Property law in Ghana is the area of formal and informal law that governs how citizens can acquire, register, and maintain property. Property in this instance pertains to physical land and its resources. Property can be bought and acquired following statutory or customary laws. Eighty percent of land in Ghana is owned through customary law and the remaining twenty percent is bought and sold through a formal statutory measures.

Property rights in Ghana have evolved from its pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial forms to encompass a blend between customary and statutory property laws. Ghana's current property rights system is governed by the Land Bill of 2016 and several regional customary policies.

During the colonial era, the British ruled the Gold Coast (which is now considered modern day Ghana) through indirect rule. Under such a system, the chiefs upheld customary law, but did not have resources or power to uphold decisions if they faced opposition from their people, which made chiefs reliant on the British to help enforce their rulings. The chiefs also served as political advisors to the British for policy making in the region, but had no concrete power in the policy production process. This aspect of indirect rule led many chiefs to feed the British false or unfounded information in attempts to sway policy in their favor.

The discovery of gold and minerals in the Gold Coast made the region a hub for investors looking to purchase land. Land quickly became commercialized, driving land prices up in the mid-1800s. Chiefs sold land without regard to legal property laws, often selling the same piece of land to multiple buyers. To combat such behavior, the British proposed the 1897 Land Bill which identified ‘waste lands, forest lands, and mineral lands in the Queen’ which would prevent Africans from claiming ownership of land unless they could provide concrete proof of ownership. Indigenous elites and traditional rulers argued against this bill arguing that the Land Bill could not be legitimate due to the fact there were no 'waste lands' in the Gold Coast because all land was accounted for through customary law. The British responded to this pushback by withdrawing the Lands Bill.

After the withdrawal of the 1897 Lands Bill, chiefs were able to handle private property matters however they wanted, often granting land ownership without uniformity and making the process malleable by “reinventing” the traditional state. Such a reinvention utilized indirect rule, which gave chiefs the right to define and apply property rights. Rulers changed what was understood as traditional institutions of their state by manipulating the functions and capabilities of the state council, rulers, and laws of inheritance. They did this for each property litigation in order to financially gain from each land transaction.

With independence, Kwame Nkrumah completely changed private land ownership by combining the state's power over property rights and assuming all powers of local institutions. His government rejected traditional rulers influence over the administration of local affairs. The Local Court Act of 1959 outlawed native powers and appointed government magistrates as responsible for settling issues concerning customary law.

Ghana's current property statutory law system is an amalgamation of departments and policies aimed at identifying procedures associated with the acquisition, registration, and ownership of land. Ghana codified laws about land ownership in the constitution of Ghana ratified in 1992.

The constitution identified public land and minerals as "vested in the president on behalf of, and in trust for, the people of Ghana." Public lands are considered any land the government compulsively attained after the ratification of the 1992 Constitution. The practice of compulsively acquiring land was codified first in the State Lands Act of 1962, which allowed the government to acquire land for the purposes of "national interest or other purposes connected." The government's only way to gain land is through compulsory acquisition, so a lot of land is taken from private land owners, causing many issues between the federal government and the private landowners, some of them being insufficient or untimely payments to landowners from the government and minimal communication of the transaction throughout all parties. In addition, Ghana's compulsory acquisition of public land and minerals for government use has long been a controversial practice and has led to many landowners uninterested in taking care of natural resources they own because they know they will have to sell it to the government eventually. The National Land Policy is the first land policy that acknowledges the dysfunction of the government acquisition of private land and how the government fails to complete payments to landowners who are forced to sell their land to the government under compulsory acquisition laws. Policy states that compensation from the government to landowners should be negotiated and agreed upon by the necessary parties. While this policy is law, it is unclear if the government has taken steps to remedy the issues outlined in the policy.