Where this data comes from

Everything on this map is public record from the Texas Railroad Commission. Nothing is estimated, scraped from a broker, or bought from a data vendor. This page explains exactly what we pull, how often, and — the part most sites skip — what it can't tell you.

The source

The Railroad Commission of Texas is the state agency that regulates oil and gas. Every operator who wants to drill a well in Texas files a drilling permit with them, and the RRC publishes the resulting records as a file that anyone can download. That file is our only source for the map.

We read the same file a landman reads. The difference is that we read it every night, for all 254 counties, and put it on a map instead of charging you for a lookup.

How often it updates

Once a night, at about 2:15 a.m. Central. The job downloads that day's file, reads it, checks it, and updates the map before morning. A monthly summary goes out on the first of each month to anyone subscribed to a county.

Permits appear here as soon as they appear in the RRC's file. We don't add a delay, and there's no paid tier that sees them sooner — that isn't a promotion, it's just how the site is built.

What happens if the file looks wrong

Before anything is published, the night's parse has to pass five checks: a plausible number of permits, dates that are actually dates, coordinates that land inside Texas, enough permits carrying coordinates at all, and county codes we recognise.

If any check fails, nothing is published. The previous day's data stays on the map and we get an email. We would rather show you yesterday's record, correctly, than today's record, mangled. Every original file is also kept exactly as downloaded, so any number here can be traced back to the government file it came from.

Why some pins are hollow

This is the honest part, and it's the thing to understand before you read anything into a pin's position.

• Solid pins are exact. The RRC published real surveyed coordinates for that permit, and the pin sits where the well is going.
• Hollow pins are approximate. The RRC published no coordinates for that permit, so we place it at the center of its county, nudged slightly off its neighbours so you can click it. The county is right. The spot is not. A hollow pin is not near the place it appears to be near.

Coordinate coverage varies night to night; in a recent file, roughly four permits in ten carried them. When the RRC later publishes coordinates for a permit, its pin becomes solid on the next nightly update automatically — nothing on our end has to be corrected, because we never wrote the approximate location down as though it were real.

One consequence worth stating plainly: hollow pins never count toward distance. When you drop a pin on your acreage and we tell you how many permits are within 10 miles, that count uses exact coordinates only. Including county-center guesses would let us report a bigger, more exciting number that happens to be made up.

What this data is not

A drilling permit is an operator telling the state they intend to drill. It is a strong signal about your area, and it is not a complete picture of it. This file does not contain:

• Ownership. Nothing here says who owns the minerals under any tract, including yours.
• Lease terms. Whether acreage is leased, to whom, and on what royalty is not in this file.
• Production or revenue. Permits are filings, not barrels. A permitted well may never be drilled.
• Prices paid. What minerals actually sold for nearby is not public record in Texas the way a home sale is.

About the estimates

Question this page didn't answer? The questions page covers what permits mean, what to do about an offer letter, and the vocabulary — or ask us there directly and a real person answers.