Find Your Well's Drilling Records
Your well's driller's log — also called a well completion report or construction report — is the birth certificate of your well: depth, yield, casing, static water level, and how it was sealed. Most states keep these on file in a free public database. Pick your state to find the right one, then use the five-minute decoder below to read what you find.
How to read your log in five minutes
Once you have the record, these are the entries that matter. Our full guide to reading your driller's log walks through every section; this is the short version.
| Entry | What it means | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| Total depth | Full drilled depth, surface to bottom of the borehole. Everything else is measured against it. | Compare it to the static level below — the difference is your feet of standing water. |
| Static water level | Distance from the surface down to the water when the well is not being pumped (sometimes labeled SWL). | Your margin: the pump intake must stay submerged below this level, with room to spare in a dry year. |
| Test rate / yield (gpm) | The rate water was pumped during the driller's test, ideally with test duration and drawdown. | 3–5 gpm is adequate for most homes. FHA rules: 5 gpm continuous over 4 hours for new construction, 3 gpm for existing homes. |
| Casing | The pipe lining the well — keeps the hole open and surface water out of the groundwater. | Depth, diameter, and material should be logged. Sand/gravel wells run casing full depth with a screen; bedrock wells case into the rock. |
| Grout / annular seal | Sealant pumped between the outside of the casing and the borehole wall, blocking contaminants from traveling down along the casing. | A depth should be logged. No grout entry at all is the red flag — worth a follow-up with the driller or state agency. |
| Drawdown | Pumping water level minus static water level — how far the level drops under load. | Small drawdown means the aquifer feeds the well easily; large drawdown means the well works hard for every gallon. |
One piece of arithmetic worth doing: total depth minus static water level is your feet of standing water, and a 6-inch well stores about 1.5 gallons per foot of water column (about 1 gallon per foot in a 5-inch well). That is why a low-yield well with a deep water column can still serve a house fine — the bore itself is a reservoir.
No record found?
That is common with older wells — many states only started requiring drillers to file reports in the 1970s through 1990s, so a 1960s well may simply have no paperwork. Work the fallback chain: ask the seller, ask the original drilling company (the name is often on the well cap or pressure tank), then your county or local health department. Buying a home? Make the well record part of your due diligence; selling? Hand the log to the buyer with the other house records — see our seller's guide.
Before you act on this
Database entries summarize what each state's agency publishes; coverage and search features change, and counties or towns may hold records the state database lacks. The decoder numbers above are the widely used benchmarks — your state or lender may set specific minimums, so treat them as orientation, not code. When in doubt, the driller's log plus a conversation with a licensed well pro beats either one alone.