Arizona groundwater

The well on that listing might not be enough.

A well is not a guarantee. Put in an address and get one report that says what the state's own records show: which rules cover this ground, how deep the water is, which way it is going, and whether the ground itself is failing.

The first report is free, no account. The full report is $95.

What the listing said What the record says

“Buildable acreage”

100% of it is Arizona State Trust land

State trust land is leased, not sold

“Good water table”

55 feet the water has fallen here in 20 years

Measured by ADWR, well by well

“Solid ground”

246 mapped earth fissures in this square mile

Cracks opened by pumping. They do not close

One listing. Three findings, from Arizona’s own records.

Why that keeps happening

Nobody is limiting your water here. Nobody is limiting your neighbor’s either.

Arizona does not rank groundwater by who reached it first. What governs a well is where it sits: inside an Active Management Area pumping is measured and limited, and outside one it largely is not. Most rural land for sale is outside one.

That is not an oversight. The 1980 Groundwater Management Act drew management areas around the places already in trouble, and deliberately left the rest of the state alone. So on most ground the honest answer is not who has the older claim, it is how deep the water is now, how far it has fallen, and whether the ground above it has started to crack.

irrigated hay, 115 ac dry ditch
  • Topsoil
  • Sand and gravel
  • Clay
  • Sandstone
  • Saturated

vertical scale in feet, horizontal schematic

A listing shows you the surface. What sets the price is everything under it.

Why nobody checks

The records are free. Reading them is the hard part.

Arizona publishes all of it, and none of it is built to be read together. Nineteen sources, no shared address, and the one key that joins them is a cadastral grid written as a twelve-character code.

A well is registered to a point on that grid rather than to a parcel. Water levels are measured well by well, in different years, and a median from two wells is not the claim a median from forty is. Earth fissures are mapped by the Geological Survey and the flood map is federal, and neither knows what the other says. Three quarters of the state has no assessor parcel at all, because it is state trust, tribal or federal land.

  1. Water rights, by structureno address field
  2. Decree history and abandonmentone comma-separated code
  3. Diversion records, monthly127 water classes
  4. Water court resumesWord files, one division at a time
  5. Well permits and outcomes808,129 events
  6. Crop water requirement4 of 7 basins modelled
  7. Aquifer monitoring wellsdepth over time
  8. Streams and stream gaugesnamed, never mapped to a parcel
  9. Federal mineral estatewho owns what is underneath
  10. County assessor parcels43 separate sites
  11. Survey grid, section by sectionthe only shared key
  12. Land grantswhere that grid stops
  13. Soil, flood, wildfireT-SQL over POST

one report

Start here

See how much there is to know before you pay for it.

Put in a property and the free report says how many things the record holds, and which of these it holds them about. If there is nothing much on record it tells you that too, in as many words. The full report is the same ground with every finding named, explained, and linked to the record it came from.

What you get

A verdict, and the record it came from.

No dashboard to learn and no data to interpret. Each finding says what it means for this piece of ground in a sentence, then names and links the state record behind it, so your water attorney can check every line of it.

Example report Sample

Pinal County

T05S R03E Sec 19

One surveyed section, about a square mile D05003019

Three findings here need a closer look and five more are worth knowing. Everything below is the record behind that, with the source of each line.

  • Wells 6
  • Parcels 101
  • Subsidence 1
  • Earth fissures 0
  • FEMA floodplain 0
  • State trust land 8
  • Tribal land 0
3need a closer look
5worth knowing
4came back clean

Who decides what you may pump

the rules that attach to this ground, not to a date

  • This is inside the Pinal AMA, the strictest groundwater rules in the state
  • This ground sits inside the Santa Cruz River adjudication
  • 182 water claims have been filed over this square mile
  • 110 grandfathered groundwater rights reach this square mile

How much water is here

depth, yield and which way it is going

  • Water sits about 550 feet down here

Whether the ground is failing

subsidence and earth fissures, which do not reverse

  • This is inside a mapped land subsidence area

Whether you can drink it

the system that serves it and what the water has tested at

  • Papago Butte DWID has an unresolved health-based drinking water violation
  • A community water system serves this area: Global Water- Santa Cruz Water Co
  • Groundwater samples near here came back within federal limits

Who owns the ground

state trust, tribal land and the flood map over it

  • About 8% of this square mile is State Trust land
  • FEMA has studied this square mile and mapped no special flood hazard here

What this report cannot tell you

the limits of the public record here

  • Only five wells here have a measured water level

Needs a closer look

Papago Butte DWID has an unresolved health-based drinking water violation

The system serving this ground has 31 health-based violations that the federal record does not show as returned to compliance, the most recent in 2025, when a contaminant limit was exceeded. A health-based violation means a standard meant to protect drinking water was not met, as distinct from a filing being late.

System
PWSID AZ0411097
Open health-based
31 of 69 total
Enforcement actions
164

Source: EPA Safe Drinking Water Information System

  • Nothing is inferred. A missing record reads as missing, never as zero.
  • Every number is dated. You can see how fresh each source was when it ran.
  • Web and PDF. Attach it to the file you are already building.

What it reads

Every water record Arizona publishes.

Find out before you are in diligence.

The free report runs on any property. The full report is $95, or $1,490 a year if you look at land for a living.

Check a property See pricing