Water wells in Ellis County

5,546 WWC-5 records — 1.8% of the Kansas register. The median well here is 45 feet deep, against 60 feet statewide.

How deep people drill in Ellis 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

142 records in Ellis County carry a DWR appropriation number — 2.6%, 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 Ellis County

The busiest contractor on these records is Karst Water Well Drilling & Service, INC, named on 922 of them (16.6%), ahead of John E. Luea Water Well Drilling (544) and Andy Anderson Drilling (315). The oldest record here was completed in 1974 and the most recent in 2026, and the deepest well on file reaches 1076 feet — a environmental remediation, injection well drilled by Layne-christensen CO in 1980.

Plugging records — in Ellis County

1,225 of the 5,546 records in Ellis County carry a plugging report (22.1%), filed on form WWC-5P. The other 4,321 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 1,710 records here completed before 1995, that is exactly what a buyer checks. Why it matters and who pays.

Who drills in Ellis County

When they were drilled

An unplugged well on land in Ellis County?

4,321 of the 5,546 records in Ellis 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 Ellis County

By water use in Ellis County

• Domestic in Ellis County 1,623
• Domestic, Lawn and Garden in Ellis County 1,276
• Domestic, Livestock in Ellis County 175
• Monitoring well/observation/piezometer in Ellis County 1,701

Counties with a comparable register

• Butler 8,187
• Saline 7,612
• Harvey 7,116
• Stafford 6,530
• Mcpherson 6,180
• Wyandotte 6,002
• Johnson 5,602
• Finney 5,476
• Pratt 5,098
• Ford 4,946
• Shawnee 4,748
• Rice 4,156
• Sumner 3,912

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.