Pennsylvania Well Records · Well logs
Pennsylvania well logs
Every time a well is drilled in Pennsylvania, the driller files a completion report — the well log — with the Pennsylvania Groundwater Information System (PaGWIS), published by the PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. We hold 651,238 of them and rebuild this index weekly, so you can find one by address instead of by record number.
✓ Verified against PaGWIS · 2026-10-12
Well logs are filed by location, not by house number. Enter any Pennsylvania address and we'll pull the recorded wells around it — about 65% of Pennsylvania well records carry a mapped location, and the state describes those positions as approximate - only about one in eight comes from GPS, while most were placed from a street atlas or a paper well inventory. Records with no location are still counted in the county figures but cannot be plotted.
Free address lookup Full property report — $49What's in a Pennsylvania well log
Not every filed report carries every field — older logs are thinner, and what the state captured changed over the decades. This is the actual coverage across all 651,238 records, so you know what to expect before you look anything up.
| Field | What it tells you | Records with it | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Original log document | A direct link to the PaGWIS copy of the filed log itself. | 651,238 (100%) | |
| Driller | The licensed company that drilled the well and signed the log. | 576,545 (89%) | |
| Date completed | When the well was finished and the log filed. | 565,044 (87%) | |
| Total depth | How deep the hole was drilled, in feet. | 453,121 (70%) | |
| Mapped location | Coordinates, so the log can be found by address instead of by record number. | 411,833 (63%) | |
| Tested yield | Gallons per minute the well produced on the driller’s pump test. | 336,960 (52%) | |
| Street address | A street address on the filed report (varies a lot by state and era). | 312,546 (48%) | |
| Static water level | How far below the surface the water stood at rest. | 204,472 (31%) | |
| Drilling method | Rotary, cable tool, auger, and so on. | 34 (0%) |
When Pennsylvania's wells were drilled
Dated logs by decade of completion (565,028 of 651,238 records carry a usable completion date). The shape of this chart is mostly the history of the filing requirement, not of drilling — thin early decades mean the logs weren't kept, not that nobody drilled.
| Decade | Logs filed | |
|---|---|---|
| 1850s | 11 | |
| 1860s | 5 | |
| 1870s | 5 | |
| 1880s | 16 | |
| 1890s | 38 | |
| 1900s | 395 | |
| 1910s | 642 | |
| 1920s | 967 | |
| 1930s | 1,188 | |
| 1940s | 1,871 | |
| 1950s | 4,562 | |
| 1960s | 21,583 | |
| 1970s | 42,092 | |
| 1980s | 119,255 | |
| 1990s | 128,028 | |
| 2000s | 109,573 | |
| 2010s | 86,846 | |
| 2020s | 47,951 |
Three ways to find a well log here
- By address — the free lookup maps an address to the wells recorded around it. This is what most people want: "how deep is the well on the place I'm buying."
- By county — each county page carries the median depth, water level and yield computed from every log filed there, plus the drillers working it.
- By driller — every log names the company that drilled the well, so the 736 Pennsylvania drillers in our directory each have a profile built from their own filed logs.
Well logs by county
See all 67 Pennsylvania counties →
Where these records come from
All of it is public record from the Pennsylvania Groundwater Information System (PaGWIS) — the state's official inventory of water wells, maintained by the Bureau of Geological Survey (gis.dcnr.pa.gov/pageode). We don't hold anything the state doesn't publish. More on that database and what a filed record carries: PaGWIS well records. What we add is that the records are indexed by location, the statistics are computed the same way in every county, and the whole thing is refreshed weekly. Our filters and the exact computation are on the methodology page (statistics use PaGWIS water wells; wells recorded solely as monitoring, observation, geothermal, injection or oil-and-gas holes are excluded, as are the few records the state labels a tunnel, drain, sinkhole or pond; depths 0-5,000 ft).
Common questions
Yes. Pennsylvania drillers are required to file a completion report for each well, and those reports are kept by the Pennsylvania Groundwater Information System (PaGWIS), published by the PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. Anyone can look them up. This site is an independent index of that public record — we re-read the source and recompute every page weekly.
Well logs are filed by location, not by street address, so you search the map rather than a house number. Enter the address on our free lookup and you'll see the recorded wells around that spot — about 65% of Pennsylvania well records carry a mapped location, and the state describes those positions as approximate - only about one in eight comes from GPS, while most were placed from a street atlas or a paper well inventory. Records with no location are still counted in the county figures but cannot be plotted. Each one shows its depth, static water level, tested yield, and a link to the original filed log.
The oldest dated log in our copy was completed in 1850; the newest is from 2026. Coverage thins out the further back you go — older wells were often never filed, and filing requirements tightened over time.
Most likely it was never filed. Wells drilled before the state's reporting requirement — and hand-dug or unpermitted wells — have no log at all. It also happens that a log exists but its recorded location is off, in which case it will show up under a neighboring property. Neither is something we can fix from the source data, and we'd rather say so than invent a record.
The useful parts for a buyer or a homeowner: how deep the well is, how high the water stands in it, how many gallons per minute it produced when tested, what the driller hit on the way down, and who drilled it. Together those say whether the well is likely to keep producing and what a replacement would cost.
The property report pulls every recorded well near an address — depths, water levels, yields, drillers , and links to each original filed log — as one printable summary for due diligence.
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