We make government well data useful.
Every state keeps a log of every water well ever drilled in it — how deep it went, how far down the water was, how much it produced, and who drilled it. Those records are public and almost unusable: one well at a time, searched by permit number, on a portal built for regulators.
We read the whole file. We index it by location. Then we answer the question the person at the other end actually has, which is almost never "what is permit 4408217."
7,778,004 well records · 15 states · rebuilt weekly from the states' own databases
The questions we answer
- Is there already a well on this property, and what does its log say? Depth, static water level, tested yield, completion date, and a link to the driller's filed report.
- How deep will a well here need to be? The median and range of what was actually drilled nearby — not a national average.
- What will it cost? Local median depth against published per-foot rates, with the arithmetic shown.
- Will it produce enough water? Yields from pump tests on the wells around it.
- Who drills around here? The companies that actually filed well logs in that county recently — ranked by how many, not by who bought an ad.
Most of the people asking are buying rural property, selling it, inspecting it, or about to pay someone to drill. All of them are making a decision worth thousands of dollars off a record that already exists and that nobody can read.
How we work
- We take the state's own database — the official well-log repository, in bulk, at the source. Not a scrape of someone else's copy.
- We normalize it into one shape: location, depth, water level, yield, driller, date, use. Every state files these differently; that difference is most of the work.
- We index it by location, so a street address or a pair of coordinates finds the wells around it. Where a state files wells by section instead of by address, we say so on the page rather than pretending to a precision the record doesn't have.
- We link every well back to its original filed record, so any number we print can be checked against the state's copy of it.
- We rebuild weekly from fresh source data, and stamp every page with the date it was verified.
What we don't do
We don't create data and we don't correct it. If a driller filed the wrong depth in 1994, that wrong depth is in the state's database and it is in ours — we show you where it came from so you can see that for yourself. We're an independent publisher, not affiliated with any state agency, and nothing here substitutes for a licensed well driller looking at the actual property.
Where the data comes from
Each state site is free to search. A full property report — every recorded well near one address, with the original logs — is $29 on any of them. More states are added as their records prove complete enough to be worth publishing.
Who we are
National Well Data is a project of Simple Apps, LLC, a small software studio in Seattle that turns government records into products that answer expensive questions. Reports and replies come from ryan@nationalwelldata.com — a real address, read by a person. If a record looks wrong, or your well isn't in ours, write to it and say which property; that's how we find the gaps.