Which liens survive a Philadelphia sheriff sale?

It's the most common question investors ask about Philadelphia's tax sales — and the most expensive one to get wrong. The records that answer it exist, but they're scattered across a 1923 statute, federal tax law, and Philadelphia court practice. Here's the picture, with the sources cited so you can verify every claim.

First: which sale are you looking at?

Philadelphia's sheriff auctions two very different kinds of property under one roof, and the lien answer depends entirely on which one you're bidding in:

• Tax-lien sales (delinquent city taxes) — held under Pennsylvania's Municipal Claims and Tax Liens Act of 1923 (the “MCTLA,” 53 P.S. § 7101 et seq.). These are the sales UpsetSale currently tracks.
• Mortgage-foreclosure sales (a lender foreclosing) — ordinary judicial execution sales, governed by lien priority, not the MCTLA's free-and-clear machinery.

Tax-lien sales: “free and clear” — with conditions

Philadelphia does not use the upset-sale system the rest of Pennsylvania uses. Instead, the City petitions the Court of Common Pleas under the MCTLA (53 P.S. § 7283) for a decree authorizing the sheriff to sell the property free and clear of all claims, liens, mortgages, ground rents, charges and estates. That's why a Philadelphia tax-sale deed can be dramatically cleaner than a tax deed from a neighboring county: the divestiture is ordered by a court before the auction happens.

The condition buried in that sentence is “when the process is followed.” The MCTLA's steps — petition, a rule on the owner to show cause, service by posting and certified and first-class mail, affidavits of service, then service of the decree itself before the sale — are what Pennsylvania's Commonwealth Court has called mandatory procedural requirements (City of Philadelphia v. Schaffer, 974 A.2d 509 (Pa. Cmwlth. 2009)). A sale built on defective service can be set aside, and a lien whose holder never got the notice the statute requires may not be divested at all.

What can still follow the property

1. Federal liens — the big exception

A city court can't wipe out the federal government's interest by itself. Under federal law (26 U.S.C. § 7425), a junior federal tax lien is discharged by the sale only if the United States was given proper notice — at least 25 days before the sale. No notice, and the IRS lien survives in full. And even when notice was proper, the United States keeps a 120-day right of redemption after the sale: it can take the property back by paying the sale price plus statutory amounts. Serious buyers run a federal lien search before bidding, not after.

2. Liens whose holders weren't properly served

The free-and-clear decree divests the interests of parties who were properly brought into the case. A mortgagee or judgment creditor who can show they were never served the way the MCTLA requires has an argument that their lien rode through the sale — or that the sale itself should be set aside. This is why the court file for the specific case (the petition, the affidavits of service) is worth reading before you treat a deed as clean. In Philadelphia, a petition to set aside a tax sale is generally due within three months of the sheriff's deed being acknowledged.

3. The nine-month right of redemption

This one doesn't attach a debt to the property — it can take the property away from you. Under 53 P.S. § 7293, the former owner (or their heirs) can redeem a tax-sale property within nine months of the deed's acknowledgment by paying the sale price plus costs, interest, and certain other amounts — in full, not in installments. The critical carve-out: vacant property cannot be redeemed. The statute's test is roughly whether the property was continuously occupied as a residence for the 90 days before the sale. An occupied rowhome bought at a Philadelphia tax sale is, for nine months, a conditional purchase — and any money you put into it during that window is at risk.

4. Interests a tax sale was never going to reach

Physical and non-lien problems ride through every sale: occupants (eviction is on you), code violations and unsafe-structure issues, environmental conditions, and boundary or title defects that predate the tax case. None of these are “liens,” but they behave like costs attached to the property.

Mortgage-foreclosure sales: priority rules, not free-and-clear

At a mortgage-foreclosure sheriff sale, the divestiture logic is completely different: the sale generally wipes out the foreclosing mortgage and liens junior to it, while liens senior to it survive and become the buyer's problem. Buy at the foreclosure of a second mortgage and you take the property still subject to the first. There is also no statutory right of redemption after a Pennsylvania mortgage-foreclosure sale — that protection belongs to tax sales. Priority searching — what was recorded, and when — is the whole due-diligence game in these sales.

Why the rest of Pennsylvania is different (and why we're called UpsetSale)

Pennsylvania's other 66 counties sell tax-delinquent property under the Real Estate Tax Sale Law, in two rounds. The September upset sale conveys the property subject to recorded mortgages and liens — the buyer inherits them, which is the classic trap of Pennsylvania tax investing. Only if a property fails at the upset sale does it move toward a court-approved judicial sale, which is free and clear. Philadelphia skips that two-step entirely and goes straight to the MCTLA's court-ordered sale — one of many county-by-county differences this site exists to keep straight.

How to check before you bid

1. Confirm the sale type. Tax-lien or mortgage foreclosure? Everything above turns on this. Our free sale list covers Philadelphia's tax-lien sales and links every property to its official auction page.
2. Read the court file. The tax-sale case (petition, rule, affidavits of service, decree) is a public record in the Court of Common Pleas. Defects live here.
3. Search for liens the sale might not reach. Federal tax liens and judgments recorded against the owner — a title company or abstractor does this in hours.
4. Assess redemption risk. Is the property occupied? If it plausibly was for the 90 days before the sale, price in nine months of limbo.
5. Talk to a professional. A Pennsylvania real-estate attorney or title company, before the auction, not after. The few hundred dollars is the cheapest insurance in this market.
6. Run the numbers before you bid. Once you know which liens count for this sale type, plug your own title-search numbers into the free bid calculator — it does the arithmetic (value, liens, costs, target profit) and shows your maximum bid. No login required.

Property File: what the recorded-document signal does and doesn't tell you

Every free listing now includes a Property File panel built from the Department of Records' recorded real-estate-document index (deeds, mortgages, satisfactions, assignments, lis pendens), plus L&I permits and violations, FEMA flood data, and school catchments — an index of what's on file, not a title search.

The "open mortgage signal" flags when the index shows a recorded mortgage with no matching recorded satisfaction. That is not the same as an outstanding balance: a payoff can go unrecorded for years, grantor and grantee names carry typos and abbreviations the matching has to guess past, and the newest filings can lag the index by weeks. Loan amounts themselves are never in this index — only the recorded document itself carries a number, and PhilaDox (linked from every listing) is where to pull it.

None of this changes the free-and-clear analysis above: Philadelphia's court-ordered decree divests recorded liens and mortgages when the MCTLA's service requirements are met, with the same three exceptions — improperly noticed federal liens, holders who weren't properly served, and the nine-month redemption window on occupied property. A mortgage the Property File flags as open is exactly the kind of interest a court-ordered tax sale is built to divest; it's shown so you know what to verify, not because it's expected to survive the sale.

Sources

• Municipal Claims and Tax Liens Act, Act of May 16, 1923, P.L. 207 (53 P.S. § 7101 et seq.) — the statute governing Philadelphia's tax-lien sheriff sales, including free-and-clear sales (§ 7283) and redemption (§ 7293)
• Nochumson P.C., “City Must Follow Pa. Tax Lien Act to Hold Sheriff's Sale” — commentary on City of Philadelphia v. Schaffer, 974 A.2d 509 (Pa. Cmwlth. 2009)
• 26 U.S.C. § 7425 — discharge of federal tax liens at nonjudicial sales; the United States' 120-day redemption right
• Young, Marr & Associates, “Is There a Right of Redemption at a Sheriff's Sale in Pennsylvania?” — the nine-month redemption window and the vacancy exclusion
• City of Philadelphia — Sheriff & lien sales and the Philadelphia Sheriff's Office — the official sources; if they conflict with anything here, they control

By Colin Adams, founder of UpsetSale · Last updated September 17, 2026