Is That Mortgage Actually Open? Satisfactions, Assignments and CEMAs
A recorded mortgage never leaves the record. Only a satisfaction closes it — an assignment does not, and a CEMA hides old mortgages inside a new one.
Quick answer
A mortgage stays in the public record forever; only a satisfaction, discharge or release closes it. An assignment transfers the loan to a new lender and closes nothing. A CEMA folds old mortgages into one new lien, so the originals look open when they are not. Match every mortgage to its discharge by document reference, not by date.
What does it mean for a mortgage to be open?
Recording systems are append-only. A mortgage recorded in Brooklyn in 2008 is still in ACRIS today, will still be there in 2050, and looks exactly the same in the index whether it was paid off in 2009 or is in foreclosure right now. Nothing is ever deleted. The presence of a mortgage document proves that a lien was once created, and proves nothing at all about whether it is live.
New York puts the duty to close the record on the lender. RPAPL 1921(1) requires that after payment of authorized principal, interest and other amounts due, a mortgagee "must execute and acknowledge before a proper officer, in like manner as to entitle a conveyance to be recorded, a satisfaction of mortgage, and thereupon within thirty days arrange to have the satisfaction of mortgage" presented for recording or delivered to the mortgagor. The statute escalates: $500 if the certificate of discharge is not presented for recording within thirty days, $1,000 within sixty, $1,500 within ninety. Those penalties do not apply to mortgagees making fewer than five mortgage loans a year.
A duty backed by a $500 penalty is not the same as a guarantee. Satisfactions get recorded late, get recorded against the wrong lot, get indexed under a misspelled name, or get lost when a servicer is acquired mid-payoff. So the operational question is never "is there a satisfaction?" It is "which recorded instrument, if any, actually discharged this specific mortgage, and can I point at the reference that proves it?"
Definition
Open mortgage — An open mortgage is a recorded mortgage that has not been discharged of record. The mortgage instrument itself is never removed from the index; it is closed only when a satisfaction, discharge or release referencing it is recorded, or when it is superseded by a consolidation instrument that absorbs the debt it secured.
Which document types close a mortgage and which do not?
The NYC Office of the City Register publishes 126 document control codes, of which 23 sit in the Mortgages & Instruments class. Most of those 23 modify a lien. Exactly one of them closes a lien in full. Reading the class name instead of the code is how phantom payoffs get created.
| ACRIS code | Official description | What it does to the lien | Closes it? |
|---|---|---|---|
| MTGE | MORTGAGE | Creates the lien. 4,220,709 recorded across the four ACRIS boroughs. | No — it opens it |
| ASST | ASSIGNMENT, MORTGAGE | Transfers the mortgage from one lender to another. Party 1 is the assignor / old lender, Party 2 the assignee / new lender. 2,210,200 recorded. | No — the debt survives, only the holder changed |
| M&CON | MORTGAGE AND CONSOLIDATION | One instrument that advances new money and consolidates it with prior mortgages. 73,215 recorded. | No — it supersedes, and the prior mortgages usually stay unsatisfied |
| AGMT | AGREEMENT | Catch-all class holding most residential CEMAs alongside every other recorded agreement. 922,096 recorded. | No — you have to read the instrument |
| ASPM | ASSUMPTION OF MORTGAGE | A new borrower takes over the existing debt. 4,183 recorded. | No — same lien, different obligor |
| SPRD | MORTGAGE SPREADER AGREEMENT | Extends an existing mortgage lien onto additional property. 2,977 recorded. | No — it widens the lien |
| SUBM | SUBORDINATION OF MORTGAGE | Changes lien priority relative to another encumbrance. 59,942 recorded. | No — it reorders, it does not remove |
| SAT | SATISFACTION OF MORTGAGE | Discharges the referenced mortgage in full. 2,630,338 recorded. | Yes — this is the one |
| PSAT | PARTIAL SATISFACTION | Discharges part of the secured obligation. Only 4,458 recorded. | No — the lien continues for the balance |
| PREL | PARTIAL RELEASE OF MORTGAGE | Releases specific collateral from the mortgage while the mortgage survives. 119,398 recorded. | No — for the released parcel only |
Why is an assignment mistaken for a payoff?
An assignment is the second most common mortgage-family instrument in ACRIS. There are 2,210,200 of them against 2,630,338 satisfactions — roughly five assignments recorded for every six satisfactions. Any heuristic that treats "a later document referencing this mortgage" as evidence of discharge will be wrong about half the time it fires.
The confusion is structural, not careless. An assignment usually carries a document amount of $0, because no new money moves. It names two institutions rather than a borrower and a lender. It arrives years after the mortgage, often in a batch with other assignments, and it frequently reads as administrative housekeeping. All of that pattern-matches to a closing event. None of it is one.
Assignments are also chained. A loan originated with MERS as nominee, sold to a servicer, then transferred again on a portfolio sale produces two or three ASST documents against a single mortgage, each naming a different pair of institutions. Reported as separate findings, one loan becomes three entries. Reported as satisfactions, one live lien disappears.
The correct reading is narrow and boring: the note changed hands, the lien did not change, and the payoff must now be requested from the last assignee in date order rather than from the originating lender.
What is a CEMA and why does it make old mortgages look open?
Tax Law § 255 is the whole reason CEMAs exist in volume. It provides that a supplemental instrument "shall not be subject to taxation under this article… unless it creates or secures a new or further indebtedness or obligation other than the principal indebtedness or obligation secured by or which under any contingency may be secured by the recorded primary mortgage." Refinance a balance with a fresh mortgage and the borrower pays New York State and New York City mortgage recording tax on the whole amount. Do it as a CEMA and the tax falls only on new money. Rates vary by jurisdiction and are published by the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, but on a New York City refinance the saving is large enough that CEMAs are routine here and effectively unknown in most other states.
The title consequence is direct. In a clean payoff refinance, the old mortgage is satisfied and a SAT appears. In a CEMA, the old mortgage is not paid off — it is assigned to the new lender and folded into the consolidated lien. There is nothing to satisfy, so no satisfaction is ever recorded. The original mortgage sits in the index, unsatisfied, forever, with its full original face amount.
Worse, ACRIS has no CEMA document type. Consolidations arrive as M&CON, which at least says "consolidation" in its description, or as a plain AGMT, one of 922,096 documents in a class that also holds unrelated agreements. The instrument that reorganizes a borrower's entire mortgage debt has no distinguishing code. One usable tell: a consolidated principal is an unpaid balance, so it tends to carry cents. 58.7% of M&CON documents have a non-integer amount versus 15.3% of MTGE documents. That is a signal worth ranking on, not a rule to decide on.
Definition
CEMA (Consolidation, Extension and Modification Agreement) — A CEMA is a New York instrument that consolidates one or more existing mortgages with a new advance into a single lien on stated terms. Because the existing debt is carried forward rather than newly created, only the new money is subject to mortgage recording tax under Tax Law § 255.
A worked example: five instruments, zero satisfactions, one lien
The following chain is a condominium unit lot on tax block 1124 in Brooklyn, reconstructed on 18 August 2026 from three NYC Open Data feeds: the ACRIS Real Property Master for document types and amounts, Legals for the lot indexing, and References for the document-to-document links. The "references" column is not inferred — every link is a published cross-reference row.
| Recorded | Type | Amount | References | Net effect on the lien |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2008-04-14 | MTGE | $612,000 | — | First mortgage created |
| 2008-04-14 | MTGE | $114,750 | — | Second mortgage created |
| 2013-06-07 | ASST | $0 | the $612,000 mortgage | Holder changes from the MERS nominee to a servicer. Nothing closed |
| 2016-11-29 | M&CON | $652,884.93 | the $612,000 mortgage | New money plus the unpaid first, consolidated into a single lien |
| 2017-01-03 | SAT | $0 | the $114,750 mortgage | Second mortgage discharged — but indexed on only one of the owner’s two lots, under a surname missing a letter |
| 2022-05-25 | ASST ×2 | $0 | the 2008 first and the 2016 consolidation | Both instruments move to a new bank ahead of the refinance |
| 2022-05-25 | MTGE | $270,230.78 | — | New money advanced |
| 2022-05-25 | AGMT | $900,000.00 | the 2008 first, the 2016 consolidation and the 2022 new money | CEMA. One consolidated lien of $900,000 |
What an automated tool reports on that chain
Count the mortgage-family instruments indexed on that unit lot and you get five carrying a dollar figure: $612,000, $114,750, $652,884.93, $270,230.78 and $900,000. That is $2,549,865.71 of apparent debt on one Brooklyn apartment. Zero satisfactions appear on the lot, because the only satisfaction in the chain was indexed on the owner’s other lot.
The true answer is one lien of $900,000. The arithmetic proves it: $900,000 minus the $270,230.78 of 2022 new money leaves $629,769.22, the amortised balance of the 2016 consolidation carried forward. Every earlier instrument was absorbed, not abandoned.
This is not an exotic property — one owner, two purchase mortgages, two refinances over fourteen years. The failure modes simply stack: a consolidation read as a new loan, assignments read as separate debts, and a satisfaction lost to a one-letter indexing error on a sibling lot.
How do I verify whether a mortgage was actually paid off?
Work the chain forward from each mortgage, one mortgage at a time. Do not work backward from the newest document, and do not reason from dates alone — instruments recorded on the same day routinely have a deliberate internal order, as the four documents recorded on 2022-05-25 above demonstrate.
List every mortgage instrument on the parcel and give each one an identity
In New York City that identity is the CRFN, the City Register File Number, or for older records the reel and page. Amount and date alone are not an identity: two mortgages of the same amount on the same day is a common purchase structure, and the example above has exactly that pattern in reverse.
Pull the cross-references, not just the documents
ACRIS publishes a References dataset containing 8,699,896 reference rows across 4,736,297 documents. Each row links a later instrument to the CRFN or document ID of the earlier one it acts on. This is the single highest-value dataset in an ACRIS mortgage search and most scrapers never touch it, because it is a separate file from the master document index.
Classify every referencing document before you count anything
SAT closes the referenced mortgage. PSAT and PREL do not — a partial satisfaction leaves the lien alive for the balance, and a partial release frees specific collateral while the mortgage survives on the rest. ASST, ASPM, SPRD and SUBM close nothing at all. M&CON and AGMT require the instrument itself to be read.
Walk assignments in date order and identify the current holder
Chain the ASST documents by matching each assignee to the next assignor. The last assignee holds the note and is the party who can issue a payoff letter or a satisfaction. A break in that chain — an assignor who never appears as a prior assignee — means either a missing recording or a name-matching failure, and both need resolving before the lien is called open.
Test every unsatisfied mortgage against later consolidations
If a CEMA references the mortgage, the mortgage is absorbed and will never receive a satisfaction. Where the reference row is absent, check the arithmetic: a consolidated amount that equals a plausible amortised balance of the earlier mortgages plus a round new advance is strong evidence of consolidation even without an explicit link.
Search the owner’s other lots and name variants before declaring a gap
A satisfaction indexed against one lot of a two-lot ownership, or filed under a misspelled party name, is invisible to a single-lot exact-match query. Run the parcel index and the party index, and treat any residual gap as an item requiring a payoff letter from the current holder, not as a confirmed open lien.
What breaks a mortgage chain in practice?
These are the recurring causes of a phantom open mortgage, in rough order of how often they appear in New York City records.
- The CEMA with no satisfaction. The most common single cause in New York, because the tax saving under Tax Law § 255 makes consolidation the default refinance structure here. The old mortgage is assigned and absorbed; no satisfaction is ever due, so waiting for one is waiting forever.
- Assignment chains read as discharges. With 2,210,200 assignments in ACRIS against 2,630,338 satisfactions, this error is common enough to invert a report’s conclusion in both directions — a live lien reported closed, and one loan reported as three.
- Partial instruments treated as full. PSAT and PREL are different documents from SAT with different legal effect. A partial release on a subdivided or condominium parcel frees that parcel; on a blanket mortgage over several lots it says nothing about the others.
- Indexing misses. A satisfaction recorded against one lot of a multi-lot ownership, or under a party name that differs by one character from every other document in the chain, will not be retrieved by an exact-match query keyed to a single BBL. Both occur in the worked example above, in the same document.
- The recording lag at the front of the file. RPAPL 1921(1) gives the mortgagee thirty days to present the satisfaction for recording after payment, and the penalties for missing that window top out at $1,500 and exclude lenders making fewer than five loans a year. A mortgage paid off six weeks ago can legitimately show as open, which is why a currency date on the report matters as much as the findings.
- Ancient mortgages that never expire on their own. New York has no statute that self-executes to clear a stale mortgage from the index; RPAPL 1501(4) instead lets an owner bring an action to "secure the cancellation and discharge of record of such encumbrance" once the limitations period to foreclose has run. Other states differ sharply. Florida Statutes 95.281 terminates a mortgage lien five years after an ascertainable maturity date, or twenty years from the date of the mortgage where no maturity date appears in the record. Do not carry a New York assumption into a Florida or Texas file, or the reverse.
Key takeaways
Key takeaways
- Recording indexes are append-only. A mortgage document is permanent evidence that a lien was created and no evidence at all that it is still open.
- Only a satisfaction, discharge or release closes a mortgage in full. ASST, ASPM, SPRD, SUBM, PSAT and PREL all leave the lien alive.
- An assignment means the note changed hands. ACRIS holds 2,210,200 assignments against 2,630,338 satisfactions, so treating any later mortgage-family document as a payoff is wrong roughly half the time.
- A CEMA absorbs prior mortgages rather than paying them off, so those mortgages never receive a satisfaction. Tax Law § 255 is why the structure is standard in New York and rare elsewhere.
- ACRIS has no CEMA document code. Consolidations record as M&CON or as an ordinary AGMT, which is why they are missed.
- The ACRIS References dataset links each satisfaction, assignment and consolidation to the mortgage it acts on. Chaining by reference rather than by date and amount is what separates a usable mortgage schedule from a document list.
- Before reporting a mortgage as open, resolve it to discharged, absorbed, or genuinely unresolved — and where it is unresolved, say so and get a payoff letter from the current holder.
Frequently asked questions
- Does an assignment of mortgage mean the loan was paid off?
- No. An assignment transfers the mortgage from one lender to another and leaves the lien exactly where it was. It usually carries a document amount of $0 and names two institutions rather than a borrower and a lender, which is why it is mistaken for a closing event. The debt survives; only the holder changed.
- Why is my old mortgage still showing on the title report after I refinanced?
- If the refinance was done as a CEMA, the old mortgage was assigned to the new lender and consolidated into the new lien rather than paid off. No satisfaction was ever due, so none was recorded, and the original mortgage stays in the index at its full original amount permanently.
- What is the difference between a satisfaction and a partial satisfaction?
- A satisfaction (ACRIS code SAT) discharges the referenced mortgage in full. A partial satisfaction (PSAT) discharges part of the secured obligation and leaves the lien alive for the balance. A partial release (PREL) is different again: it frees specific collateral while the mortgage survives on whatever remains.
- How long does a lender have to record a satisfaction in New York?
- RPAPL 1921(1) requires the mortgagee to execute a satisfaction after payment and within thirty days arrange to have it presented for recording or delivered to the mortgagor. Liability runs $500 at thirty days, $1,000 at sixty and $1,500 at ninety, and does not apply to mortgagees making fewer than five mortgage loans a year.
- Why does a title search show more mortgages than the owner ever took out?
- Because every mortgage-family instrument is being counted as a separate debt. Assignments, consolidations, spreaders and the original mortgages all appear in the index. On the Brooklyn chain in this article, five instruments totalling $2,549,865.71 resolve to a single $900,000 lien.
- Does an unsatisfied mortgage ever expire by itself?
- Not in New York. RPAPL 1501(4) lets an owner sue to cancel and discharge the encumbrance of record once the limitations period to foreclose has expired, but nothing happens automatically. Florida Statutes 95.281 does terminate mortgage liens by operation of statute. Texas sets a four-year limitations period for real property liens; check the current text of Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.035 on the Texas Legislature statutes site before relying on it.
- Can a title search tell me the exact payoff amount?
- No. A search shows the recorded face amount, which is the original principal, not the current balance. Only a payoff letter from the current holder gives a figure good to a date. Identifying that holder means walking the assignment chain to the last assignee.
- Does resolving the mortgage chain correctly replace title insurance?
- No. HeritageDeed sells title searches at $49, $79 and $129 and does not sell or underwrite title insurance. A financed buyer cannot close on a search alone, because the lender requires a policy from a licensed insurer. Use a search to decide whether to pursue a property, and a policy to close on it.
Sources
Primary records and official documentation cited in this article.
- 1ACRIS Document Control Codes — NYC Open Data (the 126 codes, 23 in Mortgages & Instruments)
- 2ACRIS Real Property Master — NYC Open Data (dataset behind every document count above)
- 3ACRIS Real Property References — NYC Open Data (the document-to-document links used to chain the example)
- 4NY Tax Law § 255 — Supplemental instruments; when no additional mortgage recording tax is due
- 5NY RPAPL § 1921 — Discharge of mortgage; thirty-day duty and penalties
- 6Florida Statutes 95.281 — Limitations; instruments encumbering real property
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