Home Water Wells Drilled in Texas Each Year, 2003 to 2025

The figures

Record year: 2022: 16,057
Previous high: 2006: 15,429
Quietest year: 2010: 8,691
Last complete year: 2025: 12,089
2026 so far: 8,945; year not over

Year by year

New and replacement home wells with a valid depth, by the year the well was finished.

Year	Home wells	Change from the year before
2003	11,804	—
2004	12,770	+8%
2005	14,003	+10%
2006	15,429	+10%
2007	12,403	−20%
2008	11,496	−7%
2009	10,009	−13%
2010	8,691	−13%
2011	10,758	+24%
2012	11,167	+4%
2013	11,430	+2%
2014	12,325	+8%
2015	10,390	−16%
2016	9,701	−7%
2017	9,887	+2%
2018	10,745	+9%
2019	11,398	+6%
2020	13,214	+16%
2021	14,569	+10%
2022	16,057	+10%
2023	13,594	−15%
2024	12,263	−10%
2025	12,089	−1%

What this shows and what it doesn't

These are the reports drillers filed for home wells, not every well in Texas. Irrigation, public supply, monitoring and oilfield wells are not counted.
The count says how many wells were drilled, not why. Dry years, new homes outside city water and replacement of old wells all add to it. 2022 and 2023 were dry years in much of Texas.
The state's online report system began in 2001, so the first years are incomplete and the table starts in 2003.

Questions

How many water wells are drilled in Texas each year?

For home wells, between 8,691 (2010) and 16,057 (2022) a year since 2003, and 12,089 in 2025, by the state's driller reports.

What year did Texas drill the most home water wells?

2022 is the busiest year in the state's driller reports: 16,057 new and replacement home wells, ahead of the 15,429 of 2006. The quietest year since 2003 was 2010, with 8,691. In 2025, the last complete year, drillers reported 12,089, 25% below the record.

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-home-wells-drilled-per-year.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.

Each well is counted once, in the year it was finished. The current year is shown apart because it is not over and late reports keep arriving.

The full method · All open data

How to cite this

TerraFunded (2026). "Texas drilled a record 16,057 home wells in 2022." 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-home-wells-drilled-per-year. 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

All the findings · Texas Well Atlas: search any address