About this site

An independent copy of a public register, made searchable by place. Not the register, and not the State of Texas.

What it is

texas-water-wells answers one question: how deep will I have to drill here, and through what? It holds 708,722 Texas well reports submitted since 2001, with 5,345,462 logged rock layers underneath them.

This is an independent copy, not the register. Well reports are filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation and published by the Texas Water Development Board; for anything a transaction depends on, use theirs.

Where it comes from

A licensed water well driller must file a report with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation; the Texas Water Development Board publishes the resulting database. We download it whole and rebuild this site from it.

A licensed driller must file a well report with the department and the owner within 60 days of finishing the well (Texas Occupations Code, chapter 1901.251). A well found abandoned must be plugged and a State of Texas Plugging Report filed within 30 days (16 TAC §76.104). The duty to plug falls on the landowner.

⚠️ What we do not take

The state file behind this site names the owner of every well, their postal address, the address of the well, its exact coordinates and even the distance from their septic tank. None of it is on this site. Those columns are not filtered out at display time — they are never read into our database at all, which is the only guarantee worth making. What you see is the ground and the licensed firms that drilled it.

Concretely: the state file carries 73 columns and we read 18 of them. The list of what we read is a whitelist in our ingestion code, checked against a pattern that rejects anything resembling an owner, an address or a coordinate — if someone later adds such a column to the list, the ingestion stops rather than running.

⚠️ The one thing we changed

Firm names. The state stores them as each form was typed: 9,323 distinct spellings for 4,784 firms. One firm had been filed under 43 spellings across 10,826 wells. Reconciling them is what makes a firm page possible, and it is the only part of this dataset you could not rebuild from the source in an afternoon.

Everything else — depths, water levels, yields, purposes, dates, rock logs — is copied and not adjusted. Two figures are set aside from the medians and never deleted: yields above 3,000 gpm and depths past 5,000 ft.

The sources, and what they require

This site republishes public registers. Source by source: the licence it is published under, and the condition its publisher sets — read from the publisher's own terms page, on the date shown.