Water wells in Rice County

4,156 WWC-5 records — 1.3% of the Kansas register. The median well here is 55 feet deep, against 60 feet statewide.

How deep people drill in Rice 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

780 records in Rice County carry a DWR appropriation number — 18.8%, 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 Rice County

The busiest contractor on these records is Rosencrantz-bemis Enterprises, INC, named on 875 of them (21.1%), ahead of Kelly's Water Well Service, INC (528) and Miller Drilling (503). The oldest record here was completed in 1971 and the most recent in 2026, and the deepest well on file reaches 650 feet — a monitoring well/observation/piezometer well drilled by Rosencrantz-bemis Enterprises, INC in 1982.

Plugging records — in Rice County

683 of the 4,156 records in Rice County carry a plugging report (16.4%), filed on form WWC-5P. The other 3,473 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 1,533 records here completed before 1995, that is exactly what a buyer checks. Why it matters and who pays.

Who drills in Rice County

When they were drilled

An unplugged well on land in Rice County?

3,473 of the 4,156 records in Rice 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 Rice County

By water use in Rice County

• Domestic in Rice County 771
• Domestic, Lawn and Garden in Rice County 277
• Domestic, Livestock in Rice County 367
• Irrigation in Rice County 399
• Monitoring well/observation/piezometer in Rice County 1,128
• Oil Field Water Supply in Rice County 781

Counties with a comparable register

• Wyandotte 6,002
• Johnson 5,602
• Ellis 5,546
• Finney 5,476
• Pratt 5,098
• Ford 4,946
• Shawnee 4,748
• Sumner 3,912
• Edwards 3,879
• Kingman 3,776
• Dickinson 3,662
• Riley 3,583
• Pawnee 3,568

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.