What it takes to drill a well here

Almost every rural listing in Colorado says "well" somewhere. That word covers a permitted well already drilled, a permit issued and never used, a right to apply for one, and occasionally nothing at all. The first thing worth separating is whether a well can be permitted here, which is a rule, from what a well would produce here, which is geology and is only visible in other people’s records.

That second figure is the one worth sitting with. A permit is permission to drill, and a large share of permits never produced a completion report at all: no depth, no yield, no driller, nothing to show a hole was ever made. A listing that says "well permit in place" may be describing one of those, and the permit number alone does not tell you which.

The permit question

Colorado treats a small household well differently from every other use of groundwater. The statute exempts wells in specified small categories from the ordinary requirement that a new withdrawal not injure senior rights, which is why a single home on acreage can generally get a permit while an irrigator on the same ground cannot.

Permits for wells in the exempt categories are issued without a finding that the withdrawal will not cause material injury, and those wells are limited by use and by rate rather than by priority.

C.R.S. 37-92-602

What the exemption actually permits is narrower than most listings imply. The ordinary domestic exemption is a house, some livestock, and a small area of lawn and garden. It is not irrigation of a field, and it is not water for a second dwelling unless the permit says so. The permit itself settles this and names its own limits, which is why the report prints the permitted use rather than the word "well".

Whether the exemption is available at all depends on where the land sits. Inside a designated basin, groundwater is administered by the Ground Water Commission under a different chapter of the law, and the rules on new small-capacity wells are set by the local ground water management district rather than by the statute above. That is a boundary question, not a parcel question, and it is answered by which basin the section falls in.

The production question

Nothing in the permit record tells you how much water the ground will actually give. That is answered by the completion report the driller files: the depth drilled, the depth water was first struck, the static level, and the yield measured on the day. Those reports are filed by location, which means the ones around a parcel are readable even when the parcel itself has never been drilled.

A median of 150 feet with a tenth percentile of 25 and a ninetieth of 515 is not a number you can quote at a property. It is a reason to look at the wells within a mile of it rather than at the state. Two sections in the same county can differ by a factor of ten, and the drilling estimate follows the depth.

The yield distribution is the one that changes what people are willing to pay. Half of all tested wells came in at ten gallons a minute or less. Ten gallons a minute is a house, a couple of horses and a garden; it is not a hayfield, and no permit anywhere in the file will tell you that, because a permit is a legal document and this is a physical fact about rock.

Where the numbers actually come from

The state publishes well permits, and it also publishes permit ACTIONS: the separate events filed against a permit over its life, of which a completion report is one. Reading only the permit table gives you a static row that is often years behind. The action record is where a well becomes real, gets plugged, changes hands, or turns out to have been a dry hole, and it is filed under a receipt number rather than a permit number, which is why the two have to be joined rather than read separately.

Beyond that there are documents the database only points at. DWR images the driller’s own hand-filled completion report, and the tabular record does not always carry what is written on it. Those images are read page by page by a vision model and the values set against the API’s own, so where the two disagree the report can say so instead of quietly preferring one.

The disagreements are rare and they are not small. One well is recorded at 123 feet in the tabular data and 570 feet on the driller’s own log; another at 23 feet against 48. A buyer sizing a pump off the first number in each of those pairs is sizing it off the wrong one. This is a young programme and the counts above are honest about its size, but the direction is the point: the record is not one table, and treating it as one is how a due diligence report becomes a query wrapper.

What the report does with this

• Every permitted well of record in the section, with its use, its permitted rate and whether a completion report ever followed
• Depth, static level and measured yield from completion reports nearby, as a distribution rather than a single figure
• Whether the location is inside a designated basin or a ground water management district, and what that changes
• Wells since plugged or abandoned, kept apart from live ones
• Where the imaged document and the database disagree, with both values and the link to the scan

Each of those links to the record it came from, so the permit number in the report is the number to hand a driller or an attorney.

This is general information about Colorado law and records. It is not legal advice and not a title opinion. What applies to a particular piece of ground is settled by the documents filed against it.