Michigan more than doubles by-right parcel splits — and lets local governments go further
Michigan more than doubles by-right parcel splits — and lets local governments go further
2026-09-12 · Michigan · Legislation
What happened. Michigan amended the Land Division Act to raise the number of parcels a landowner may create without platting, and added a provision letting local governments authorise more still. 2025 PA 58, from Senate Bill 23 sponsored by Sen. Kevin Hertel (D-12), was signed 23 December 2025 and took effect 24 March 2026, amending MCL 560.108.1
The new numbers, on a staged clock
- The base allowance for the first 10 acres of a parent parcel goes from 4 parcels to 10 — but not at once. It stays at 4 from 24 March 2026 for one year, then rises to 10 on 24 March 2027.
- Beyond the first ten acres: one additional parcel per whole 10 acres, capped at 11 additional.
- Plus one additional parcel per whole 40 acres in excess of the first 120 acres.
The bonus parcels in subsection (3) survive: for a parent tract of not less than 20 acres, two extra parcels where new roads mean no new driveway accesses to an existing public road are created, or where one resulting parcel is not less than 60% of the parent tract.
The provision that matters more than the numbers
New subsection (6): a parcel “may be partitioned or split at any time into a greater number of parcels or tracts than otherwise authorized by this section” if authorised by, and compliant with standards in, an ordinance of the municipality or county with authority to approve divisions under section 109(1).
The state floor moved. Local governments may now go above it without limit.
Why this is an association story
Because more by-right splits without platting means infill and flag-lot development adjacent to, and inside, existing subdivisions — on parcels that were previously too constrained to divide.
The exposure depends entirely on the association's own documents:
- An association whose declaration prohibits further division of a lot is unaffected as a matter of private law. The Land Division Act governs what the state and the municipality will approve; it does not override a recorded covenant.
- An association with no anti-subdivision or minimum-lot-size covenant has materially less protection than it had in 2025, and the protection it thought it had was coming from the statute rather than from its documents.
- An association whose declaration references the statutory limits — drafting of the form “no lot shall be divided except as permitted by the Land Division Act” — has just had its own covenant loosened by the amendment, without a vote.
That third category is the one to check first, and it is more common in Michigan declarations than boards expect.
The date to work backwards from
24 March 2027. That is when the first-ten-acres allowance goes from four to ten. A board that wants an anti-division covenant in place before the larger allowance arrives has roughly six months to draft it, secure whatever amendment threshold its documents require, and record it.
Michigan amendment thresholds are typically two-thirds of co-owners or members. That is not a process to start in February 2027.
What is not affected
New subsection (7) provides that a parcel created under subsection (5), or under a subsection (6) local ordinance, cannot be further split except under those same provisions. So the local-override route does not compound indefinitely.
And condominium projects are not divided under the Land Division Act at all — they expand and contract through the Condominium Act's own machinery, which is a different problem set entirely, currently running through the reversion cases and Senate Bill 272.
The wider pattern this belongs to
PA 58 is the enacted piece of a much larger Michigan deregulation push. Fourteen zoning-preemption bills are pending in the House — on minimum lot sizes, minimum dwelling areas, setbacks, parking, duplexes by right and accessory dwelling units by right. Every one of them is drafted as a restriction on municipalities, and none of them touches a private covenant.
What to watch next
Local ordinances adopted under new subsection (6). This is where the real variation will appear, and it will appear township by township with no statewide reporting. A board's relevant question is not what Lansing did — it is whether its own municipality has adopted a division ordinance since March 2026.
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