The 7 Texas Counties Where New Water Wells Are Shallower

The figures

Counties drilling shallower: 7 of 180
Largest change: Cameron: −39%; 115 to 70 feet
Changed 20% or more: 5
No clear change: 137 counties
Texas median: 260 to 255 feet

County by county

Median depth of home wells in each period. The line shows the median of each year from 2003 to 2025. Tap a heading to sort.

County	2003 to 2007 (ft)	2021 to 2025 (ft)	Change	95% interval (ft)	Water level change (ft)	Wells (then / now)
Cameron	115	70	−39%	−58 to −30	+2	352 / 82
Chambers	300	200	−33%	−120 to −38	−32	248 / 153
Martin	115	80	−30%	−55 to −7	−5	85 / 449
Refugio	288	205	−29%	−105 to −37	+10	126 / 117
Hardin	330	255	−23%	−120 to −30	−10	317 / 422
Caldwell	300	248	−17%	−68 to −22	+20	133 / 306
Hockley	174	148	−15%	−36 to −16	−13	167 / 471

What this shows and what it doesn't

A deeper well can mean a falling water table, a different aquifer, better water quality or simply more reserve.
These are wells people chose to drill, not a monitoring network. Where and why people drill changes over time.
A county-wide median also moves when new homes are built in a different part of the county, over a different depth.

Questions

Are there Texas counties where water wells are getting shallower?

Of the 180 Texas counties with at least 30 home wells in both 2003 to 2007 and 2021 to 2025, only 7 now drill at least 10% shallower with statistical confidence, against 36 that drill deeper. The largest change is in Cameron County, where the median went from 115 to 70 feet (−39%; 352 and 82 wells).

Which Texas county's wells got shallower the most?

Cameron County: the median home well went from 115 feet in 2003 to 2007 to 70 feet in 2021 to 2025, a change of −39% (95% interval −58 to −30 feet).

Sources you can check

Texas Water Development Board, Submitted Driller's Reports database. The state's own file, rebuilt every night. Direct download (we used the file of November 10, 2026, 145 MB). SHA-256: 10b60ed0d9895e735f0b2c7833b5aa39de7a56fd68454fe16b3c14684f61ea7b
TWDB well report viewer: the official report of each well, one by one
TerraFunded, Texas Well Atlas dataset, archived on Zenodo. One row per well, no names, locations generalized to about 1.5 km. DOI 10.5281/zenodo.24126380.

Check it yourself

Download this page's table as a CSV (texas-counties-drilling-shallower-wells.csv): every figure in the text is in it.
Open any county in the table. Its page lists its figures, and each well on its map opens the official report on the state's site.
For the raw data, download the state file from the TWDB link in the sources and keep the wells whose proposed use is Domestic and whose work is a new well or a replacement.
If a figure does not match, write to us with the county and the number: we correct it in the next update and say so.

How we got it

We count new and replacement domestic (home) wells with a valid depth on their report. Monitoring wells, soil borings, injection, geothermal and oilfield wells are left out. A depth under 10 feet or over 5,000 feet is treated as an entry error.

We compare the wells finished in 2003 to 2007 with those finished in 2021 to 2025, in every county with at least 30 wells in each period. The 95% interval for the difference in medians comes from 2,000 bootstrap resamples. A county counts as deeper or shallower only when that interval excludes zero and the change is at least 10%. For the water level we require at least 5 feet and 10%.

The full method · All open data

How to cite this

TerraFunded (2026). "In 7 Texas counties, new wells are shallower than 20 years ago." Texas Well Atlas. From the Texas Water Development Board, Submitted Driller's Reports database (state file of November 10, 2026). https://terrafunded.com/wells/findings/texas-counties-drilling-shallower-wells. License CC BY 4.0. Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24126380.

Free to use with credit under CC BY 4.0. Journalists: write to us for any county's figures.

More findings

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