Guide · Value
What is my Bakken mineral royalty worth?
Nobody can answer that from an acreage number alone. The value comes from a handful of facts about your interest, the wells under it and your lease, and most of them are public or already on your royalty statement. Here's how to find each one.
Last reviewed:
Why there's no single number
The North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources says plainly that its Oil and Gas Division doesn't calculate mineral values or review private lease information or contracts.[1] There's no official figure to look up. What you can do is work out what you own, which wells it's attached to, and what those wells have actually paid.
We don't print per-acre prices on this page, on purpose. Two tracts in the same township can sit under very different wells and carry different lease terms, so an average would mislead more often than it would help.
Piece one: your decimal
Your decimal interest is the share of a well's sales that belongs to you. The state's royalty statement rules require the operator or payor, within 120 days after the month of first sale from a well, or after a change in the spacing unit or in your decimal, to send an ownership interest statement. It has to show the spacing unit, the net mineral acres you own, the gross mineral acres in the spacing unit, and the decimal being applied.[2] The arithmetic behind a decimal is usually your net acres divided by the unit's gross acres, times the royalty fraction in your lease.
If you've never seen that statement for a well, ask the payor for it. If the acres or the decimal on it don't match your records, that's worth sorting out before anything else, because every other number gets multiplied by it. Our guides on whether you own minerals and the division order cover where the figures come from.
Piece two: the wells
A mineral interest is worth what the wells in its spacing unit produce, so the next step is to find them. The Department of Mineral Resources lets you search wells by section, township and range in its Find My Well tool, and its GIS map server has a “Find Section” tab where you enter your legal description and see the layers around it.[3], [4], [1] Our guide to spacing units and pooling explains how a section ends up in a unit.
Two things the department's page says are worth knowing. An operator can ask for confidential status on a new well, and for up to six months the department can release only a short list of items, such as the operator, well name, location and spud date, along with any production runs.[1] And a first royalty check normally takes one to two months from the time the oil and gas is marketed. Before then, ownership has to be determined, a title opinion may be needed, and if the leases don't all have voluntary pooling language there may have to be a pooling hearing and order.[1]
Our daily summaries of Industrial Commission activity are a handy way to watch for permits, completions and hearings near your land.
Piece three: what the check shows
If you already receive royalties, your statements are the best evidence of what an interest has paid. North Dakota's rule on royalty statements lists what has to be on them: the month and year of the sales, the volume of oil and gas sold, the weighted average price, the total state severance and other production taxes, each owner deduction and what it was for, your decimal, your share of the sales value before taxes, and your share after taxes and deductions.[2]
Read together, those lines show how a check is built. Volume times price gives the sales value. Your decimal gives your share of it. Taxes and deductions come out of that. When any of those changes from one month to the next, the check changes with it. Our guides on royalty check deductions and oil and gas taxes for royalty owners cover the last two lines, and the royalty estimator will run the same steps from your own decimal and assumptions so you can see each one.
Piece four: your lease
The royalty fraction and the deduction language in your lease have a lot to say about how much of the sales value reaches you. Both the Montana State and the NDSU extension guides explain that a lessee may deduct some costs of getting the product to market, and that the lease wording on which costs can come out, and on what price the royalty is based, is something owners and companies negotiate.[5], [6] Our guide to lease bonus and royalty walks through those clauses.
If someone offers to buy
A buyer's offer should rest on the same pieces: your decimal and acres, the wells and what they've produced, your lease terms, and whether title and the division order are in order. When we look at an interest, those are the things we ask about first. Ask for any offer in writing, ask what it assumes about the wells, and feel free to compare it with others.
A sale has tax consequences, and so does the royalty you'd be giving up. A CPA who works with mineral income can walk through your case. For the paperwork of a sale, a North Dakota or Montana attorney is the right person. If the interest came to you through an estate, our guide on inherited minerals covers getting it into your name first.
You don't need to sell, and many owners never do. If you'd just like to know what we'd offer for your interest, our offer page is the way to ask, and the FAQ covers common questions.
A note on our interest
Fort Union buys minerals and royalty interests, so we have a commercial interest in this subject. Nothing in this guide depends on selling to us, and each statement comes from a public source listed below. Our editorial standards explain how we source and review our pages. If you ever want to know what we'd pay for your interest, the offer page is the way to reach us.
Sources
These are the sources behind this guide, in the order we first cite them. We read the parts of each one that this guide relies on, on October 25, 2026.
- Mineral Owner information and frequently asked questions — North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources, Oil and Gas Division, viewed October 25, 2026.
- N.D.A.C. chapter 43-02-06, Royalty Statements — North Dakota Legislative Branch (Administrative Code), read October 25, 2026.
- Find My Well — North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources, Oil and Gas Division, viewed October 25, 2026.
- Oil and Gas GIS map viewer — North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources, viewed October 25, 2026.
- Oil and Gas Leasing, MontGuide MT201209AG (reviewed January 2017) — Montana State University Extension, read October 25, 2026.
- North Dakota Oil and Gas Leasing Considerations, Extension Bulletin 29 (revised October 2006) — North Dakota State University Extension, hosted by the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources, read October 25, 2026.
This guide is general information from public sources. It isn't legal or tax advice. For your own lease, title or check, talk to a North Dakota attorney.