The record
What the drillers filed, counted by county.
Two states publish every water well their drillers reported, one bounding box or one query at a time — which answers questions about a point and not about a county. These pages do the arithmetic nobody else does: 867,834 reports, aggregated, with the method stated and the limits named.
Covered states
55 counties
California
478,261 completion reports from the Department of Water Resources. Median county well 220 ft. California’s reports also carry the water level recorded at completion and the yield the driller tested, so these pages can report both — as distributions of what was filed, never as a forecast.
176 counties
Texas
389,573 driller’s reports from the Texas Water Development Board. Median county well 275 ft. The Texan index carries no water level at all, so those pages speak only of how far the hole went — and say so. They live on Beneath Texas Water Report, which answers the same question for a single address.
The same test, two states
Take each county’s first and last filing period with enough reports to support a median, and ask which way it moved. The two states answer differently enough that any single story about “wells getting deeper” is wrong about one of them.
California
54 deeper
Out of 55 counties: 1 steady, 0 shallower. Close to unanimous.
Texas
112 steady
Out of 176 counties: 51 deeper, 13 shallower. The majority have not moved.
What it does not mean
A count, not a cause
Completion depth follows where people drill, what they are drilling for and which aquifer they are drilling into, as well as what is happening to the water. These pages count filings. Attributing the difference to one cause would be a claim the records cannot carry.
Free, and meant to be quoted
Every figure on these pages names its source, its method and the date it was read, so a number lifted from here stays checkable wherever it lands. Beneath sells the narrower answer — what the ground under one boundary is worth investigating — not the public record it is built on.