How this site is built

An independent search layer over one public file. Not affiliated with the Colorado Division of Water Resources.

One file, 600,017 permits

the Colorado Division of Water Resources publishes its well permit applications as open data, refreshed daily. The source carried 650,015 rows on 2026-08-21; 49,998 of them were byte-identical duplicates of another row — same receipt, same permit, same status, same depth. They are dropped, which is why this site says 600,017 permits and not 650,015.

The key is the receipt number, which is unique. The permit number is not: one permit can cover several successive applications — an amendment, a replacement. The index holds both, so either number finds the record.

⚠️ What is not downloaded

The applicant’s name. The source file carries contact_name next to the property address. These are largely rural properties, which means homes. The question this site answers — does this land have a well permit, what does it allow, was the well built — does not need anybody’s name, so the field is not requested at download and the loader stops if it finds one.

⚠️ What no page here carries

The address. An address is on the file for 17.5% of permits and it never appears on an indexable page. It is rendered on an individual record from the URL fragment, which means that record has no address of its own and cannot be indexed. Pages carry the county, the basin and the aquifer — wide units.

The fine legal description. Township, range, section and quarter locate a parcel precisely. They are on the record, never on a page.

⚠️ A blank is not a zero

Depth is reported on 63 % of permits, yield on 23 %, static water level on 49 %. Every median on this site is computed over reported values only, and the count it rests on is printed beside it. No page fills a blank with a nought, and no page treats an unreported well as a dry one.

Medians, never means

A handful of industrial and monitoring holes go thousands of feet down. A mean depth would follow them and say something false about an ordinary domestic well. Every figure of depth, yield or water level on this site is a median, with its 90th percentile beside it.

How the pages are chosen

A county gets a page at 500 permits (63 of 65 qualify, covering 99.6%); a decreed use at 1,500; an aquifer at 1,500; a county-and-use page at 1,000, and only where it is not simply the county page over again — a crossing covering more than 70 % of its county is not published.

Sources

Well Application Permit, the Colorado Division of Water Resources, on data.colorado.gov, public domain, refreshed daily. Published 2013-11-15; our copy is from 2026-08-21, and the most recent permit in it was issued on 2026-09-25. For anything a transaction depends on, use the Division’s own permitting service.

The data made available here has been modified for use from its original source, which is the State of Colorado.

The Division publishes this file as public-domain open data and refreshes it daily. It records what a permit allows and what the Division was told about the well — and where a depth, a yield or a water level is blank, it was never reported, not measured as zero.