Monitoring/sampling wells in Boulder County

3,864 of the 20,791 well permits in Boulder County — 18.6% — are decreed for monitoring/sampling.

How this group compares

Boulder County holds 4.2% of Colorado’s 91,022 monitoring/sampling permits, while holding 3.5% of the register overall — so it is over-represented in this use.

Monitoring/sampling means not a water supply at all — a hole drilled to watch the groundwater. These sit on the same register and are not wells anyone drinks from.

What happened to these permits

2,021 of the 3,864 permits decreed for monitoring/sampling in Boulder County ended with a well the Division was told about — 52.3%. And 900 expired without one: 23.3%.

An expired permit is the trap in a rural sale. A seller can produce a permit that lapsed years ago, and a permit is not a water right — the two are separate, and a purchase turns on both. What an expired permit does and does not mean.

Buying land in Boulder County, or need a well drilled?

3,864 well permits are on the Division’s register in Boulder County, 900 of them expired. This site tells you what a permit says; it does not drill, and it is not advice on a water right. Tell us where and we pass the request to drillers and water-rights advisers working in Colorado.

We take no commission and we recommend no driller. We have no arrangement with any firm today — we are collecting these requests in order to go and find them. What we do with this.

The permits

Part of a bigger picture: all 20,791 permits in Boulder County, and every monitoring/sampling permit in Colorado.

Other groups of a similar size

• Irrigation — Yuma 4,622
• Household Use Only — Summit 4,534
• Domestic — Routt 4,390
• Domestic — Rio Grande 4,314
• Domestic — Logan 4,286
• Domestic — Gunnison 4,179
• Domestic — Alamosa 3,719
• Domestic — Morgan 3,592
• Household Use Only — Fremont 3,535
• Domestic — Yuma 3,411
• Household Use Only — Clear Creek 3,399