Search the register

The permit number or the receipt number, as they appear on the paperwork. Both work.

What comes back

One permit, with the answer first: whether the well was constructed, whether the permit expired, what the water may be used for, and what the Division was told about depth, yield and the water level.

Nothing is searched on our servers — the index is a set of static files and the lookup runs in your browser, which is why an individual permit has no address of its own and cannot be indexed as a page about a property.

⚠️ Why searching by address usually fails

An address is on the file for 17.5% of permits, and that is not a gap in the data. A Colorado well is located by its legal description — township, range, section, quarter — which is what a deed carries and what the Division records. Use the permit number.

⚠️ What a blank does not mean

• Not that there is no well. Wells drilled before permits were required leave no permit behind.
• Not a water right. A permit and a decreed water right are different instruments, and a purchase turns on both.
• Not the current state of anything. The register records what the Division was told, on the day it was told.

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.