What a Texas drilling permit means for mineral owners

Published September 23, 2026.

A drilling permit is the first public sign that somebody intends to drill, and it is the single most misread document in the whole of the public record. It is worth knowing exactly what it is, because a permit a mile from your tract and a permit on the unit your tract sits in mean completely different things to you.

A permit is an application, not a well

An operator that wants to drill in Texas files a Form W-1 with the Texas Railroad Commission, the state agency that regulates oil and gas. The form is formally an application for a permit to drill, recomplete or re-enter, and it names the operator, the lease or unit, the well number, the county, the field, the proposed depth and the location.

Two words on the Commission’s records do different jobs. A permit that has been filed has been submitted and is pending. A permit that has been issued, or approved, has been granted, and only then may the operator drill. The gap between the two is usually days to a few weeks.

In the Commission’s drilling permit records each application carries a status number, such as 918469, and an approved permit also carries its own permit number. Those numbers are how a filing is looked up later, and they are worth writing down when you see one.

Two facts about permits surprise people. Many permits are never drilled at all: plans change, prices move, acreage trades, and a permit lapses when its expiration passes without a well. And a permit is not a promise of a payment to anybody, including the operator.

Where the well would go

A modern Texas permit describes two places, and confusing them is the most common mistake.

The surface location is where the hole is collared, the pad built and the equipment set. The bottom hole location is where the producing part of the well ends up. For a horizontal well these can be a mile or two apart, because the wellbore turns and runs laterally through the target formation.

That geometry is why a well can be drilled from a pad you can see from the road and produce from under land a long way from it, and equally why a well whose pad you never see can be producing directly beneath your acreage. The permit’s plat shows the path, described against the survey and abstract the tract sits in, which is how Texas land is identified rather than by township and range.

The permit also names the lease or unit it is drilled to serve. That name is the thing to compare against your own paperwork, because it is what will later appear on a division order and on a check stub.

What usually follows

A permit that turns into a producing well normally passes these markers, months apart.

• The well is spudded, which means drilling has begun.
• The well is drilled, cased and completed, which for a horizontal well includes hydraulic fracturing over a period of weeks.
• The operator files a completion report, Form W-2 for an oil well or Form G-1 for a gas well, which is the first public record that the well is finished.
• Production is measured, sold and reported to the Commission, which is why production postings for a lease appear some months behind the calendar.
• The operator or purchaser works out who owns what in the unit and sends division orders.
• Payment begins, and Texas sets deadlines for it in section 91.402 of the Natural Resources Code.

From permit to first payment is commonly a year or more, and longer where title work is complicated or a pipeline connection is not ready. A well that is drilled and then left waiting for completion, which the industry calls drilled but uncompleted, can sit for a year with nothing further filed.

What a permit near your land means, and does not

Near is not in, and this is the distinction that matters most.

A permit on a tract that is not yours, and not pooled with yours, pays the owners of that tract. Being half a mile away does not entitle you to anything, however directly the wellbore points at you. A lateral that actually runs underneath your own tract is a different matter, and where that tract has never been pooled it raises the unleased or unpooled owner’s question rather than a question about distance.

What changes that is pooling. If your tract has been pooled into the unit the well serves, you share in that well by acreage, no matter where in the unit the hole was drilled. If it has not, you do not. The companion guide Pooling and units in Texas covers how a tract joins a unit, how to tell whether yours did, and what happens when it did not.

A nearby permit is still worth knowing about, for reasons that have nothing to do with a payment. It says an operator believes there is something worth drilling in your neighborhood. It tells you which formation is being targeted and by whom. And it is often the first hint that the acreage around you is being assembled, which is the sort of thing an owner would rather learn from the public record than from a letter.

Reading the county page

This site publishes a page for every Texas county, rewritten each Monday from the Railroad Commission’s records for the week just ended.

A county page opens with a single sentence of counts: how many permits were filed, how many issued, how many amended or cancelled, how many completions were reported, how many leases changed operators and how many production postings arrived. Below that it names the most active operators of the week with the number of filings each. Then it lists the notable filings one by one, each with what happened, the lease and well number, the operator, the permit or API number and the date, in the same words the weekly county digest email uses. The filings with coordinates can be shown on a map, and the page keeps a list of recent weeks so you can read backwards.

A quiet county gets a page too, saying plainly that nothing new was filed that week. If a night’s collection did not complete, the page says that instead of pretending the week was quiet, which is a distinction worth trusting a source for.

What to do next

When you see a permit that names a lease or unit you recognize, write down the operator, the lease name, the permit number and the date, and check whether that unit is one your tract was pooled into. Your old division orders and your lease are where that answer lives.

If the permit names a unit you believe your tract belongs to but you have never been paid on it, that is a question for the operator’s owner relations department first and for a Texas oil and gas attorney if the answer does not satisfy you. A CPA is the right person for the tax side once payments begin.

NetAcre finds your minerals on the county roll and tells you when a permit is filed near a lease you have claimed, free.