Cochise County's Tax-Lien List: 10,975 Vacant Parcels, Sorted

The Cochise County Treasurer publishes a list of tax liens the county is holding and will assign to anyone who pays what is owed. On 26 October 2026 that list had 11,150 parcels on it. 10,975 of them, 98 percent, are vacant land. We joined every one to the Assessor's record, the zoning layer, the maintained-road inventory and FEMA's flood layer to see what is actually for sale. The companion piece on who owns the county's vacant land covers the general picture.

What the list is, in statute

Arizona counties do not sell delinquent property. They sell the lien. The rules are in A.R.S. Title 42, Chapter 18, and the parts that matter are short.

• The sale is in February (§ 42-18112). Every parcel with unpaid prior-year taxes is advertised and offered. The buyer pays the whole delinquent tax, interest, penalties and fees, and the lien goes to whoever accepts the lowest interest rate, bid down from 16 percent (§ 42-18114, § 42-18053). Cochise County runs the auction through GovEase.
• Unsold liens go to the State at 16 percent, and the Treasurer assigns them over the counter to anyone who pays the amount due plus subsequent years' taxes, for a fee of up to $10 (§ 42-18122). That is the published list: leftovers from past February sales, at the full 16 percent.
• The owner can redeem at any time by repaying the lien holder with interest (§ 42-18152). Most do.
• Three years after the sale the lien holder may sue in Superior Court to foreclose the right to redeem (§ 42-18201). Not before, and not more than ten years after acquiring the lien. It is a lawsuit, with notice requirements, filing fees and usually an attorney.

So a lien is not land. It is a 16 percent note secured by land, which becomes land only if the owner ignores a lawsuit for several years. The economics of the list follow from that.

What is on it

The lien parcels are the county's vacant land, concentrated. Median size 0.83 acres (county-wide 0.86); median full cash value $1,000, less than half the county-wide $2,500. Seventy percent are an acre or less.

By zoning district, the 1960s subdivision districts dominate and the four-acre rural district barely appears.

Nearly a third of all SR-22 and SR-8 lots in the county, and a third of the vacant lots inside Willcox, carry an unsold lien. Four percent of RU-4 parcels do. Owners pay the tax on land they use.

10,116 of the 10,975 lien parcels carry use code 0013, vacant residential rural subdivided. 73 percent have an out-of-state tax address, and 995 have no deliverable address at all, which is the county's way of saying the tax bill has been coming back for years. Three quarters are owned by individuals, not companies.

What a lien costs

The county's layer carries a field called purchasetotal, which tracks the Treasurer's total due: back tax, interest and fees, i.e. roughly what you would pay for the assignment. Verify the figure with the Treasurer before sending money; interest accrues monthly and the layer is a snapshot.

The median lien is $697 on a parcel the Assessor values at $1,000. Across the list, the median lien is 59 percent of the parcel's full cash value, and on 2,543 parcels, 23 percent, the lien already exceeds what the Assessor says the land is worth. Those are lots where the owner's rational move is to let it go, and the lien buyer's rational move is to not want it either.

Why the list is tiny subdivided lots

The mechanism is simple. A lien on a usable parcel gets redeemed, by the owner, a lender or a buyer at closing, and the lien holder collects 16 percent for a year or two. A lien on a half-acre lot in a plat with no built roads, owned by someone in Ohio who paid $40 a year since 1975 and has decided to stop, does not. Nobody bids on it in February. It goes to the State, onto this list, and sits.

The lien layer's foreclosure-year field shows this. The county does not define the field, but the values run from 2008 to 2029 and sit about three years after the oldest delinquent year, consistent with the year the lien becomes foreclosable under § 42-18201. Treat it as an inference. On that reading, 8,915 of the 10,975 parcels, 81 percent, were already foreclosable in 2026, and the biggest single cohort (1,052 parcels) came due in 2018. Eight years foreclosable and nobody has bothered.

The flood and road overlap

We computed two more things for the lien parcels specifically.

Flood. 4,088 lien parcels, 37 percent, intersect a FEMA Special Flood Hazard Area, against 28 percent of vacant land overall. 3,931 have more than half their area in one. Most of that is Zone A sheet-flow mapping across the Sulphur Springs Valley floor and the Willcox playa; 96 percent of all vacant parcels inside Willcox are in an SFHA, and Willcox is the single largest city on the lien list. A floodplain use permit is required to grade or fill in an SFHA, and insurance on anything you build there is priced accordingly. How to check a specific APN takes ten minutes.

Road. 828 lien parcels, 7.5 percent, are within 15 metres of an active county-maintained road, against 12.9 percent of vacant land overall. The median lien parcel is 672 metres from the nearest maintained road, and where there is one, it is native dirt for 7,372 of them, chip seal for 3,273, asphalt for 55. 56 percent are within 15 metres of some mapped centerline, which in these plats usually means a platted right-of-way that may or may not exist on the ground. Paper roads are the whole story here.

Water: 7,451 lien parcels are in the Willcox AMA and 3,124 in the Douglas AMA; only 400 are outside either. A new well in the Willcox AMA means the 2024 rules.

How to use the list without getting burned

1. Decide which business you are in. Collecting 16 percent on liens that redeem, or acquiring land through foreclosure. They want opposite parcels: the first wants lots someone will pay off, the second wants lots nobody will, and then has to want the lot itself.
2. Price the whole path. A $697 lien plus three years of subsequent taxes plus a foreclosure action is several thousand dollars for a lot the Assessor values at $1,000. If the lien already exceeds the full cash value, you are underwater before you start.
3. Run the APN through zoning, flood and road first. SR districts exclude manufactured homes. The flood flag and the maintained-road distance tell you whether anyone will ever want to build there.
4. Check title before foreclosing. The action requires notice to the owner and parties of record, and an unknown-address owner makes that step slower and costlier, not cheaper.
5. Do not expect the county to have done any of this. The list is a list of unpaid bills. It carries no judgement about whether the parcel is reachable, dry or buildable.
6. Pay the Treasurer directly. Liens cannot be bought online; funds go to the Treasurer's office in Bisbee (520-432-8400). Anyone selling Cochise County liens through a third-party site is not the Treasurer.

What we could not confirm

• The exact meaning of the layer's purchasetotal and foreclosureyear fields. Neither is documented on the open-data hub; both are inferred.
• Whether every parcel on the GIS layer is still available. The Treasurer's list updates nightly; the GIS is a weekly snapshot and liens are redeemed daily.
• Current fees and procedures for over-the-counter assignment. Call before you mail anything.

The short version

• 10,975 vacant parcels on the over-the-counter list; median lien $697 on a parcel valued at $1,000; 23 percent of liens exceed the land's assessed value.
• Nearly all are 1960s–70s subdivision lots under an acre in SR-22, SR-43, SR-8, SR-12, R-36 and Willcox; RU-4 barely appears.
• 37 percent are in a FEMA flood zone; 7.5 percent touch a county-maintained road; the median is 672 metres from one.
• 16 percent interest, redeemable any time, foreclosable three years after the sale under § 42-18201, and 81 percent of the list is already past that point.
• The list sorts itself: what is good gets redeemed, what is left is what nobody wants. Check the APN before you want it either.