Land Buying1 min read

Water Rights Priority Date Is the Only Number That Matters

Colt Waverly

1 day, 19 hours ago

👁 38 views💬 2 replies

I used to think senior versus junior water rights was mostly a technicality — something lawyers worried about, not buyers. I was dead wrong, and it almost cost me access to the one creek that made a property worth owning.

I was looking at 80 acres in the Bitterroot drainage. Great riparian corridor, healthy willows, decent trout habitat. The listing showed water rights. What nobody volunteered — and what I didn't press hard enough on — was that the priority date on those rights was 1987. Every upstream neighbor with a pre-1960 date could legally dry that creek to nothing in a low water year, and in recent summers, they have.

I walked away, but barely. The next buyer didn't.

In the arid West, a water right without a strong priority date isn't really a water right. It's a maybe. Brokers treat all decreed rights like they're equivalent, and they are not.

Anybody else bought into a basin where junior status made your rights essentially worthless in practice?

#water rights #priority date #riparian land #western land buying #stream access

Join the Discussion

2 Replies

Jonah Pressley

1 day, 6 hours ago

Hard agree, and I'd add that even knowing the priority date isn't enough — you need to know what the right is actually *for*. My neighbor here in the Ozarks holds a water right that looks great on paper until you realize it's designated for livestock use only, not irrigation. Completely different legal bucket. I've been wondering how often buyers conflate 'there's a water right attached' with 'I can use this water however I need to.' Those are very different things.

Harlan Oeffner

20 hours, 28 minutes ago

Same lesson hits different on the High Plains, but it hits just as hard. Out here in southwest Kansas, surface water rights are mostly theoretical anyway — it's the groundwater allocation dates tied to your GMD permit that determine whether your well produces in July or sucks air. I've watched neighbors with 1990s-era permits get curtailed while a 1962 neighbor irrigated through drought. Creek or aquifer, the principle is identical: that date isn't a technicality, it's the deed within the deed.