Charges over properties in the Land Registry have been declining for three years

What do these figures count?

A charge over a property gives the bank the right to satisfy itself from the sale of your property if you fail to repay the loan. It is entered in the Land Registry when the mortgage is granted, and removed by the same kind of entry once it is repaid.

The office therefore keeps two figures side by side: how many charges were added in a period and how many disappeared. The difference between the two is the only thing we calculated ourselves. Every other figure is exactly as the office published it.

The statistics track entries made by registration, that is, ones arising from a contract. They are kept for the whole country, for each region, and for individual cadastral offices.

How many were added, and how many disappeared?

The turn came in 2025, not gradually. For the first half, the difference was still 1,686 below zero. The rest of the year pulled it 6,105 above it.

Why did they decline while properties kept changing hands?

Because new entries fell far more than removals. Between 2021 and 2023, entries of charges fell by 53%, removals by only 34%.

A removal only comes once the old loan is repaid: in full, from selling the property, or when moving to another bank. There were still plenty of those cases. New entries, though, fell by half over two years.

The latest data show the opposite movement. For the first half of 2026, entries of charges were 49% higher than in the same period of 2024, that is, 84,502 against 56,528. Entries of ownership rights, meanwhile, were 1% lower.

So roughly the same number of properties are changing hands as back then, only with far more charges now registered on them.

Can I tell from this how many people buy with a mortgage?

Refinancing inflates both sides. At the new bank a new charge is registered; at the original one the old one is removed. One mortgage that simply changed bank therefore shows up twice in the figures, once on each side. We cover what else happens during refinancing separately.

Ownership rights aren't only purchases. The column also includes gifts, exchanges and the settlement of co-ownership, that is, transfers with no loan behind them at all. The denominator is therefore wider than the market for buying a home on credit.

A charge doesn't only secure a home mortgage. A property can also secure a building-savings loan, an American mortgage, or a business loan. More than one charge can sit on the same property at once.

Read the ratio as a direction, not to the decimal point. It shows how often a property changing hands is also being pledged at the same time. How many mortgages banks actually provided belongs in Czech National Bank statistics, not in the Land Registry.

Was it the same across the whole country?

It was. In 2023, all 94 cadastral offices ended in the negative. By 2024, the nationwide figures were already climbing again. Even so, 82 offices out of 94 remained below zero, and only one region ended in positive territory: Prague.

Ranking regions by how many charges disappeared would only be a ranking by the region's size. We therefore recalculated the decline per hundred ownership-right entries in the same region and the same years. The steepest decline is in the Karlovy Vary Region: for every hundred ownership-right entries there, charges fell by 8.7. At the other end is Prague with 0.9.

Unlike the decline, the recovery is uneven. For the first half of 2026, only 2 regions out of 14 were still below zero, the South Bohemian Region and the Zlín Region, along with 27 offices out of 93.

The ratio itself differs sharply between regions. The highest is 59 charges registered per hundred ownership-right entries (Prague), the lowest 32 (the Vysočina Region). The same caveat applies to it as to the nationwide figure: it is a direction, not a share of mortgages.

What should I take from this if I'm dealing with a mortgage?

The nationwide figure says nothing about your own repayment. Three things do follow directly from these tables, though, and they come up in practice.

A removal does not happen on its own. Once you repay in full, the bank issues a confirmation that the debt has ended. With it, you file an application for removal. Until someone files it, the charge stays registered in the Land Registry even though you owe nothing. This is covered under the entry Charge over a property.

Refinancing means two visits to the Land Registry. Once to register the new bank's charge, a second time to remove the original one. Both steps carry their own administrative fee, so they belong in the cost of switching.

A charge doesn't block a sale, it only sets the order of the steps. A property with an unpaid mortgage can still be sold. We cover how that works in practice on our selling a property with a mortgage page.

Where the numbers come from, and what we did not use

From the statistics on entries made by registration, kept by the Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping and Cadastre. One file per period, cumulative from January. A script in our repository downloads and recalculates them, most recently on 21. 9. 2026. It checks the columns against the header row, so if the office rearranges the table, it fails rather than record something wrong.

We deliberately did not use three things: a ranking of districts by the absolute number of charges, because that would just be a ranking by their size; the number of proceedings as a denominator, because one proceeding can carry more than one right at a time; and comparing a partial year against full years, so a shorter period is only compared with the same period in earlier years.

Open the ČÚZK statistics ↗ You can run the calculation yourself.

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