Title plan (official copy of the registered title plan)

A title plan shows the general extent of the land in one registered title, drawn on an Ordnance Survey base with the registered land edged in red. It does not name the owner, list the mortgage or set out covenants: those sit in the title register, which describes the land only by reference to the plan. The register’s published guidance says the plan must always be read together with the register.

For a title plan that means a timed and dated official copy of the plan held against the title number for your address, delivered as a PDF within 24 UK business hours.

Take a 1930s semi-detached house in Rotherham held under a title number such as SYK654321. Its title plan is a single sheet: Ordnance Survey mapping at 1:1250 with the house and gardens edged in red, neighbouring houses in black outline, and the title number in a box at the top. That sheet is what most people picture when they say “the deeds show the boundary”.

Start at the title number box at the top of the sheet and work inwards to the red line. The register’s published guidance, as at September 2026, lists the elements a title plan carries; the table takes them from the top of the sheet down.

Colours only make sense next to the register. An entry reading “The land edged and numbered in green on the title plan has been removed from this title and registered under the title number or numbers shown in green on the said plan” is the register telling you what a green loop means. Every coloured mark on the plan should have an entry in the register that explains it.

Every title plan shows general boundaries, which means the red line shows roughly where the boundary runs and does not fix its exact position. As at September 2026 the register’s published guidance puts it this way: the boundary shown on the plan is general unless it has been formally determined, and a general boundary does not determine the exact line.

Here is why, using the Rotherham house. Ordnance Survey surveys the fence between numbers 24 and 26 and draws it as a black line; the registry then draws the red edging along the inside of that line for each title.

At 1:1250 the printed line is not a hair’s breadth. The register’s published guidance says the line width itself represents roughly 0.3 metres of ground at that scale, and 0.6 metres at 1:2500, and gives Ordnance Survey’s relative accuracy at 1:1250 in urban areas as plus or minus 0.9 metres. Put together, the red line cannot be read to anything like half a metre, on a map whose detail, the same guidance says, is not intended to represent property boundaries.

That is why the registry will not scale a measurement off a title plan and says you should not either. There is no standard tolerance or ratio between the general boundary on the plan and the legal boundary, which is an imaginary line with no width; the fence is a physical feature that may or may not sit on it.

A title plan cannot tell you who owns a fence, how many metres wide a plot is, or whether a shed sits on your land or your neighbour’s. Those are the questions people most often order a plan to answer.

Fence ownership. The register records who owns or must maintain a boundary feature only when the deeds lodged on registration said so, and the registry says it rarely holds that information. Where it exists, it appears as an entry noting that a transfer “contains provisions regarding light, air, and boundary structures”, or as T marks on the filed deed plan. A T mark indicates ownership of a boundary structure or the duty to maintain it, but unless the deed text refers to the marks they have no special force in law.

Measurements. Title plans only show dimensions if the plans in the original deeds showed them, and the register’s published guidance says dimensions are no longer routinely reproduced. If the original conveyance plan carried figures, the conveyancing pack is where you will find them, if a copy was filed.

Exact position. Where a hedge and ditch run together, the register’s published guidance describes a presumption that the boundary runs along the edge of the ditch furthest from the hedge, but that is a presumption about the legal line, not something the plan draws. Disputed boundaries are decided by the courts or the Land Registration division of the First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber), not by the registry.

Match the question to the record before you spend anything: most boundary questions need two or three records read together, and one needs none.

Order the plan for both titles when a neighbour is involved. Both are drawn from the same Ordnance Survey base, so if the red lines do not meet, or they overlap, that gap is itself useful evidence.

A determined boundary needs a plan by a chartered land surveyor or other suitably qualified professional at a scale no smaller than 1:200, accurate to plus or minus 10 millimetres from at least two permanent features. Once approved, an entry goes in the property register of each affected title and lettered points are marked on the plans. It is a separate legal application, not a document anyone can order.

The boundary fence at the Rotherham semi has been replaced and now sits, you think, about half a metre further onto your side. The first instinct is to order a title plan and measure it. Here is what helps.

1. Order the title plan for your title (SYK654321) and for the neighbour’s (a title number such as SYK654322). Check that the red edging on both meets along the same black line; on most estates it will.
2. Accept that at 1:1250 a half-metre shift cannot be read off the plan. The line itself represents roughly 0.3 metres and the mapping tolerance is plus or minus 0.9 metres, so the plan puts the fence roughly there, not exactly there.
3. Order the title register and look for an entry noting that the original transfer “contains provisions regarding light, air, and boundary structures”. That is the sign that the deeds say something about the fence.
4. If that entry exists, order the conveyancing pack. Where a copy of the transfer was filed, its plan may carry T marks or the plot dimensions the developer worked to.
5. Photograph the old fence line and post holes before they disappear, so a surveyor can compare the physical evidence with the deed plan.

What the records cannot do is order the fence back. That takes agreement between neighbours, a determined boundary application, or a court or tribunal decision. The records are the evidence, not the remedy.

A new-build plot gets its own title plan when the transfer of that plot out of the developer’s title has been registered, and until then it may have no plan of its own. While that application is pending, the only plan on the register is the developer’s.

Say a builder holds a field outside Clitheroe under a title number such as LA987654 and sells 40 plots. Each plot sold and registered is edged in green on the developer’s plan with its new title number in green, and the developer’s register gains an entry saying that land has been removed and registered under the numbers shown in green. The plan becomes a patchwork of green loops around a shrinking red outline.

Your plot’s own plan is drawn on the Ordnance Survey mapping current at registration. On a brand-new estate that mapping may still show the field, so your red edging may follow the transfer plan rather than any built feature until an entry reads “A new title plan based on the latest revision of the Ordnance Survey Map has been prepared”.

If the address of a new plot does not come up on our search, tell us the developer’s name, the plot number and the site postcode. We confirm which title the plot sits under before ordering, and if it is still pending we say so. The how ordering works page explains our checks.

The title plan and the filed plan are the same document under two names. The register’s published guidance says the title plan was previously known as the filed plan; older registers still carry entries such as “edged red on filed plan” or “New filed plan prepared”, while later entries say “New title plan based on Ordnance Survey Map”.

The registry now bases all its plans on Ordnance Survey’s MasterMap digital data. Whichever name the register uses, an official copy ordered today is the current plan, not the version first filed.

Two practical points follow. The “land registry map” many people search for is this same document; there is no separate map for a single title. Electronic history of title plans is held only for dates after 13 October 2003, so an earlier version may exist only on paper, if at all.

Plans attached to old deeds from before registration are covered on the title deeds page.