Water wells in Clay County

1,621 WWC-5 records — 0.5% of the Kansas register. The median well here is 70 feet deep, against 60 feet statewide.

How deep people drill in Clay County

This is what a buyer or a builder actually wants, and the Survey does not publish it as a figure you can look up. The numbers below are medians over the records where a figure was reported — a mean would be carried away by a few deep irrigation wells.

What the water is used for

Wells tied to a water right

131 records in Clay County carry a DWR appropriation number — 8.1%, against 11.0% statewide. A well permit and a water right are separate instruments in Kansas, and the appropriation number is the thread back to the Division of Water Resources.

What stands out in Clay County

The busiest contractor on these records is Associated Drilling, INC, named on 237 of them (14.6%), ahead of Well Owner (146) and Cox-beswick Irrigation Service, INC (139). The oldest record here was completed in 1974 and the most recent in 2026, and the deepest well on file reaches 290 feet — a heat pump (closed loop/disposal), geothermal well drilled by Associated Drilling, INC in 2007.

Plugging records — in Clay County

368 of the 1,621 records in Clay County carry a plugging report (22.7%), filed on form WWC-5P. The other 1,253 do not.

That is not a list of abandoned wells, and this site never calls them that. Kansas defines abandonment by use — a well unused for two years — and nothing in this register tracks use. What the absence of a plugging report does mean is that the State has never been told the well was sealed. On the 412 records here completed before 1995, that is exactly what a buyer checks. Why it matters and who pays.

Who drills in Clay County

When they were drilled

An unplugged well on land in Clay County?

1,253 of the 1,621 records in Clay County have no plugging report on file. If a well on your land is no longer used, Kansas requires it to be plugged and the duty falls on the landowner — with cost-share of up to USD 1,000 per well through the Kansas Department of Agriculture. This site reads the register; it does not drill and it does not plug. Tell us where and we pass the request to licensed Kansas well contractors.

We recommend no contractor and we are nobody's agent. We have no arrangement with any firm today — we are collecting these requests in order to go and find them. What we do with this.

Records in Clay County

By water use in Clay County

• Domestic in Clay County 797
• Domestic, Livestock in Clay County 152
• Monitoring well/observation/piezometer in Clay County 271

Counties with a comparable register

• Washington 1,798
• Phillips 1,775
• Norton 1,770
• Russell 1,752
• Cloud 1,746
• Morris 1,671
• Rawlins 1,643
• Ottawa 1,592
• Grant 1,571
• Scott 1,571
• Franklin 1,558
• Harper 1,552
• Sherman 1,533

Neighbours by the size of their register, not a ranking: the list slides with the county, so each of the 100 county pages is reachable from the others. All of them.