How many gallons per minute is a good well?

Where the benchmark comes from

About 6 gallons per minute is the figure commonly cited for a single-family home. It comes from estimating peak demand — several fixtures running at once — rather than from daily totals, which is why it sounds high against the few hundred gallons a household actually uses in a day.

It is a planning benchmark, not a standard, and no Idaho agency sets a minimum yield for a private well.

What Idaho wells actually report

Across 123,761 Idaho records that report a yield, no county has a median below the household benchmark. Canyon County reports the highest median at 50 gpm and Clearwater the lowest at 10 gpm.

But the median hides the tail. In 17 of 44 counties the 10th-percentile well is under 6 gpm, meaning roughly one well in ten came in below what a single household is usually planned around.

Scale it to what you are actually doing

The benchmark covers a house. Livestock, irrigated pasture, a shop or a second dwelling all push the requirement up, and a yield that is comfortable for a family can be nowhere near enough for five acres of pasture.

Note also that irrigating acreage from a domestic well is limited in Idaho — the exemption covers household and livestock use plus irrigation of up to half an acre. Beyond that you are into water-right territory regardless of what the well produces.

A low yield is a design problem, not always a dealbreaker

Low-yield wells are routinely made to work with storage: a cistern or a large pressure tank fills slowly through the day and delivers at household rates when taps open. That has a cost, and it is a cost worth knowing before you make an offer rather than after.