How deep are home wells around Knoxville?

Knowing roughly how deep your well is helps with almost every well question: how much pipe and wire a pump replacement involves, whether a dry spell could leave the pump uncovered, and how much disinfecting bleach the well needs. Your own driller's report is the best answer. If you don't have it, the state's well records give a good picture of what's normal in your county.

What the state's driller records show

Tennessee requires drillers to file a well report with TDEC, and those records are public through TDEC's water well map viewer and its statewide GIS service. We pulled every record marked as a new residential well in the six counties this site covers (queried October 22, 2026). Medians are the middle value; the "middle half" column shows where half of all wells fall.

Across all six counties, the 30,982 home well records have a median depth of 265 feet. Sevier County alone accounts for about half of them.

Share of home wells reporting less than 3 gallons per minute at completion: Knox 9%, Blount 8%, Anderson 19%, Sevier 12%, Union 26%, Grainger 15%. TDEC's rule of thumb is that 3 to 5 gallons a minute or more usually covers a household of four to six.

Some caution with these numbers: they are what drillers reported, some records go back many decades, and TDEC itself warns that older entries can have unreliable locations. They describe the typical well, not yours.

Why depths swing so much here

The USGS Ground Water Atlas describes East Tennessee's Valley and Ridge as rock that was folded and then broken along closely spaced thrust faults, so the same water-bearing limestone and dolomite units (the Knox, Chickamauga and Conasauga groups) repeat across the landscape. Carbonate rock sits mostly under the valleys, while ridges are capped by sandstone, siltstone and cherty dolomite. Water travels through fractures, bedding planes and openings dissolved by slightly acidic groundwater, and the USGS says most of that movement happens within about 300 feet of the surface. A driller who hits a good fracture may stop at 150 feet; a neighbor on the same road may go past 400 looking for one.

Casing: the part of the well you can see

TDEC's construction standards say a well drilled into bedrock gets watertight steel casing down to 19 feet or 5 feet into the top of the rock, whichever is deeper, and that most wells in Middle and East Tennessee need steel casing. Typical home wells here have casing about 6 5/8 inches across. In the records above, median casing depth runs from about 42 feet in Anderson County to 82 feet in Blount County, a sign of how thick the weathered soil and broken rock above solid bedrock can be.

Finding your own well's record

• Look on the casing for a metal tag. TDEC asks owners never to cut the casing down, partly because the ID tag goes with it.
• Search the TDEC water well map viewer near your address.
• Or call your TDEC field office at 1-888-891-8332 with the Driller Tag number and ask for a copy of the driller's report.

With depth and water level in hand, a licensed installer can plan a pump replacement or diagnose a well that keeps running dry much faster.

Good questions

How deep is a typical well near Knoxville?

State driller records put the median new home well at about 240 feet in Knox County and 265 feet across the six surrounding counties, with roughly one in five going deeper than 400 feet.

Why is my well deeper than my neighbor's?

In East Tennessee's fractured limestone and dolomite, water comes from cracks and dissolved openings rather than an even layer. Two wells a few hundred feet apart can hit water at very different depths.

Is my well's record public?

Yes. TDEC says private well records are public, and you can look them up on its water well map viewer or request the driller's report from a field office.