If your house runs on a private well, no agency is checking your water. Not the EPA, not the state, not the county. That single fact decides most of what follows, and it is why this section exists.
Everything here is written for the household that owns the well: what to test and how often, what your well’s own drilling record already tells you, what treatment equipment is worth buying, and what happens when the power goes out and the pump stops. Our well coverage is Texas-first, because that is where our on-site sewage coverage runs deepest and where the rules governing both are written down in one place.
Because Texas sets a minimum distance between an on-site sewage facility and a water well, and the EPA keeps a page on what happens when that distance is wrong.
The EPA keeps a page devoted to exactly this pairing. It puts the hazard bluntly: “Wastewater contains harmful bacteria, viruses, and nutrients that could make you sick if it comes in contact with your drinking water well.” And it describes the pathway that makes the two systems one problem rather than two: “Groundwater flowing underneath a drainfield captures any remaining contaminants released from the septic system.” The same page names the conditions that raise the risk, and every one of them is a rural property description: a shallow well in permeable soil, a well sitting downgradient of the system, several systems close together, and a well or a system that has not been looked after.
Texas answers that risk in rule. Under 30 TAC §285.30(b)(4), the site evaluation behind a new system has to identify every feature the system could contaminate and show the separation requirements on the site drawing. The distances themselves sit in paragraph (10) of §285.91, titled “Table X. Minimum Required Separation Distances for On-Site Sewage Facilities.” We do not print that table on this page. It is published as an attached graphic rather than as rule text, and our Texas septic regulations guide is the page that maps Chapter 285.
One thing we will not do here is estimate how many Texas households run a well and an on-site system together. We looked for a published count and did not find one. TCEQ counts authorizations to construct; the Texas Water Development Board holds drilling reports; neither joins the two at the household. Until somebody publishes that number, we do not have it.
Private wells sit outside the Safe Drinking Water Act, and no state program fills the gap.
The EPA says so in its own words: “The quality and safety of drinking water from private domestic wells are not regulated by the Federal Government under the Safe Drinking Water Act nor by most state governments and laws.” That is not a small population being left out. Per the same page, updated 25 August 2026, “Around 15 percent of the U.S. population (over 43 million) rely on private wells as their source of drinking water.”
In Texas the Texas Water Resources Institute puts it at scale: “There are over one million private water wells in Texas, which provide water to 2,230,000 citizens – equal to the population of Houston” (August 2024).
So the testing schedule is yours to keep. The EPA’s baseline is one test a year: “Test your private well annually for total coliform bacteria, nitrates, total dissolved solids, and pH levels.” It adds four triggers for testing sooner, and three of them describe an ordinary year on rural property. Test when there are known groundwater problems nearby. Test after flooding, land disturbance or new construction near the well. Test after you replace or repair any part of the well system. Test when the water changes odor, color or taste.
Texas A&M AgriLife runs the Texas Well Owner Network, which holds screening events where well owners bring in a sample. Two published descriptions of the panel exist and they are not identical, so here are both. The TWRI article describes screening for nitrate, presence or absence of coliform and E. coli bacteria, and arsenic in some parts of the state. The program’s own Well Informed page lists fecal coliform bacteria, nitrates and salinity, followed by an hour explaining the results and wellhead protection. The panel varies by event. Neither page publishes a fee, so we are not quoting one.
Texas requires a State Well Report on every well a licensed driller completes, and one copy was supposed to go to the owner.
The rule is 16 TAC §76.70. “Every well driller who drills, deepens, or alters a well, within this state” must file a State Well Report “not later than the 60th day after the date of the completion or cessation of drilling, deepening, or otherwise altering the well.” It goes to the department electronically through the Texas Well Report Submission and Retrieval System, and copies go to “the owner of the well or the person for whom the well was drilled” and to the groundwater conservation district in which the well sits, if there is one.
Most people who bought a house with a well never saw that copy. You can often find it anyway. The Texas Water Development Board’s Submitted Driller’s Reports database is fed by the same submission system, and it holds drilling and plugging reports from 2003 to the present. Reports mailed in before the database existed sit instead in TCEQ’s Water Well Report Viewer.
What is on that report is the difference between guessing and knowing. Total depth. Casing depth and diameter. The formation the driller logged on the way down. Static water level on the day it was completed. Pump setting. That is the input to the decisions that follow: what size pump the well can carry, whether a treatment system is sized right, and, per the EPA’s own risk list, whether yours is one of the shallow wells that needs more distance from a drainfield than the minimum.
Two licenses also matter before you hire anyone. TDLR licenses Well Drillers and Pump Installers in Texas under Texas Occupations Code Chapters 1901 and 1902 and 16 TAC Chapter 76, with separate endorsements for the work involved: water wells, monitor wells, injection and dewatering wells and closed-loop geothermal on the drilling side; single phase, 3 phase, turbine and windmill, pump jack or hand pump on the installing side. Check the license and its endorsement before the truck arrives, not after. That is the same standard we apply to every provider on this site, and how we verify sets it out.
Buy equipment against a lab result, not against a symptom.
Hardness, iron, sulfur smell and sediment are four different problems with four different fixes, and the cost of guessing is a softener that does nothing about the smell. Our water softener guide for well water carries the Texas hardness figures, the sizing method and the picks.
One Texas rule catches people out on a septic property. Under 30 TAC §285.37(b)(1), a water softener whose backwash discharges to an on-site sewage facility must regenerate using a demand-initiated regeneration control device, and it must carry a label on the outside of the unit, readable on inspection, naming the company that installed it. That is a rule about the softener, enforced through the septic system. The softener guide covers what it means at purchase.
A well is an electrical appliance. When the power stops, the water stops.
The pressure tank is the part most people replace blind. It usually stands in an unconditioned shed or pump house, which is why our well pressure tank guide reads the temperature limit on every spec sheet and works through drawdown sizing before brand.
Backup power is the other half. A city household in a long outage may get a boil notice. A well household gets no water at all until the pump has power, and an aerobic septic system loses its compressor in the same moment. Our generator guide for well pumps carries the outage figures, the motor starting-watt data and the transfer switch rules.
Both guides sit in supplies, alongside the septic side of the same property.
The guides linked below are the ones that are live. The rest are questions we intend to answer, not pages that exist. No dates, because a date we miss is worse than no date.
| Question | Status |
|---|---|
| Which water softener suits Texas well water, and how to size it | Published |
| What size water softener a household needs, worked as grain-capacity math | Published |
| Salt-free versus salt-based softeners, and which one a well household should buy | Published |
| Which well pressure tank to buy, and what size | Published |
| Which generator will actually start a well pump | Published |
| What to test well water for, where to send a sample, and how to read the result | Published |
| How the main well water treatment methods compare, and which problem each one solves | Not yet published |
| How submersible, jet and other well pumps differ, and how to choose | Not yet published |
| What well pump repair and replacement involve | Published |
| What coliform bacteria and nitrate in a well actually mean, and what to do next | Published |
| How a well and an on-site sewage facility share one lot without contaminating each other | Not yet published |
Until those land, the closest thing we have to well-and-septic-together coverage is our guide to septic service in rural Texas, and the county pages under Texas.
Not by default, and not the water quality. A septic inspection and a well inspection are separate scopes with separate fees. Our septic inspection cost guide covers what the septic side includes.
Annually, per the EPA, for total coliform bacteria, nitrates, total dissolved solids and pH, plus a retest after flooding, after any repair to the well system, and any time the water changes taste, color or smell.
The water is not. The work is. TDLR licenses the drillers and pump installers under 16 TAC Chapter 76, and the driller has 60 days to file a State Well Report. Nothing in that chain tests what comes out of your tap.
It depends on the distance, the depth of the well, the soil and which way the groundwater moves. The separations Texas requires between a system and the features around it sit in Table X of 30 TAC §285.91(10), and counties can be stricter. Ask the permitting authority for the county the property sits in, and pull the well report to find out how deep the well actually is.
Federal framing comes from three EPA pages, each cited with its own last-updated date: Private Drinking Water Wells (updated 25 August 2026), Protect Your Home’s Water (updated 26 February 2026) and Septic Systems and Drinking Water (updated 7 August 2025). Texas licensing and reporting rules were read from the current text of 16 TAC §76.70 and TDLR’s own December 2025 program summary. The Submitted Driller’s Reports description is TWDB’s. The Texas well count and the screening panel come from Texas A&M AgriLife and the Texas Water Resources Institute, dated August 2024, quoted as published.
We print no separation distance on this page. The Texas table that holds those distances is published as a graphic rather than as rule text, and we did not retrieve it this pass. We also print no count of Texas households running a well and an on-site system together, because no source we found publishes one.
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