Seasonal Roads: The County Stops Plowing Your Street in November

That gravel two-track leading back to the cabin looks charming in the July listing photos. Then you close in August, and the first hard snow arrives, and you learn the plow truck is never coming. Not late. Not ever, until spring.

Michigan county road commissions can put a road on their “seasonal” list under Act 51, the same 1951 law that funnels gas-tax money to the counties. Once they do, that road isn’t open to public travel for a stretch of the year — in practice, November through April. No plowing, no salt, no winter grading. It gets a pass or two with the grader in the warm months and otherwise fends for itself. The whole point was to save the winter budget for roads where people live year-round. Up-north counties like Charlevoix and Lapeer run big seasonal lists, and a summer place is exactly the parcel that lands on one.

The part that catches buyers is the timing. A road can only be made seasonal after a public hearing and a formal resolution, and the law protects a sitting year-round resident — if a road is your principal home’s only way out and you object at that hearing, the commission can’t strand you without giving you another route. But that protection is a snapshot in time. If a road went seasonal in 1994 and you buy the place in 2026, the hearing is long over. You inherit the designation with the deed, and nobody has to ask you.

So a cabin the sellers only ever used from May to October can be perfectly legal and perfectly unplowed. Emergency vehicles, the mail carrier, and the school bus all treat a closed seasonal road the way you’d expect: they don’t come down it. You either plow the thing yourself or you don’t drive it in January.

There is a release valve. If the road is part of the county system, an owner can pay to bring it up to plow grade — the usual split is a third from you, a third from the county, a third from the state — and then it gets plowed like any other road. Worth pricing early.

Every road commission keeps a map of its seasonal roads posted in the office, and there should be signs on the roads, though signs vanish. A five-minute call with a parcel number tells you exactly what you’re buying. None of this is legal advice — a Michigan real estate attorney can read your specific situation — but the map is free, and the plow truck’s absence is not something you want to discover in a whiteout.