Texas Septic Permit Authority by County (2026)

Texas has no single septic permitting office. Authority is delegated county by county to 444 local “authorized agents” (counties, cities, river authorities, and health districts), and in 49 counties there is no local agent at all, so permitting runs through a TCEQ regional office instead. Filing with the wrong desk is the most common and most expensive procedural mistake a Texas property owner makes. This page tells you which desk is yours.

Why this is confusing in the first place

Texas delegates on-site sewage facility (OSSF) permitting under Health & Safety Code Chapter 366, so the answer to “who permits my septic system?” depends on your parcel, not your county.

A county, a city, a river authority, or a public health district can apply to TCEQ to become the “authorized agent” for a defined area. Most did. Three patterns cause nearly all the resulting confusion.

1. City limits carve-outs. In 81 counties, more than one authority operates. Bexar County permits most of its territory, but Elmendorf, Hill Country Village, Shavano Park, and Hollywood Park each run their own programs inside their city limits. Bowie County covers everything except the City of Texarkana.

2. River authorities. Lake and reservoir zones are often permitted by a river authority rather than the county. In Wood County, property inside the Lake Fork Reservoir project boundary is permitted by the Sabine River Authority: same county, different agency, different forms. The Lower Colorado River Authority covers designated lake areas across several Hill Country counties. Brazos, Trinity, Sabine, and Upper Neches river authorities all hold agent status at some point.

3. Water-frontage rules that ignore lot lines. Travis County is the sharpest example: Austin Water regulates any property with water frontage on Lake Austin or its tributaries, regardless of how the lot or the drainfield is arranged.

The 49 counties with no local authorized agent

In these counties no local government took on the program, so TCEQ’s regional offices handle permitting directly.

Borden, Briscoe, Cochran, Collingsworth, Cottle, Crockett, Dickens, Floyd, Hall, Hardeman, Irion, Kent, King, Lipscomb, Motley, Oldham, Roberts, Shackelford, Sherman, Sterling, Stonewall, and 28 others.

These are, with few exceptions, the state’s least populous counties, and several authorized fewer than ten systems last year. If you own land in one, call TCEQ’s OSSF program first, and expect a slower, more remote process than a metro county’s portal.

How to find your permitting office

Work the sequence in order: your county page, then city limits, then reservoir boundaries, then a phone call.

1. Start with your county page on this site. Each of the 254 carries its primary permitting authority with phone, address, and the jurisdiction it actually covers. Browse counties.
2. Check whether you’re inside a city limit or extraterritorial jurisdiction (ETJ). If you are, the city may run its own program. County GIS address lookups usually answer this in a single search.
3. Check for a lake or reservoir boundary. If your property fronts a major reservoir, call the river authority before assuming the county has you.
4. Call before you file. Every office on this list will tell you in one phone call whether the parcel is theirs. That call is free; filing with the wrong agency is not.

Download the full directory

The complete list is free: all 254 counties, the primary permitting authority, phone number, office address, and how many authorities operate in each county, as a CSV.

Get it: email hello@nearbyseptic.com and we will send texas-septic-permitting-authorities.csv. No signup, no gate.

Use it however you like. Cite it as: Nearby Septic, “Texas Septic Permitting Authorities by County,” derived from the TCEQ OSSF Authorized Agent directory, pulled July 30, 2026.

If you work for a county office and your entry is wrong, a moved office, a new number, a jurisdiction change, email corrections@nearbyseptic.com and we will fix it and credit you.

What this list does and doesn’t tell you

It tells you which office holds OSSF authority for each county, its published contact details, and whether additional authorities operate inside that county.

It does not tell you which authority covers your specific parcel. That depends on city limits, ETJ boundaries, and reservoir project boundaries that no statewide dataset resolves. It also does not carry fees, which each agent sets independently and revises on its own schedule. Our county-by-county fee index lists the fees we have read from each office’s published schedule, and says so plainly where we have not.

Currency: refreshed quarterly. Agent designations change when a city adopts or drops a program, so if you are reading this months later, the phone number is likelier to be stale than the jurisdiction.

Sources & Methodology

Every contact and count on this page comes from TCEQ’s own OSSF authorized-agent records, queried for all 254 counties on July 30, 2026.

We ran TCEQ’s OARS lookup for every Texas county and captured each agent record returned: name, area served, office location, mailing address, primary contact, phone, email, office hours, status, and the county’s order document reference. Counties returning no agent are recorded as regional-office jurisdictions rather than left blank.

Where a county has multiple authorities, we designate a “primary” for display using a documented rule: the county-level office, if one exists; otherwise, the agent whose area of service covers unincorporated territory; otherwise, alphabetically. The others stay in the dataset rather than being discarded.

• TCEQ, OSSF Authorized Agent directory (OARS county lookup), all 254 counties pulled July 30, 2026
• TCEQ, “On-Site Sewage Facility Program Contacts,” accessed July 30, 2026

Full data practices: how we verify. Statewide permitting volumes and trends: Texas septic systems by the numbers.

Looking for a licensed provider rather than a permitting office? Every provider we list is matched to a current TCEQ license. Start with your county.