Squatters and vacant property in Indiana: what the law says

1 · IC 32-31-12-4(b) — the agency dispatches officers; SEA 157 (2025)

Read what the chapter assigns, and to whom. Every act of removal in it is an officer's act. Section 3 gives the owner one thing to do — execute an affidavit — and section 3(b) requires that the affidavit "state that a person who makes a false statement on the affidavit is subject to the penalties of perjury."

2 · IC 32-31-5-6(c) — landlord prohibited from interfering with a tenant's access or possession · secondhand source

SECONDARY: the Indiana Code browser at iga.in.gov is a JavaScript application that returns no statutory text to automated retrieval, so this section was read in Justia's year-pinned 2025 Indiana Code and must be confirmed against the official code. (The General Assembly's enrolled-act PDFs ARE fetchable — that is how the squatter chapter and the trespass section on this page are quoted as primary — so the next pass should run the enrolled act back to this section.) And note the scope, and note what we did NOT find: this section speaks of a LANDLORD and a TENANT, and IC 32-31-12-2 says a squatter is a person who never had a rental agreement at all. We looked for an Indiana appellate decision resolving whether § 32-31-5-6 reaches a person who was never a tenant and did not find one we could fetch. UNTESTED IS NOT THE SAME AS PERMITTED, and the person who finds out which it is will be the defendant. DeedProof does not advise on this and never will.

1 · IC 35-43-2-2(b)(2) — criminal trespass; Senate Enrolled Act 219 (2025), amending the section eff. 2025-07-01

Quoted from the enrolled act that amended this section, fetched from the General Assembly's own server and read in full. SEA 219 made one change to this subdivision — it added the law enforcement officer as a third person who may ask you to leave, and struck the "or" that used to sit before "that person's agent"; we quote the amended text, not the struck word. Note the opening words — "not having a contractual interest in the property" — which is the element a forged lease is built to attack.

2 · IC 35-43-2-2(b)(7) — criminal trespass on vacant real property or a vacant structure; Senate Enrolled Act 219 (2025)

Quoted from the enrolled act, read in full. READ WHO HAS TO DO THE ASKING: under this subdivision the person must have been asked to leave BY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER — not by you. Two things sit on top of it in the same section. Subsection (e): "A law enforcement officer may not deny entry to property or ask a person to leave a property under subsection (b)(7) unless there is reasonable suspicion that criminal activity has occurred or is occurring." And subsection (f) carves out anyone holding written permission from the owner, the owner's agent, an enforcement authority or a court to come onto the property for maintenance, repair or demolition.

3 · IC 35-43-2-2(b) — the grading sentence; Senate Enrolled Act 219 (2025)

Quoted from the enrolled act, read in full. THE ELLIPSIS IS OURS: the grading passage continues with two more sentences, and both are about subdivisions (8) and (9) — the agricultural-operation and scientific-research-facility offenses — raising the grade where the property damage exceeds $750 or $50,000. Neither reaches an ordinary trespass in a vacant house. THIS IS THE LINK THAT KILLED THE PREVIOUS MARKET SOMEWHERE ELSE — an offense graded low enough that the arrest statute may not reach it. Read it against the next links and decide for yourself.

4 · IC 35-43-2-1.5 — residential entry · secondhand source

SECONDARY: read in Justia's year-pinned 2025 Indiana Code, because the Indiana Code browser at iga.in.gov returns no statutory text to automated retrieval; confirm against the official code. The grade turns on the word "dwelling", and whether an empty house under renovation is a dwelling is a question of Indiana law that we are not going to answer for you. It is also the difference between the two arrest routes in the next link.

5 · IC 35-33-1-1(a) — arrest by a law enforcement officer · secondhand source

SECONDARY: read in Justia's year-pinned 2025 Indiana Code, because the Indiana Code browser at iga.in.gov returns no statutory text to automated retrieval; confirm against the official code. THE ELLIPSIS IS OURS, AND HERE IS WHAT IT HIDES: subsection (a) runs on to clause (14). We quote (1)–(4) because those are the two routes that matter to an owner with a stranger in a vacant house. The remaining clauses authorise a probable-cause arrest for SPECIFIC NAMED OFFENSES — battery, invasion of privacy, handgun offenses, interference with the reporting of a crime, theft under IC 35-43-4-2, and immigration detainers — and several of those named offenses are misdemeanors. So the rule is not "felonies only": it is that Indiana gives NO GENERAL probable-cause arrest power for a misdemeanor, and trespass is not on the list of misdemeanors it names. Read (2) against (4), read the clauses we elided, and decide. Whether a person found living in a vacant building is "committing a misdemeanor in the officer's presence" is the question the whole encounter turns on, and it is not ours to answer.

6 · IC 32-31-12-5(c) — arrest in addition to removal; SEA 157 (2025)

These are the provisions, in order. We have drawn no conclusion from them — that is not ours to draw. Note that this sentence is permissive ("may arrest"), that it sits in a property statute rather than the criminal code, and that the arrest powers in IC 35-33-1-1 are where an officer will actually look. Read them together and decide.

1 · IC 32-31-12-5(a)–(b) — credible evidence that an individual is not a squatter; SEA 157 (2025)

A forged lease is "credible evidence" until somebody establishes that it is not — and the chapter names no one whose job that is, and gives the officer nothing to test it against. The statute does not define "credible evidence".

2 · IC 32-31-12-3 — the owner's affidavit; SEA 157 (2025)

A CLAIM ABOUT OUR OWN SEARCH, NOT ABOUT THE LAW: on 2026-07-14 we read Senate Enrolled Act 157 (2025) in full — the whole of IC 32-31-12, all eight sections — on the Indiana General Assembly's own server. We looked for any provision telling a law enforcement agency or an officer how to establish that the person who signed the affidavit actually owns the building: a deed check, a recorder's lookup, a registry, an identity document, anything. We found no such provision. The only safeguard the chapter attaches to the owner's half is the perjury warning in subsection (b) — which is a punishment after the fact, not a check before it. Confirm against the official code before relying on this.

1 · IC 32-31-12-3 — the affidavit, and the form; SEA 157 (2025)

A CLAIM ABOUT OUR OWN SEARCH, NOT ABOUT THE LAW: subsection (c) is permissive — "may create a form affidavit" — so the chapter does not oblige any agency to publish one, and it names no statewide form. On 2026-07-14 we looked for an official Indiana affidavit form under this chapter, published by a state agency or a police department, and found none we will stand behind. We do not link to one, and we will not draft one for you: ask the law enforcement agency you intend to hand it to whether it has a form. Note also what the chapter does NOT say — it does not say the affidavit must be notarized; it says it must carry the perjury warning in subsection (b).

2 · IC 32-31-12-4 — removal of a squatter by law enforcement; SEA 157 (2025)

Subsection (d) also lets the whole thing happen on the spot: nothing in the section prohibits an owner from executing the affidavit, and an officer from removing the squatter on receiving it, "at the time a law enforcement officer is responding to a complaint that a squatter is occupying the owner's property."

3 · IC 32-31-12-6 — other legal remedies; SEA 157 (2025)

Read the cross-reference with care. "This article" is IC 32-31, the landlord-tenant article, and the emergency possessory order in IC 32-31-6 is available on its face to "a landlord" against "a tenant" — which, by this chapter's own definition, a squatter is not. Where the fast route does not fit, the next link is the one an Indiana owner is actually left with.

4 · IC 32-30-2-1 — action to recover real property from a tenant in possession or other persons · secondhand source

SECONDARY: read in Justia's year-pinned 2025 Indiana Code, because iga.in.gov returns no statutory text to automated retrieval; confirm against the official code. A CLAIM ABOUT OUR OWN SEARCH: we read IC 32-30-2 looking for a statutory deadline on this action — a hearing clock, an expedited track, anything comparable to the 48 hours in IC 32-31-12-4 — and found none. That is why the slow half of the timing column is months and not weeks.

1 · IC 32-31-12-4(b)–(c) — the 48-hour duty, and its exception; SEA 157 (2025)

"For reasons of public safety" is doing real work in that sentence, and the chapter does not define it or set an outer limit — only "as soon as practicable". NO DOLLAR FIGURE APPEARS ON THIS PAGE, and that is deliberate: the fast route has no filing fee because there is no filing, and Indiana court filing and service fees for the slow route are set outside this statute. Every fee figure on this site appears verbatim in a document we fetched, or it does not appear.

2 · IC 32-31-12-5(a) — the officer removes UNLESS; SEA 157 (2025)

This is the sentence that decides whether an Indiana owner is measuring the problem in hours or in months, and the paper the intruder is holding is what decides the sentence.

3 · IC 32-31-12-8 — wrongful removal; civil cause of action; SEA 157 (2025)

A CLAIM ABOUT OUR OWN SEARCH: it is widely written, on law-firm blogs and property-management sites, that using this affidavit against a real tenant carries a MANDATORY $25,000 civil penalty. We read Senate Enrolled Act 157 in full on 2026-07-14, and the chapter it enacted has exactly eight sections. We found no dollar figure anywhere in it, and no mandatory penalty — section 8 creates a cause of action against the affiant and names no amount. We are not saying Indiana law contains no such penalty; we are saying it is not in this chapter, and we did not find the document the $25,000 comes from. Do not rely on a number nobody will show you.

1 · IC 32-31-12-4(a)–(b) — affidavit to agency, removal within 48 hours; SEA 157 (2025), P.L. 191-2025

A CLAIM ABOUT OUR OWN SEARCH: we read all eight sections of IC 32-31-12 as enacted by Senate Enrolled Act 157 (2025) on 2026-07-14. There is no petition, no filing, no judicial officer, no hearing and no counter-affidavit procedure anywhere in the chapter. Compare Georgia, where a single signed page from the occupant sends the whole thing to a magistrate; Indiana has no such valve. The occupant's only route in the statute is to persuade the officer, at the door, with "credible evidence" (section 5).

2 · IC 32-31-12-7 — law enforcement immunity; SEA 157 (2025)

The same act added this to the immunity index at IC 34-30-2.1-533.3. Read it beside section 8: the officer who removes the wrong person is immune, and the liability lands on the AFFIANT — but only where he "knowingly makes a materially false statement." The risk of being wrong is the owner's, and the burden of being right was never given to anyone.

1 · IC 34-11-2-11(a) — ten-year limitation, including actions for the recovery of the possession of real estate · secondhand source

SECONDARY: read in Justia's year-pinned 2025 Indiana Code, because iga.in.gov returns no statutory text to automated retrieval; confirm against the official code. The sentence is written as one long list and the possession clause sits inside it — which is why the ten-year rule is hard to find if you go looking in the property title for it.

2 · IC 32-21-7-1(a) — adverse possession; payment of taxes and special assessments · secondhand source

SECONDARY: read on Justia (2025 Indiana Code); confirm against the official code. A CLAIM ABOUT OUR OWN SEARCH: read the last sentence — the statute expressly does not state the elements, it presupposes them. The four Indiana lawyers recite (control, intent, notice, duration) come from a 2005 Indiana Supreme Court decision, Fraley v. Minger. We did not fetch that opinion and we do not quote it, because we do not put words in a court's mouth. Do not read the bare ten years plus tax payment as the whole rule; ask an Indiana lawyer what the elements are.