Household Use Only wells in Jefferson County

13,857 of the 42,751 well permits in Jefferson County — 32.4% — are decreed for household use only.

How this group compares

Jefferson County holds 13.2% of Colorado’s 105,372 household use only permits, while holding 7.1% of the register overall — so it is over-represented in this use.

Household Use Only means the narrowest domestic permit there is: water inside the house, and nothing else. No lawn, no livestock, no garden. It is the use most often misunderstood by a buyer who assumes a well means water for the land.

What happened to these permits

8,572 of the 13,857 permits decreed for household use only in Jefferson County ended with a well the Division was told about — 61.9%. And 2,850 expired without one: 20.6%.

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 Jefferson County, or need a well drilled?

13,857 well permits are on the Division’s register in Jefferson County, 2,850 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 42,751 permits in Jefferson County, and every household use only permit in Colorado.

Other groups of a similar size

• Domestic — El Paso 28,862
• Domestic — Jefferson 15,063
• Domestic — Weld 14,428
• Household Use Only — Park 14,356
• Domestic — Douglas 13,804
• Monitoring/sampling — Weld 10,978
• Domestic — Elbert 10,857
• Domestic — La Plata 10,644
• Domestic — Adams 9,364
• Monitoring/sampling — Adams 9,123
• Domestic — Boulder 8,225