How deep are wells in Canyon County, Idaho?

What the state records actually contain

Idaho drillers must file a report for every well they complete. The Idaho Department of Water Resources publishes those reports, including total depth, depth to water, yield and construction date. The database holds most reports filed since July 1987; earlier wells are patchy and some were never reported at all.

That means any answer to "how deep are wells here" is really "how deep were the wells somebody reported here". It is good evidence, not a census.

Depth varies more than most buyers expect

Within a single square mile of farmland near Caldwell, reported depths run from 40 feet to 463 feet, with a median of 155 feet. Both of those extremes are real wells in the same neighborhood. Drilling is priced per foot, so that spread is the difference between a routine job and a serious one.

This is the main reason a nearby-wells summary is worth reading before you make an offer: it tells you how much uncertainty to price in.

How to read depth to water

Depth to water, or static water level, is how far below the surface water settles in a finished well. It drives pump sizing and running costs. It is not the same as total depth: a well can be drilled far deeper than the level water rises to.

Zero is ambiguous in the state records. It can mean water at the surface, or that nobody recorded a figure. We exclude zeros from our ranges and tell you how many we excluded.

County-level figures

We compute median depth, depth to water and yield for every Idaho county directly from the state records, and publish the counts behind each figure. See the Canyon County page for the current numbers, or the county index to compare counties.

Treat a county median as orientation only. Canyon County alone contains wells under 50 feet and wells over 600 feet, so the median tells you what is typical, not what is likely on a particular parcel.

What this cannot tell you

Groundwater changes over short distances. A well 300 feet away can hit water at a completely different depth. Only a licensed Idaho well driller can give you a realistic expectation for a specific parcel, and only a written quote tells you the cost.