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Video: Colorado Well Permits and Water Rights, Blackmore Group Realty. The written version below covers the same ten questions.

About us

Blackmore Group Realty works ranch, land, and luxury property across Southwest Colorado and Northern New Mexico. Ashley Blackmore is a licensed broker in both Colorado and New Mexico, grew up in this part of the state, and spends a fair amount of time reading well permits before anybody writes an offer. If you are looking at a place with a well, a ditch, or both, that is the conversation worth having early.

Blackmore Group Realty, 2901 Main Ave, Durango, Colorado. Call the team at (970) 444-2431.

A water right is a place in line, not a share of the water

Colorado runs on prior appropriation. The oldest decreed rights get satisfied first, and everybody junior to them waits. So when a listing says a property has water rights, the useful question isn’t how much. It’s how old.

A senior right on a well established ditch behaves very differently in August than a junior right on an over appropriated stream. One keeps producing when things get tight. The other might give you plenty in June and nothing when you actually need it. Four things tell you what you bought: the priority date, the source, the decreed amount, and the use it was decreed for. Irrigation, stock, and domestic are not interchangeable.

Get all four in writing and get them verified independently. Listing descriptions are not a source.

Household use only versus domestic: the distinction that causes the most trouble

Most residential wells in Colorado are what the state calls exempt wells, meaning they sit outside the priority system. They come in two forms, and people mix them up constantly.

A household use only permit allows water inside the home. That’s the whole allowance. No filling a stock tank, no watering a garden, no hosing off a horse, not a strip of lawn.

A domestic permit is the better one. It generally allows household use, water for non commercial domestic animals, and irrigation of up to about an acre of lawn or garden.

Here’s the part that catches folks. Those limits get interpreted strictly, and using more than the permit allows can put the exemption itself at risk. Somebody buys five acres planning to keep a couple of horses, gets told by everybody involved that the well will cover it, and finds out a year later that the permit says household use only. That is a very hard problem to fix after the fact.

Why 35 acres keeps showing up in land listings

Thirty five acres is the line the state drew. Most private wells drilled on or after May 8, 1972 on a parcel under 35 acres are permitted for household use only. At 35 acres or more with no existing well, you can generally apply for a domestic permit, which is the one that allows animals and irrigation.

That’s why so much land around here gets listed right at 35 or 36 acres. It isn’t a coincidence.

But acreage is the starting question, not the answer. Plat notes on a recorded subdivision map can restrict a well to household use no matter how large the parcel is. And in some subdivisions created through the state subdivision review process, even a household use only permit isn’t available, which puts you on a central system or a considerably more complicated path.

What lenders want to see on well yield

There’s a difference between what the state permits and what a lender will accept. An exempt well permitted after May 1971 is capped at 15 gallons a minute, and older ones can go higher. Those are ceilings written on the permit, not what the well actually does.

What it actually does is the yield, and that gets established by a pump test. Most lenders working in this market want to see a few gallons a minute before writing the loan, and the specific threshold depends on the lender and the loan product, so ask early rather than late.

A low yield well is not automatically a dead property, either. Paired with a cistern and a properly sized pump system, families live comfortably on very little water. The question is whether your lender agrees, and that’s worth settling before you’re eleven days from closing.

What a pump test actually measures

Sustained yield, not a two minute burst. A proper test runs the well continuously for several hours and then measures how fast it recovers.

That recovery number matters as much as the yield does. A well producing a steady five gallons a minute that takes two days to come back is a different animal than one that holds level. A good test also gives you static water level, drawdown, and a look at the well log and completion depth.

Have it done by a licensed pump installer or a well driller, not by the home inspector. Who pays is negotiable and usually lands with the buyer as part of due diligence, though sellers cover it often enough. If a seller won’t allow a pump test at all, that itself is information.

Pasture irrigation comes from surface water, not from your well

If the well is household use only, the answer on outdoor watering is no. Not a drop, and that includes a stock tank. If it’s a domestic well, you can water animals and irrigate roughly an acre, which covers a lawn and a garden. It does not cover a pasture.

Real irrigation almost always comes from surface water. A ditch share, a decreed irrigation right, occasionally a spring. So when somebody’s standing on a place picturing green grass in July, the question isn’t how deep the well goes. It’s which ditch that property sits on and how many shares convey with the sale.

How ditch shares work

A ditch company is essentially a cooperative that owns and runs the delivery system. You hold shares, and those shares entitle you to a proportional cut of whatever water the company’s rights bring in that year. Good year, everybody gets plenty. Dry year, everybody’s share shrinks together.

You pay annual assessments covering maintenance, the ditch rider, headgate repairs, and so on. Those vary quite a bit by company and by how many shares you hold. Some companies also expect you to turn out for ditch cleaning in the spring, which tends to surprise people who moved here from somewhere with a municipal water bill.

Call the ditch company directly before you write an offer. Ask what assessments have been running, whether the shares actually transfer with the sale, and whether there’s an outstanding balance. Some shares are held separately from the land and don’t convey unless the contract says so explicitly.

A call on the river, and whether it reaches your well

A call happens when a senior right holder isn’t getting the water they’re entitled to, so they call for it, and junior users have to stop diverting until that senior right is satisfied. On most of our stream systems the rights are over appropriated, so calls are a normal feature of a dry summer rather than some rare event.

Good news for most homeowners. A permitted exempt well, household use only or domestic, sits outside the priority system and a call doesn’t shut it off. A non exempt or large capacity well is inside that system and can absolutely be curtailed. Which is one more reason the exempt status on the permit matters, and one more reason to read the permit yourself.

Augmentation plans and what they do to a build timeline

In most of our drainages, a well that isn’t exempt, meaning one drawing more water than the exempt rules allow, can’t simply be drilled. You have to replace the water you pull out so senior rights aren’t injured. That replacement is an augmentation plan, and it typically means buying into a water district’s existing plan or getting one decreed through water court.

It costs money up front, costs money annually, and adds real time to a build schedule. So if you’re buying raw land with ambitious plans, meaning commercial use, multiple homes, or genuine irrigation, sort out the water path before closing rather than after. This is probably the most common reason a land purchase turns into a project that stalls.

Rainwater and ponds

Rainwater collection is allowed in Colorado, but narrowly. Most residential owners can collect rain in a small number of barrels with a limited combined capacity, used on the property it fell on. Anything beyond that is capturing water already spoken for downstream. Check the current limits before you set anything up.

Ponds are the bigger misunderstanding. You generally can’t dig a hole and let it fill, because storing water is a use, and uses require a right. A pond usually needs a decreed storage right or an augmentation source covering evaporation. There are exceptions, including certain older ponds and some small stock ponds. Check before you dig, not after somebody downstream complains, because water enforcement in this state is active.

Common questions

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General information about Colorado water administration, not legal advice. Confirm any permit, decree, or ditch share with the Colorado Division of Water Resources, the relevant ditch company, or a water attorney before relying on it in a transaction.