riparian rights attach only to land that actually touches the water. If anything sits between the lot and the shoreline, the lot may have no riparian rights at all. That “anything” can be a community-owned beach, a private road, an old right-of-way, or a few feet of ground the original developer never deeded out. The lot might still have a gorgeous view. It might have a deeded right to use a community pier. Both are real benefits, and both are priced very differently from true waterfront.

Several of our bayside communities in Calvert County were laid out this way. Scientists Cliffs and Chesapeake Ranch Estates, for example, have beaches and water amenities owned by the association rather than by the individual lots. That’s a wonderful setup for a lot of families. Just know which one you are buying. Before I write an offer on anything marketed as “waterfront,” I pull the plat and the deed and look at exactly where the lot line meets the shore.

Anyone can land a boat on your shore to get safe

Here is the part most waterfront owners don’t know. Most boaters don’t either.

If a boater is in real danger, the law lets them tie up to a pier or pull onto a shoreline to get safe, even when that pier or shore belongs to someone else. Maybe a squall is coming across the Bay. Maybe the engine quit, or someone aboard is hurt, or the boat is taking on water. In that moment, landing on your property isn’t trespass. Courts call it necessity.

This isn’t a new Maryland boating rule. It comes from very old common law. The case law students still read is Ploof v. Putnam, decided in Vermont in 1908. A family’s sloop was caught in a violent storm on Lake Champlain, so they tied up to a private dock. The dock owner’s servant cast them off. The boat was wrecked and the family was hurt, and the court held the dock owner responsible. An owner can’t push a boat back into danger to protect a dock.

The flip side matters too. Necessity lets someone stay until it is safe to leave. It doesn’t turn your pier into a public marina. And under a companion case, Vincent v. Lake Erie Transportation Co. (Minnesota, 1910), a boat owner who damages a dock while riding out a storm can still owe the dock owner for the repair.

What I tell owners is simple. If someone comes in hard off the water in bad weather, let them tie up and help them call for help. If the boat is still there two days later and nobody is in trouble, that is a different conversation. It belongs with the Maryland Natural Resources Police or your attorney.

Yes, people can walk along your beach

This one usually gets a bigger reaction. Because the land below mean high water belongs to the State and is held for the public, a person walking along the wet sand at low tide is generally on public land, even with your house sitting right above them.

There are real limits, and they protect you too:

• They have to get there legally: from the water, a public beach, a public landing or a road end that is truly public. Cutting through your yard is trespassing.
• They stay below the high water line. Your dry sand and lawn are private, and so are your steps and your pier deck.
• At high tide on much of our shoreline, there is no beach left to walk. The water sits right at the bulkhead or the edge of the marsh.
• Local rules still apply. A county or town can limit parking or hours even where the shore itself is public.

On the Calvert County side of the Bay, you see this with fossil hunters. People walk the beach below the cliffs looking for shark teeth, often starting from Calvert Cliffs State Park or Flag Ponds Nature Park. The beach below the tide line is one thing. The cliff face and the land above it are private, and they are dangerous. Those cliffs slump without warning, and the county tells people to stay well back from the base.

If privacy matters a lot to you, keep this in mind before you fall for a sandy lot on the open Bay. A marshy creek lot, or a lot behind a stone revetment, gets far less foot traffic.

State tidal wetlands and private tidal wetlands

This part surprises even experienced waterfront buyers. The Maryland DNR Critical Area Commission explains it well in its guidance on private versus State tidal wetlands. Not every wet part of a waterfront lot is the same kind of wetland, and the difference changes what you own.

State tidal wetlands are the land under navigable State waters below mean high tide, the ground affected by the regular rise and fall of the tide. On a marsh, that is usually the low marsh that floods every day. The State owns it, except where an interest was transferred to a private owner by a valid grant or patent.

Private tidal wetlands are wetlands that border on or lie beneath tidal waters, get regular or periodic tidal action, and support aquatic growth, but are not State wetlands. Think high marsh. It floods on the bigger spring tides, maybe monthly, maybe only a few times a year. It can be part of your parcel. Both definitions come from Environment Article §16-101.

DNR points out a common misunderstanding: people assume only open water counts as State wetland. It doesn’t. A stretch of green marsh grass can be State wetland too.

Why this matters when you buy:

• State tidal wetlands can’t be privately owned. According to DNR, they shouldn’t appear inside a private parcel boundary, and they can’t be counted in the lot’s acreage for Critical Area density.
• Private tidal wetlands can be counted in gross acreage for Critical Area density. That matters if you ever want to subdivide or add a second dwelling.
• The Critical Area buffer is drawn from the edge of the tidal wetland no matter who owns it. A wide marsh can push the buildable part of a lot much farther back than the open water you see.
• The line between State and private is set by professionals, using vegetation studies, NOAA benchmarks, tide station data and field surveys. DNR expects the boundary flagged and surveyed, with the methods and findings written down.

Here’s the practical version. If a listing says 3.2 acres and a good piece of it is low marsh, I want to know how much of that acreage is really the seller’s to sell. Old deed descriptions sometimes run straight out into what is State wetland today.

Permits: who says yes to what

Riparian rights give you the right to ask. They don’t hand you the permit. For most work on Maryland’s tidal water, the approvals look like this:

• Work in State tidal wetlands, which includes most piers because they stand on State bottom, needs a tidal wetlands license. MDE’s Wetlands and Waterways Program reviews it, and larger or contested projects go before the Board of Public Works.
• Work in private tidal wetlands needs a permit from MDE.
• Bigger projects can also need a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permit.
• The county reviews anything in the Critical Area, which is the land within 1,000 feet of tidal water, and it is strict about the 100-foot buffer inside that zone.

Shoreline protection has its own rule. Under §16-201, Maryland starts with nonstructural protection, meaning marsh creation and plantings, often with sand and stone placed to work with the shore. A bulkhead or revetment is allowed where MDE mapping says structural protection fits. It is also allowed where the owner shows a living shoreline won’t work, for example because of heavy erosion or a shore too narrow for marsh. If you’re buying an eroding lot and planning to “just put in a bulkhead,” expect a longer conversation than that.

I go deeper on the paperwork in my guides to buying a home with a pier or boat lift and shoreline protection documents.

Questions I ask on every waterfront listing

1. Where exactly does the deed line meet the water? Does it say “to mean high water,” give a fixed line, or leave it vague?
2. Is there a current survey showing mean high water and any tidal wetlands?
3. Do the pier, lift and bulkhead have permits? I want the license numbers and the approved plans.
4. Is anything between the lot and the shore, like a private road or a community-owned strip?
5. How deep is the water at the end of the pier at mean low tide? And what happens in a hard northwest wind in January, when a blowout tide can leave a boat sitting in the mud?
6. Is the shoreline holding, and what did the last owner do about erosion?
7. Is there public land nearby, such as a public landing or a road end, that brings people along the shore by foot or by boat?

None of these are hard. They just need to be asked before you sign, not after settlement when the answers cost more.

What this means for you

Owning waterfront in Maryland is a little like owning a house with a very old, very large easement running across the front of it. You get the pier and the sunsets over the Patuxent. The public keeps its place in the water and on the wet sand, and a boater caught in a storm keeps the right to reach safety at your dock.

Most owners never have a single problem with any of this. The ones who do usually bought without knowing where their line was. I’d rather you know first.

I’m a Realtor, not an attorney. Riparian questions can turn on the exact deed wording and the survey. For a legal opinion on a specific property, talk with a Maryland real estate attorney.

About Dawn Riley

I’m an Associate Broker and Realtor with The Riley Team at Deep Roots Real Estate in Huntingtown, and a Master Certified Negotiation Expert (MCNE) and Pricing Strategy Advisor (PSA). I’ve sold real estate in Southern Maryland for more than 25 years, much of it on the Bay and the Patuxent. If you’re looking at a waterfront property and want to know where the line really is, call me before you write the offer.

Career results as of 2026: 1,338+ homes sold, $532,653,786+ in sales volume and average sold-to-list price statistics over 101%, per Bright MLS career production records. Past performance does not guarantee a specific result.

Dawn Riley
Associate Broker, Realtor
Master Certified Negotiation Expert (MCNE), PSA
The Riley Team at Deep Roots Real Estate
2425 Solomons Island Rd., Suite C, Huntingtown, MD 20639
410-414-2438
dawn@dawnriley.net
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