Arizona articles · Land ownership
Three quarters of Arizona is not for sale
Almost every statistic about Arizona water quotes a denominator that includes ground nobody can buy. The market is a quarter the size it looks.
Arizona is described in averages: acres of it, wells under it, how far down the water is. Those averages are taken over the whole state, and most of the state is not available to anybody.
Survey sections containing any private parcel at all, against every section in the state. A section holding a single small private lot counts as buyable here, so this is the generous reading.
ADWR cadastral survey and statewide parcel coverage · computed September 2026
The rest is federal land, tribal land and state trust land. State trust land in particular is often mistaken for public land somebody might buy: it is held in trust for schools, it is leased rather than sold in most cases, and it is not a listing waiting to happen.
This is the generous reading, deliberately. A section holding one small private lot is counted here as buyable, so the real share of Arizona a person can purchase is smaller than a quarter rather than larger.
Why the denominator changes the answer
Take any statement of the form "x percent of Arizona has y". Almost all of them are computed over 114,305 square miles of survey, and three quarters of that is ground the statement can never be acted on. Measured against the quarter that can be bought, the picture is different and considerably less comfortable: a third of it sits inside an Active Management Area, and barely half has a live production well anywhere in the square mile.
That is why this product carries both numbers. A count over the whole state describes the desert. A count over the sections that contain private land describes the market, and only one of those is the thing a buyer is standing in.
This is general information about Arizona law and records. It is not legal advice or a title search. What applies to a particular parcel is settled by the documents filed against it.