Who orders an ALTA survey, who pays for it, and when it is required

In a commercial real estate deal, the buyer or the borrower orders and pays for the ALTA survey, and the request normally travels through the title company or closing attorney rather than going direct. The lender is usually the party who makes it non-negotiable, because the survey is what lets the title insurer delete the standard survey exception from the loan policy. Sellers rarely order one, and when they do it is to control the timeline on a marketed asset.

That is the short answer. The longer answer matters because in practice four parties touch the order, and getting the sequence wrong is the most common reason a commercial closing slips.

Who orders an ALTA survey?

Nobody has authority to compel the survey except through the contract and the loan documents, so "who orders it" really means "who signs the engagement and who pays the invoice." Here is how the roles usually break down on a US commercial transaction.

The detail people miss is the certification. An ALTA/NSPS survey carries a certificate naming specific parties, and only the named parties can rely on it. If the lender is not named, the lender will not accept it. If you are buying and the seller hands you their survey from three years ago certified to a different buyer and a different bank, you do not have a usable survey, you have a reference document.

Who pays for an ALTA survey?

The buyer pays in the large majority of commercial purchases, for the same reason the buyer pays for its own title policy and environmental work: the survey exists to protect the buyer and to satisfy the buyer's lender. On a refinance there is no buyer, so the borrower pays. Costs run roughly $2,500 to $10,000 depending on acreage, parcel count and Table A scope, and our ALTA survey cost breakdown goes through what moves the number.

It is negotiable like any other closing cost, and it does get negotiated. Three patterns show up regularly. A seller running a competitive process sometimes commissions a survey up front and offers it to bidders, which shortens everyone's diligence period and is worth real money on a tight timeline. A buyer with leverage asks for a survey credit at closing. And on a portfolio deal the parties often split, with the seller supplying existing surveys and the buyer paying to update and recertify them, which is far cheaper than starting over.

One thing not to negotiate away: control of the engagement. Whoever signs the surveyor's contract controls the scope, the Table A selections and the revision requests. Letting the seller own that relationship on a property you are buying tends to cost more in review cycles than it saves in fee.

When is an ALTA survey required?

No statute requires an ALTA survey. It is required by contract, and in practice by lenders. It becomes effectively mandatory in these situations:

• Commercial acquisition with financing. Nearly every institutional or bank lender conditions funding on a current ALTA/NSPS survey certified to the lender and the title insurer.
• Removing the survey exception from a title policy. This is the core purpose. Without a survey the policy excepts matters an accurate survey would disclose, which is a large hole in your coverage.
• Any deal with easements, shared access or encroachments in play. If access to the site depends on an easement over someone else's land, the survey is what proves the easement actually reaches the parcel.
• Ground leases and build to suit. A tenant taking a long term leasehold interest is buying something worth surveying.
• Development sites. Where the survey feeds engineering design, entitlement or platting.
• 1031 exchanges and portfolio roll ups, where legal descriptions have to be exact across many parcels at once.

State law can also pull an ALTA survey into a category of its own for unrelated reasons. Alabama is a good example: its board rules bar selecting engineers and land surveyors on price alone, and the statute carves ordinary private boundary surveys out of that rule, but expressly leaves ALTA/NSPS surveys inside it. So in Alabama a commercial buyer should expect a qualifications-first conversation before a fee, while a homeowner can freely compare quotes. The detail is on our page for land surveyors in Alabama.

Is an ALTA survey necessary?

Not always, and this is where money gets wasted. An ALTA/NSPS survey is a heavyweight product built for title insurance and lending. If you are not insuring title, not borrowing, and not dealing with easements, you may need something smaller.

A plain boundary survey establishes where the lines run and sets the corners. It does not plot title exceptions and does not carry the ALTA certificate. On an all-cash purchase of a simple parcel from a seller with clean title, a boundary survey plus a careful read of the title commitment is sometimes the proportionate choice. An as-built survey answers where the improvements sit, which is a different question again.

The honest test: ask your title officer, in writing, what they will need to delete the survey exception, and ask your lender what it will accept. Those two answers decide it. If both say a boundary survey suffices, you have your answer. In commercial deals they almost never do.

How to order an ALTA survey

The order is straightforward once you know the sequence. The mistake is starting at step four.

1. Open title first. The surveyor cannot complete and certify the drawing without the title commitment and the documents listed in Schedule B Part II. Order title on day one.
2. Ask the lender for its survey requirements in writing, including which Table A items it wants and exactly how the certification should read, with the correct legal entity names. Getting the certification wording wrong is a common cause of a late revision.
3. Select your Table A items. These are optional and negotiated, and they drive both cost and schedule. Item 11(b) underground utilities and Item 6 zoning are the two that most often add weeks. The 2026 standard also added Item 20, an encroachment and conditions summary table on the face of the plat, which is optional and must be requested. Our guide to the 2026 ALTA/NSPS survey requirements covers the full list.
4. Engage a surveyor licensed in the state where the land sits. There is no such thing as an ALTA license. Any surveyor licensed in that state may perform one, though experience with commercial title work varies enormously.
5. Hand over everything at once: the title commitment and all Schedule B documents, prior surveys and plats, the legal description, site access arrangements and contacts, and any zoning report.
6. Build review float into the schedule. The title company and lender read the drawing and come back with comments. Budget a week for that round trip.

Requests should now specify a 2026 ALTA/NSPS Land Title Survey, since the 2026 Minimum Standard Detail Requirements took effect on February 23, 2026 and superseded the earlier versions. Asking for a "2021 ALTA survey" out of habit is the kind of small thing that generates a clarifying email and a lost day.

Who orders the survey in a real estate closing?

On residential closings the answer is different and much simpler. Most home purchases in the US never involve an ALTA survey at all. Where a survey is ordered, it is typically a mortgage or location survey requested by the lender or the closing agent, and in a handful of states it is customary for the seller to provide one. Our piece on who pays for a survey when buying a house covers the residential side.

On commercial closings the title company usually places the order, but that is administrative convenience, not authority. The buyer is the client, the buyer signs the engagement, and the buyer should be the one deciding scope. If your title company picks the surveyor for you and you never see the engagement letter, you have outsourced a decision that affects both your cost and your coverage.

What the ALTA survey sits alongside in diligence

The survey is one of four workstreams that run in parallel during a commercial diligence period, and treating them as sequential is what blows deadlines. Title and survey depend on each other. The environmental assessment runs independently. And on any income producing asset, somebody has to read every lease in the rent roll and pull the terms that actually affect value: rent escalations, renewal options, exclusive use clauses, and any right of first refusal that could complicate the sale. Teams increasingly run that pass with software that extracts the key terms from each lease document rather than by hand, because on a fifty tenant property the manual version takes longer than the survey does.

Two of those workstreams intersect directly with the survey. Recorded easements show up in Schedule B and get plotted on the drawing. And lease exhibits sometimes describe premises boundaries that do not match the surveyed parcel, which is a problem far better discovered in diligence than at closing.

Common questions

Can the seller order the ALTA survey? Yes, and on marketed assets it happens. The catch is certification: a survey certified to the seller and its lender is not certified to you or yours. Expect to pay the surveyor to update and recertify it, which is normally $500 to $2,000 rather than a new survey fee, assuming nothing material has changed on the ground.

How long is an ALTA survey good for? There is no expiry date written into the standard. Title insurers and lenders set their own tolerance, and six months to two years is the usual comfort range, shorter where construction has occurred. What ages a survey is change on the ground, not the calendar. See how long an ALTA survey takes for the timeline side.

Do I need a new ALTA survey for a refinance? Often an update is enough. The lender and title insurer decide. If the prior survey is recent, nothing has been built, and the surveyor can recertify to the new lender, an update is far cheaper than a fresh survey.

Who signs the ALTA survey? The professional land surveyor licensed in the state where the property sits, who seals the drawing and issues the certification to the named parties. The buyer, lender and title company do not sign it; they are named on it.

Can I order an ALTA survey without a title commitment? You can engage the surveyor and get fieldwork started, and on a tight schedule that is smart. You cannot get a completed, certified drawing, because plotting the Schedule B Part II exceptions is a required part of the work.

If you are still deciding whether the deal warrants the full product, compare boundary survey vs ALTA survey cost first. If you are scoping a commercial deal and want real numbers from surveyors who do title work in that state, describe the property and we will put up to three licensed surveyors in front of you, with the quote in writing before anyone visits. Start with our commercial land survey page for scope and pricing.