Which states are running out of groundwater, a new ranking names 12 and the government confirms 8 down 16.5 feet on average

Which states are running out of groundwater

A ranking published in September 2026 puts real numbers behind a question a lot of people are already asking, which states are running out of groundwater. It names 12 United States states facing the worst groundwater pressure, water stored underground in layers of rock, sand and clay called aquifers and pulled up through wells. Most of the weight in that ranking sits on the High Plains aquifer, which lies under 8 of the 12 named states, Texas, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota. The government study behind that shared aquifer is real, and its combined figure for all 8 states holds up, an average water level decline of 16.5 feet and a loss of about 286.4 million acre feet of water held underground, from about 1950 to 2019, the United States Geological Survey reports. An acre foot is the amount of water needed to cover 1 acre of land 1 foot deep. That report contains its own breakdown by state, but the breakdown could not be extracted from the government file for this article. So the state figures below come from the ranking that reported them, not from a reading of that table done for this article.

Texas tops the ranking, and its own water agency, the Texas Water Development Board, confirms the scale. It measures water levels down more than 300 feet in several Ogallala Aquifer areas over the last 50 to 60 years, and states that withdrawals exceed recharge, the water nature adds back through rain and snowmelt seeping down, across much of the aquifer. About 95% of everything pumped from the aquifer supports irrigated farmland, the same agency reports.

South Dakota is the 1 exception, its share of the aquifer gained 0.5 feet and 0.2 million acre feet in storage through 2019. It lands in the ranking for a different reason, population in the Black Hills area grew 73% from 1980 to 2022, straining a water system built for fewer people, the ranking reports.

Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist at Arizona State University, put the imbalance in 1 line, as The Queen Zone quotes him saying.

Groundwater is disappearing 2.4 times faster than the surface water.

Jay Famiglietti, hydrologist, Arizona State University, as quoted by The Queen Zone. Source 1.

Groundwater pressure reaches beyond the High Plains

California is not part of the High Plains system at all, yet it depends on groundwater for approximately 41% of its water supply in an average year and up to 60% or more during a drought, its Department of Water Resources reports. The department states that land sinking, most extensive in parts of the Central Valley, occurs as aquifers empty faster than they refill.

The same pattern shows up nationally. The United States Geological Survey reports that groundwater depletion across the country totaled approximately 1,000 cubic kilometers between 1900 and 2008, with the yearly pace nearly tripling by the end of that window, from an average of 9.2 cubic kilometers a year to nearly 25 cubic kilometers a year between 2000 and 2008 alone.

For utilities, farmers and regulators in these states, what matters is not the ranking itself but what stands behind it. A federal agency and 2 state agencies each independently confirm the same imbalance, more water is being pulled out of the ground than nature puts back, and the government reports the pace is speeding up, not slowing down.