How deep, and how much water

The statewide median well is 148 feet deep and yields 10 gallons a minute. Neither number means much on its own, because the county you are in changes it by a factor of six.

The question this answers

Before you buy rural land in Colorado, you want to know what a well will cost. Depth is the largest term in that: a driller charges by the foot. The Division holds the depth of every well it was told about — 380,522 of them — and does not publish it as a figure you can look up. This page is that figure.

⚠️ Medians, and only on what was reported

Every number here is a median. A mean would be carried away by a handful of industrial and monitoring holes thousands of feet deep, and would tell you something false about an ordinary domestic well. The count in the last column is how many permits each median rests on.

Depth is reported on 63 % of permits, yield on 23 %, static water level on 49 %. A blank is not a zero: where the Division was never told, this site says so.

Every county with enough permits to measure

Why the spread is so wide

It is geology, and it is mostly the Denver Basin. 175,512 permits draw on one of the four named Denver Basin aquifers — Dawson, Denver, Arapahoe, Laramie-Fox Hills, in that order of depth. On the Front Range that means drilling through hundreds of feet to reach water that is legally allocated differently from the shallow alluvial water in a river valley.

The counties near the top of this table are Denver Basin counties. The ones near the bottom sit on alluvium along a river, where water is shallow and closely tied to the surface stream — which is why it is regulated more tightly.

⚠️ What this cannot tell you

Not what your well will cost, and not whether it will produce. A median is what happened on other parcels; the parcel you are looking at has its own geology, and the only thing that settles it is a driller who works the area. Nothing in this register says whether a well still produces today — the depth was recorded once, when the well was built.

Need a well drilled, or a figure for a parcel you are buying?

A median is what happened on other parcels. What it will cost on yours takes a driller who works the county. Tell us where and we pass the request to drillers 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.

Not a consumer reporting agency. This site and the datasets sold from it are not consumer reports under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and must not be used to decide anyone's eligibility for employment, credit, insurance, housing, or any other purpose covered by the FCRA. If you need a background check, use a screening company that operates as a consumer reporting agency.