How much less groundwater Texas will have by 2080
Texas adopted a new 50 year state water plan on July 23, 2026, called the 2027 State Water Plan, and it puts a real number on a question many Texans are already asking, is Texas running out of water. The Texas Water Development Board, the state agency that writes this plan every 5 years, is not describing a state running dry everywhere. It finds that Texas total existing water supply, the amount the state can actually count on delivering during a severe drought, falls 10% between 2030 and 2080. That drop is not spread evenly across water sources. Surface water barely moves, down 2%. Groundwater, water stored underground in layers of rock, sand and clay called aquifers and pulled up through wells, falls 19% over the same 50 years, from 7.5 million acre feet a year in 2030 to about 6.1 million acre feet a year in 2080. An acre foot is the amount of water needed to cover 1 acre of land 1 foot deep, the unit states use to measure large water supplies.
Reuse and aquifer storage and recovery are not shown because both hold steady or grow over the same period, according to the same table.
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| Ground water | 19 |
| Total existing supply | 10 |
| Surface water | 2 |
The Board chairwoman, L Oreal Stepney, ties that number to why the state does this work at all.
The TWDB understands the importance and responsibility of publishing the state water plan every five years to help ensure sufficient water supplies during drought of record conditions.
L Oreal Stepney, Texas Water Development Board chairwoman. Source 2.
The Ogallala Aquifer drives most of the decline
The state technical page for the Ogallala Aquifer explains why groundwater is falling faster than every other part of the supply. The aquifer stretches beneath 49 counties across the High Plains of Texas, an area of 36,293 square miles, and about 95% of everything pumped from it supports irrigated farmland. Water levels in some areas have already fallen more than 300 feet over the last 50 to 60 years, because withdrawals exceed recharge, the water added back into an aquifer by rain and snowmelt seeping down, across most of the aquifer. Reading the full water plan directly, rather than any summary of it, surfaces a detail that does not show up in coverage of the plan. Region O, the planning region that covers most of the Ogallala Aquifer in Texas, already lowered its own future irrigation demand projections, not because farmers there want to pump less water, but because the plan expects the water simply will not be there to pump by the later decades it plans for.
Figures are rounded to 1 decimal from the acre foot totals the plan itself states, 7,524,781 in 2030, 6,678,387 in 2050 and 6,096,221 in 2080.
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| 2030 | 7.5 |
| 2050 | 6.7 |
| 2080 | 6.1 |
What the drop costs, and what the plan spends to avoid it
Groundwater already supplies about 60% of everything Texas uses water for today, according to a separate account the Board gives of its groundwater science grant program to local conservation districts. A 19% cut to the reliable share lands squarely on the source Texans already depend on most. The plan states that a severe drought could cost Texas 91 billion dollars a year in lost income by 2030 if nothing new gets built, rising to 177 billion dollars a year by 2080, with up to 979,644 jobs at risk that year. To offset that, the plan recommends about 6,700 water management strategies and roughly 3,000 projects, at a total cost of 174 billion dollars in 2023 dollars, up from 81 billion dollars for the prior 2022 plan.