Can You Still Drill a Well in Cochise County? The Willcox AMA, Explained

Short answer: yes. A domestic well on your own property is still allowed, still does not need a groundwater permit, and still does not need a meter.

Longer answer, and the reason this article exists: the information available online about wells in this basin is a mess. Some of it predates the Active Management Area entirely. Some of it — including material still live on a state domain at the time of writing — describes the 2022 ballot proposition that failed, without mentioning that the AMA was subsequently created anyway by administrative order. If you searched this two years ago and think you know the answer, you may not.

What happened, in order

In November 2022, Cochise County voters rejected a proposal to create a Willcox Active Management Area.

In October 2024, the Director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources initiated proceedings to designate one anyway, using a different statutory route — designation by the Director rather than by election. A public hearing was held in November 2024, the findings and order issued in December 2024, and the designation notices published in the first week of January 2025.

The Willcox AMA has existed since 8 January 2025. It is Arizona's seventh.

Am I in it?

The AMA follows the groundwater basin, not the county line, and Cochise County is split across three situations. From ADWR's own well registry data:

The Douglas AMA is older — it was created by voter election in Cochise County in November 2022, the same election in which the Willcox proposal failed.

What did not change for a homeowner

This is the part that matters most and gets the least coverage.

Arizona exempts wells with a pump capacity of 35 gallons per minute or less used for non-irrigation purposes. That exemption still applies inside an AMA. A new domestic exempt well does not need a groundwater right and does not need a permit. It is not metered and there is no annual reporting obligation on it.

What you do have to do

The statewide requirements apply regardless of AMA status:

• File a Notice of Intention to Drill (ADWR Form 55-40) before drilling. The authority it grants lasts one year; after that you file again.
• Use a licensed well-drilling contractor. Not optional, and not something to be creative about.
• Meet construction standards and file a completion report when the well is finished. Your driller normally handles this.
• Get county health approval and provide a site plan showing the well is not within 100 feet of a septic tank, drainfield or sewer line, on domestic parcels of five acres or less.

The Cochise County step people miss

For parcels of five acres or less, the application goes through Cochise County Development Services before it reaches ADWR. The county checks that the well site is at least 5 feet from all property lines and at least 100 feet from every septic component, sends an inspector to verify it, takes GPS coordinates, and then forwards the application to the state.

The county's published payment structure is $50 to the Cochise County Treasurer plus the ADWR filing fee.

How deep, actually

This is where public information is worst and where you can do much better than the cost-estimator sites. ADWR's well registry is public, and it records depth and static water level for registered wells. We pulled the exempt wells in the Willcox basin within Cochise County and grouped them by the year they were installed:

Narrowing to the Sunsites and Pearce area specifically, across 801 exempt wells: the median across all years is 400 feet, but the median for wells drilled since 2015 is 540 feet, with the middle half falling between 500 and 680. Recorded static water level at registration has a median of 232 feet.

Read the trend rather than the individual numbers. A well drilled in 1985 at 167 feet tells you nothing useful about what you would need to drill today. Groundwater levels in parts of this basin have dropped by as much as 400 feet between the 1940s and 2015, and ADWR has estimated that if all pumping stopped today the aquifer would take over 280 years to recover.

Cost, and why we are not giving you a number

Search for well drilling costs in Arizona and you will find pages quoting $5,000 to $20,000, and other pages quoting $20,000 to $50,000, and none of them will tell you how they got there. They are programmatically generated lead-capture pages. Several claim to carry current-year data and carry nothing of the kind.

The only figure we found from a source that will stand behind it is from the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center: drilling a well to 1,200 feet cost approximately $420,000 in 2017. That is an agricultural well — large diameter, high capacity — and it is not your number. We include it only because it is the one real published figure in the whole search result set, and to show you how far apart the honest data and the SEO pages are.

What actually determines your cost is depth, and depth is a local question. Get two or three written quotes from licensed drillers working this valley. Take the registry depths above to that conversation — a driller quoting you a 300-foot well in Sunsites in 2026 is quoting something other than what the recent data suggests.

Look up your neighbours first

Before you commit to anything, spend twenty minutes on ADWR's Wells 55 registry map. You can draw a selection around your parcel and get a table of nearby registered wells with their depths and water levels. Once you have a registration number you can pull the imaged file, which includes the driller's log — the actual record of what they hit and at what depth.

ADWR also maintains the Groundwater Site Inventory, a field-verified database with current and historic water level information.

This is the single highest-value free thing you can do before buying a parcel in this basin. It costs nothing and it is better information than the seller has.

What the AMA does change

Not much for a single household, quite a lot for the valley:

• Irrigation is capped. Only land legally irrigated in the five years before 23 October 2024 may continue to be irrigated. New irrigation acreage is prohibited without a grandfathered right, and the application deadline for those certificates was 8 April 2026 — that has now passed.
• Non-exempt wells need measuring devices and file annual reports.
• New subdivisions of six or more lots need a determination of Assured Water Supply to get plat approval and offer lots for sale. This is why AMA status matters to anyone thinking about splitting land.
• A management plan is being developed. The April 2025 draft proposed reducing groundwater overdraft by at least 50 percent by 2075.

The numbers behind the designation are worth knowing even if none of the rules touch you: annual overdraft over 100,000 acre-feet, 71 wells gone dry in a decade, more than 11 feet of land subsidence with the rate accelerating from 1.2 inches a year in 1996 to 2.8 inches a year in 2023, and more than 50 miles of earth fissuring recorded as of 2023.

That last one has direct consequences for where you build, and we covered it separately.

The realistic sequence

A well is a five-figure decision on a parcel you may have paid five figures for. Most people here do it in this order:

1. Look up neighbouring well depths on the registry.
2. Get written quotes from licensed drillers, priced against a realistic depth.
3. Start on hauled water and a tank, which gets you usable water in weeks rather than months.
4. Site the well and the septic together, respecting the 100-foot separation, before either goes in.
5. Drill when the budget is there, with the tank staying in place as backup — which is what you want anyway the first time a pump fails in July.

Test the water when you get it

Whether it comes out of your own well or off a hauling truck, test it. Arsenic occurs in Arizona groundwater and it is odourless, tasteless and invisible; a general water test strip panel will not detect it. Coliform is the other one to check, and a well that tested clean at completion is not a well that is clean five years later.

Retest after any work on the well, after any flood event that could have reached the wellhead, and otherwise annually.

Where we come into it

We do not drill wells — that is licensed work and we work alongside the drillers who do it. What we do is everything around the hole: rig access, the pad, the trench from wellhead to house, the tank pad, the pump house, and the water system that has to keep running while you wait for the well budget.

If you are trying to work out whether to drill now or haul for another year, that is a conversation worth having before you commit either way.