600-Foot Deep Well Drilling Cost

The 600-foot deep-well threshold

Six hundred feet is where the residential drilling job stops being just "deeper than usual" and starts taking on industrial characteristics. The rig has to be larger. The drill string has more weight to handle. The casing string (if cased to a meaningful depth) has its own weight and stress dynamics. The pump and drop pipe weigh several hundred pounds in steady state and require purpose-built pulling equipment when they fail. Every line item on the bid gets a deep-well premium relative to the 400-foot bracket, and the bidding process becomes less standardised because fewer drillers are equipped to work routinely at this depth.

In areas where 600 feet is the typical residential depth (Rocky Mountain rural, interior Pacific Northwest, parts of Arizona and New Mexico), the local drilling industry is sized for the work and per-foot rates are roughly continuous with the 400 and 500-foot brackets. In areas where 600 feet is unusual (mid-Atlantic, much of the South), few drillers will quote the work and those that do typically price a premium of $10 to $20 per foot above their normal rate to cover the unfamiliar logistics.

The state-by-state well-log databases are the best indicator of whether 600 feet is "normal" in a given county. If the median completion depth in a five-mile radius is 580 to 620 feet, the local drillers are equipped and the work will price like a standard job. If the median is 350 feet and the 600-foot quote is an outlier, expect the higher premium and longer lead time.

Cost breakdown for a representative bid

Take a 600-foot well in western Wyoming, drilled through 100 feet of glacial outwash gravel into 500 feet of fractured sandstone and shale of the Frontier Formation. Six-inch steel casing is set 100 feet to seal off the alluvium and meet state surface-casing standards. The remaining 500 feet is open bore through bedrock. A 3 HP submersible pump is set at 580 feet on stainless-steel drop pipe. A 119-gallon pressure tank goes in a heated well-house adjacent to the wellhead.

Line items at 2026 rates. Mobilisation $1,400. Drilling 100 feet through gravel at $32 per foot ($3,200). Drilling 500 feet through sandstone-and-shale bedrock at $50 per foot ($25,000). Six-inch steel casing 100 feet at $16 per foot ($1,600). Grouting 60 feet, $850. Well cap with pitless adapter, $350. Development 10 hours, $1,200. Submersible pump 3 HP with control box, $3,500. Stainless-steel drop pipe 580 feet at $10 per foot ($5,800). Submersible cable 580 feet (8 AWG for the 3 HP), $1,600. Pressure tank 119 gallon, $1,600. Well-house construction with heat and electrical, $3,500. Trench from well-house to house 300 feet, $1,200. Permit and water test $450. Subtotal: $51,250. With 10 percent contingency, $56,375. That is a typical upper bid for rural western Wyoming at this depth.

Drilling alone ($28,200) is 55 percent of the subtotal at this depth, down from the 65 to 70 percent share at 400 to 500 feet. The reason is that pump, drop pipe, electrical, well-house and trench all cost more at this depth and their combined share grows. The pump-and-electrical-and-tank package alone is $12,500, larger than the 400-foot version by $5,000.

Why drilling time scales more than linearly

A 600-foot well does not take 50 percent longer to drill than a 400-foot well in the same geology; it usually takes 65 to 80 percent longer. The reason is drill-string handling time. At 400 feet, the drill string is about 20 sections of 20-foot drill pipe; adding or removing each section takes 15 to 20 seconds at the rig. At 600 feet, the string is 30 sections, each taking 30 to 60 seconds to handle because the deeper string is heavier and slower to thread. Multiply across multiple bit changes, the casing setting trip, and the final pull-out, and a 600-foot well takes an additional half-day of rig time beyond what depth alone would predict.

This is why drillers in deep-well markets price a fourth rate tier above 500 feet: not because the rock is harder (it is the same rock the bit was chewing at 400 feet) but because the rig is spending more time handling drill string and less time actually penetrating. The per-foot rate at 600 feet in granite typically runs $58 to $68, compared to $52 to $62 at 400 feet in the same rock.

On bids that look surprisingly low for the depth, ask the driller how they will handle drill-string changes and how many sections of pipe they will have on site. A 600-foot bore needs 30 sections of drill pipe plus spares; if the rig only carries 20 sections, the driller is planning to drill in stages with downtime between stages to swap pipe, which lengthens the project and can affect bore quality.

Drop pipe, pump and pressure tank at 600 feet

The pump system at 600 feet is at a different cost tier than at 400. Several reasons:

Pump HP. The standard residential spec at 600 feet is a 3 HP submersible. Three horsepower lifts water through 600 feet of head plus friction at 12 to 18 gpm peak demand. A 2 HP pump can do it on paper but is undersized for a typical 4 to 6 person household and short-cycles under demand. The 3 HP pump costs $700 to $1,200 more than the 2 HP and consumes 30 to 40 percent more electricity per gallon, but the longer pump life and reduced cycling pay back the difference within five to ten years.

Drop pipe. At 600 feet, galvanized steel drop pipe has a real risk of failure at the threaded couplings (the cumulative weight of pipe-plus-water-plus-pump approaches 800 pounds at the surface coupling). Most installers in deep-well markets spec stainless steel drop pipe at this depth for the longer service life and the better fatigue resistance at the couplings. The stainless premium is $4 to $6 per foot over galvanized; at 580 feet of drop, that adds $2,300 to $3,500 to the bill. Worth it for the 40 to 50 year service life vs 20 to 30 for galvanized.

Submersible cable. The 3 HP motor at 230V requires 8 AWG submersible cable at 600 feet to keep voltage drop below the NEC limit at start-up. Cable runs $3 to $4 per foot installed. The 580-foot run is $1,750 to $2,300, materially more than the 10 AWG used at 400 feet.

Pressure tank. At this pump HP and depth, the standard tank is 119 gallons (with 38 gallons working drawdown) rather than the 86 gallon used at 500 feet. Bigger tank, less cycling, less pump fatigue. Tank cost $1,500 to $1,800. The 119-gallon tank takes up roughly twice the floor space of a 44-gallon tank, so a well-house or dedicated mechanical room is often needed.

Well-house and freeze protection

In Rocky Mountain and interior PNW country where 600-foot wells are common, the wellhead and pressure tank are usually in an above-ground well-house rather than a basement. This is partly because the well is typically 200 to 500 feet from the residence on rural lots, and partly because the deep wells in these regions sit in cold winters where the freeze depth is 4 to 6 feet and a buried pitless adapter alone is not sufficient frost protection.

A well-house construction adds $2,500 to $5,000 to the project: insulated frame structure 6x8 to 8x10 feet, concrete pad, electrical service, heat (typically a thermostatically controlled space heater on a low setpoint), plumbing run to the residence below frost depth, and an access door. The pressure tank lives in the well-house; the controller and pump electrical are mounted on an interior wall. This is standard infrastructure in deep-well rural country and worth budgeting from the start.

For lots within 50 feet of the residence with a basement, the pressure tank can go indoors and the well-house cost can be avoided. But many rural deep-well lots position the well 200+ feet from the house for setback compliance (50 to 100 ft from septic, 25+ ft from buildings, often well-considered placement for drainage and access for future pump pulls), and the well-house becomes mandatory.

Yield and the cistern alternative

At 600 feet, the yield-vs-cost analysis is consequential. A 600-foot well producing 6 to 12 gpm is a perfectly normal residential supply with no need for storage. A 600-foot well producing 1 to 3 gpm is a marginal supply that benefits from a buffer cistern. A 600-foot well producing less than 1 gpm is below the threshold at which most homeowners would accept the well as a primary supply; at that yield, water hauling or cistern delivery is usually combined with the well as a hybrid system.

For homeowners who have not yet drilled and are looking at a 600-foot bid, model the cistern alternative. A 6,000-gallon underground concrete or fibreglass cistern installed costs $8,000 to $15,000. Water hauling at $200 per 1,000 gallons delivered, with refills every 14 to 20 days for a 4-person household, runs $3,500 to $5,500 per year. Over 20 years that is $70,000 to $110,000 in operating cost on top of the install. A 600-foot well at $40,000 installed plus $500 per year operating cost is $50,000 over 20 years. The well wins on the 20-year economics in most scenarios, but the cistern option is worth modelling explicitly rather than dismissing.

Cross-references and adjacent depths

For the per-foot rate, well drilling cost per foot 2026. Shallower bracket, 500-foot well drilling cost. Next depth up, 800-foot well drilling cost. For Rocky Mountain pricing context, cost by state. For pump configuration details, pump installation costs. For pressure tank sizing, well pressure tank cost.