How the reports answer

1 What each report answers

Each report covers one parcel. The Rights report answers holding by holding, for each decreed water right and well permit on the property. Search is free, and shows the likely answers across a parcel's section, to 9 of the Land report's 10 questions. The Land report gives the parcel's own answers. Questions marked gated are held to the release gate in section 11.

The Land report asks only what applies to the parcel. A home, a lot or a business on a water provider's system is not asked about a household well, animals, the groundwater trend, splitting the land or what water adds to its price, and the report names the questions it left out and says why. A parcel is on a provider's system when it lies inside a town, or inside a provider's service area where the state has all but stopped granting wells, and no well of its own is on record. What stands on it is the county assessor's land use, or, where the assessor publishes none, whether an address or a building is recorded there. Five acres or more of cropland, irrigated land or an irrigation right makes it a farm, and a farm is asked every question.

Land report

For someone buying rural land: what water comes with it, what you can build on, and what to ask before you close.

1. What water will I legally have on the day I close? gated
2. Can I get a household well, and what will it cost all in? gated
3. Can I keep animals, a garden, horses? gated
4. Is the groundwater holding up?
5. Is it safe to drink? gated
6. Can I build here, and on what water? gated
7. Can I split it later?
8. Is anything about the water likely to change in the next five years?
9. What's land like this worth with water vs without?
10. What should I ask the seller, and put in the contract?

Development report

For the engineer or attorney on a project: how many homes the water supports, the paths to more, and the filings, with the rule behind each answer.

1. How many homes can this land support on water? gated
2. Which water paths exist, ranked by cost and time? gated
3. Is there a water provider that could serve it? gated
4. What will the county require to approve it? gated
5. Who's likely to object?
6. What's the timeline and the permit list? gated

Also includes the 10 Land questions and the 6 Rights questions, answered in a builder's terms, with a list of the filings and permits a project needs.

Rights report

For the owner of a water right or a well: what you hold, what could take it away, and the dates not to miss. Covers decreed water rights and well permits.

1. How much water can I actually use or sell? gated
2. Could I lose it, and by when? gated
3. How often will I get my water? gated
4. Is anyone filing nearby who could hurt me, and what's my objection deadline? gated
5. Am I in compliance? gated
6. What would it take to change its use or sell it? gated

2 How an answer is built

Each question is answered from conditions. A condition is one test the law sets, such as whether a lot is 35 acres or more, whether it sits in a designated groundwater basin, and whether a decreed right has diverted water in the last ten years. It reads the statute or rule that sets the test and the public records for the parcel, and returns a ruling.

An answer starts from the ruling of the question's main condition and takes in the others it depends on. Where an agency decides case by case, the answer counts that agency's decisions on land within 1 mile and says how many point the same way. Where wells nearby inform the answer, it gives their depth and yield within 1 mile. Nearby wells are grouped on a quarter-mile grid, so "within about 1 mile" can take in a well a little past it or leave out one just inside, and the parcel report's well table marks the wells the depth was read from.

Every answer states its basis:

State law decides this

A statute or rule settles the answer for this parcel.

From the public record

An agency's record settles it.

From decisions on nearby land

The agency's decisions on land nearby point one way.

Estimated from nearby records

Wells, samples or sales nearby support a likely answer.

The record doesn't settle this

The card says what would.

Every sentence an answer can print is written in advance, for each state and each outcome, and filled from the record. Each card lists the law it applied, with the words relied on, and the records it read, with the date each was loaded.

The answers a report shows are checked against each other before it is published. A well one card says the land has is the well the next card builds on, and land a provider serves is not told to drill. A report whose answers disagree is held back until the cause is fixed.

3 Documents read, and checked

Some records are documents rather than data: the water court's monthly resumes of applications, the statements of opposition filed on them, and the decrees the court entered. A model reads each one, and nothing it reads is kept unless the document says it. Every name, number and quote is matched against the document's own text, and a figure the text does not contain is dropped.

Where a person has read a document or a name, that reading outranks the model's. The reviewed lists are part of every build: the parties to objections, with spellings, households and estates joined and counsel and agents set apart; and the decrees' rulings on whether water left the land it irrigated. A daily check lists any name a report could print that no one has reviewed.

A county's rules are read from its current published code. Where a county does not publish them, or its current text cannot be confirmed, the answer says It depends, names what the county does publish, and says why.

4 Who is likely to object

The Development report asks who is likely to object to a water filing near the parcel. It reads the statements of opposition filed in the water court, each read for who opposed, on what grounds, which of their own rights they said were at risk, and how the case ended. An opposition is placed where the application it opposes is: the sections the application names for what it asks the court to decree, not the reservoirs or ditches it only mentions.

Each party is counted once. A household, its trust and its estate are one party, and so are the spellings of one name; lawyers and agents acting for a party are not parties. The answer names who has objected nearby and how often, and where the record says, on what grounds and how those cases ended, with the distance on the card. It describes who watches the water there; it does not predict an objection to any one filing.

5 Historical consumptive use

A Colorado water right that changes its use or place is limited to the water it historically consumed, not the amount on its decree. The Rights report estimates that figure for each irrigation right with a diversion record, and the water court decides the real one.

1. Diverted. DWR's monthly diversion records at the right's headgate.
2. Delivered. Less ditch and field losses, at the conveyance and application efficiencies of the state's consumptive use model (StateCU).
3. Needed. The crop irrigation requirement of the acres DWR mapped under the headgate, crop by crop, by the modified Blaney-Criddle method the water court hears. Where StateCU models the ditch, its figure; elsewhere computed from NOAA temperature and precipitation at the nearest station within 60 km, with StateCU's crop coefficients and growing seasons.
4. Consumed. Each month, the lesser of water delivered and water needed. A month's surplus is held in the soil, up to what the soil can store, for a later short month. Water already in the soil when the study period begins is not counted: it was diverted before the years being measured.

The estimate is the average over the most recent 20 years with a full irrigation season, a period that must include a dry year and a wet one; fewer than 10 such years is a thin record and the card says so. It is shown as a range: low and high take the low and high efficiencies and the smaller and larger mapped acreage, and the range always contains the estimate. Where several rights share a headgate, its water is credited day by day, since 2000, to the rights that were in priority under the call record, most senior first, each up to its decreed rate.

It is never Settled. Only a decree settles historical consumptive use, so the card is Likely at best and It depends on a short or unrepresentative record. It does not compute return flows, injury to other rights, dry-up obligations or the amount a court would let move, and it counts only the ditch's water: a crop also watered by a well consumed some well water that the ditch right cannot claim.

Checked against the state's model

On every ditch StateCU models on its own, the estimate is compared with the state's published supply-limited consumptive use over the years both cover.

Ditches with no well on the mapped ground, 10 or more full seasons in common. Where wells supplement a ditch, the state's figure includes the well water and ours reads lower by design.

The crop requirement alone, computed by our method, against StateCU's per acre:

Checked against the water court

Where a change decree states how much water per acre the court found a ditch historically consumed, the estimate for that headgate is compared with it. This reaches the Arkansas, Gunnison and San Juan, where the state publishes no model output. Each decree speaks for one right over its own study years and acres, so the table shows how far the estimate sits from what courts have found on a few headgates, not an error on any one of them.

6 Homes on Denver Basin water

Under most of the Denver metro area and the plains east and south of it lie six bedrock aquifers. The State Engineer allocates their water to the land above: each acre may withdraw 1% a year of the water recoverable beneath it, the aquifer's saturated sand thickness times its specific yield, over a 100-year aquifer life. The Development report counts the homes that water supports on the parcel.

1. Sand under the land. The State Engineer's presumptive net sand thickness for each aquifer under the parcel's section, from DWR's Denver Basin location tool. A site study can rebut it.
2. Water per acre. Net sand times the rule's specific yield, divided by 100 years: Upper and Lower Dawson 20%; Denver, Upper and Lower Arapahoe 17%; Laramie-Fox Hills 15%.
3. The county's standard. The parcel's acres times that, scaled to the years of supply the county requires, divided by the water it assumes per home.

homes = acres × Σ (net sand ft × specific yield) ÷ 100 × 100 ÷ years of supply ÷ AF per home

Each card prints this working with its own figures. For example, a 223.3-acre parcel in Elbert County:

Elbert County allows one home per 10 acres on a well and septic, so about 22 here: the water is not what limits this parcel.

The count is the water's limit, not the county's: zoning and well-and-septic density usually allow far fewer homes, and the card says so. It is Likely at best, because the sand figures are presumptive. Water from the shallowest aquifers near streams (not-nontributary) needs a court-approved augmentation plan before it can be used. A designated groundwater basin is the Ground Water Commission's, and a parcel a water provider serves gets the provider's answer instead.

7 Water from a provider

A parcel is served by a water system when it lies in an area the system serves in practice and no well of record is on it. For a served parcel, the Land report reads three things from the provider's own documents.

• Tap fee. What the provider charges for water to connect a new single-family home: its tap fee, system development charge, plant investment fee, water resource fee or cash in lieu of raw water, from its fee schedule or city code. Sewer, meter and permit fees are left out. Where the fee differs inside and outside a city, or by lot size, the report gives the one that applies to the parcel.
• Watering rules. The rule a household follows to water a lawn now, from the provider's drought page or its latest notice, with the date it took effect where the provider gives one.
• Lead service lines. What the provider's service line inventory lists for the line to the address, where it publishes one by address. Otherwise, the counts it reports to EPA, which do not say which addresses.

Every fee and watering rule is read by a person from the provider's own page or schedule, never from a news story or a list someone else compiled, and kept with the page's address and a line quoted from it. Each month the page is fetched again and the line looked for. A rule whose line has not been found in 62 days is no longer printed. Watering rules change with the season, so a summer page is never read as the rule in force after it ends.

Where a provider publishes no fee schedule, or no current watering rule, the report says so and gives the provider's phone and email from its record in the federal drinking water register.

8 Settled, Likely and It depends

Settled

The law or the public record decides the answer for this parcel.

Likely

The answer is estimated from nearby records or decisions. The card begins “Likely” and shows the evidence.

It depends

The answer turns on something the public record does not hold, such as a deed or the date a lot was created. The card states each outcome and what decides between them.

In a section's free Land summary, an answer that differs between parcels is marked Varies, with each answer and the number of parcels it covers.

9 Who decides

Every answer names who has the final say and the next step to take with them. For example:

• The Division of Water Resources, on a well permit
• The water court, on a decree, a change of use or a statement of opposition
• The division engineer, on calls
• The county, on a subdivision, after the State Engineer's review
• The deed and the title search, on what conveys at closing

A report reads the public record. It is not legal advice, and it does not replace the decision it names.

10 Who to contact

When a next step names someone, the card says how to reach them. Where one office is the right one for the land, it is shown in full: name, phone, email and website, with where it was read and when. Where the buyer chooses among many, the card lists them, ranked.

• County planning offices: read on each county's own website, and checked there every month.
• Town offices: the state municipal league's directory of its towns.
• Water systems: the state's community water system records and the federal drinking water register.
• Well drillers: the state's list of licensed well drillers, ranked by the wells each has drilled in the county since 2016.

Where we hold no contact, the card says so rather than leave the step without one.

11 The release gate

A gated question ships in Colorado only when its answer is Settled on at least 80% of the state's rural parcels. Rights questions are measured on every holding. A Likely answer does not count toward the bar.

Where the law, or a public record that does not exist, makes a Settled answer impossible, a confirmed exception lets a parcel count. Its card must give the likely answer and name the document that decides it. These are the exceptions in force in Colorado:

12 Records and datasets

Each report lists what is on record on the parcel and within 1 mile: decreed water rights, well permits, ditches, reservoirs and other structures, water court applications with their objection deadlines, oil and gas wells, flood zones, wildfire risk, irrigated land, public land and the bulk water stations haulers fill at. Each row gives its distance from the parcel and links to the agency's own page where there is one. The map draws wells, structures, oil and gas wells, streams, flood zones, irrigated land and public land.

Every dataset below is published by a public agency. Each report lists the ones it read, with their load dates.

Load dates as of October 9, 2026. A fixed reference is a dataset published once, such as the national stream network.

13 The download

A report downloads as one zip file:

• report.pdf: the report as published.
• answers.csv: every answer, with its confidence, basis, who decides and its sources.
• sources.csv: every law and record cited, with the words relied on and each dataset's age.
• rights.csv, wells.csv, structures.csv, filings.csv and oil-gas.csv: the records on and near the parcel, when the report lists any.
• holdings.csv, dates.csv, checklist.csv: the holdings, deadlines and documents to ask for, when the report has them.
• README.txt: the subject, the record date and what each file holds.

A report is published under a version and never overwritten, so the files always match the report of that version.

14 What the reports do not cover

• Title. A report does not search title or confirm who owns the parcel.
• Liens and encumbrances. A report does not search for them.
• Legal access. A report does not establish a right of way to the parcel.
• Appraisal. The Land report compares sales nearby with and without water. It does not value the parcel.
• Legal advice. Each answer names who decides; that decision is theirs.