Monthly permit report
Where Drilling Is Heading: New Oil & Gas Permits by County, Last 30 Days
By OilPriceAPI · Published
1,257 oil and gas permits were recorded across nine states between September 25, 2026 and October 24, 2026, against 1,387 in the prior 30 days (August 26, 2026 to September 24, 2026): -130 (-9%). Weld County, Colorado and Martin County, Texas led, and the gains were concentrated in the Permian, the DJ Basin, Oklahoma and the Haynesville.
This report is for people who sell into drilling activity (water, sand, trucking, rentals), for landmen and mineral buyers watching where operators are filing, and for analysts who want county-level counts with the comparison window stated. Counts are permits by permit_date as each state regulator records them. The data capture was October 24, 2026.
What changed
- Martin County, Texas rose from 65 to 106 permits (+63%). Upton (33 to 59), Winkler (9 to 28) and Gaines (8 to 18) also rose. Reagan (51 to 22), Reeves (63 to 47) and Midland (59 to 49) fell. The Texas total was close to flat at 856 against 883.
- Weld County, Colorado was the busiest single county at 110 (from 94). It accounts for 110 of Colorado's 136 permits.
- Oklahoma rose from 58 to 84 and Louisiana from 25 to 40. Grady County, Oklahoma went from 2 to 18 and De Soto Parish, Louisiana from 5 to 15.
- Utah fell from 114 to 19, almost all of it Uintah County (85 to 16). Utah's latest record is dated October 19. Whether this is a slowdown or a reporting lag will show in next month's refresh; the numbers above are what the regulator has published so far.
Top 15 counties by new permits
Ranked by permits dated Sep 25–Oct 24. Five counties tied at 18, so all five are listed. Counties with a permit page are linked.
| # | County | State | Last 30d | Prior 30d | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Weld | CO | 110 | 94 | +16(+17%) |
| 2 | Martin | TX | 106 | 65 | +41(+63%) |
| 3 | Loving | TX | 73 | 66 | +7(+11%) |
| 4 | Upton | TX | 59 | 33 | +26(+79%) |
| 5 | Midland | TX | 49 | 59 | -10(-17%) |
| 6 | Reeves | TX | 47 | 63 | -16(-25%) |
| 7 | Ector | TX | 31 | 18 | +13(+72%) |
| 8 | Winkler | TX | 28 | 9 | +19(+211%) |
| 9 | Reagan | TX | 22 | 51 | -29(-57%) |
| 10 | Karnes | TX | 22 | 14 | +8(+57%) |
| 11 | Crane | TX | 18 | 27 | -9(-33%) |
| 12 | Glasscock | TX | 18 | 24 | -6(-25%) |
| 13 | DeWitt | TX | 18 | 12 | +6(+50%) |
| 14 | Gaines | TX | 18 | 8 | +10(+125%) |
| 15 | Grady | OK | 18 | 2 | +16(+800%) |
Top 10 operators
Operator names are the normalized names stored from the regulator filings. Subsidiaries are not rolled up to a parent, so a company that files under more than one name appears more than once in the full data.
| Operator | States | Last 30d | Prior 30d | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pioneer Natural Resources | TX | 82 | 60 | +22(+37%) |
| Diamondback Energy | TX | 79 | 49 | +30(+61%) |
| Ovintiv | TX | 41 | 4 | +37(+925%) |
| Occidental Petroleum | TX | 38 | 54 | -16(-30%) |
| Apache Corporation | TX | 28 | 12 | +16(+133%) |
| PDC Energy INC | CO | 24 | 14 | +10(+71%) |
| Noble Energy INC | CO, TX | 24 | 12 | +12(+100%) |
| Continental Resources | OK, TX | 22 | 14 | +8(+57%) |
| EOG Resources | OH, TX | 21 | 49 | -28(-57%) |
| WPX Energy Permian, LLC | TX | 21 | 0 | +21 |
State totals
| State | Last 30d | Prior 30d | Change | Source | Latest record |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Texas | 856 | 883 | -27(-3%) | Railroad Commission of Texas | 2026-10-21 |
| Colorado | 136 | 118 | +18(+15%) | Colorado Energy & Carbon Management Commission | 2026-10-24 |
| Oklahoma | 84 | 58 | +26(+45%) | Oklahoma Corporation Commission | 2026-10-20 |
| Pennsylvania | 51 | 72 | -21(-29%) | Pennsylvania DEP | 2026-10-14 |
| North Dakota | 41 | 65 | -24(-37%) | North Dakota Industrial Commission | 2026-10-19 |
| Louisiana | 40 | 25 | +15(+60%) | Louisiana DENR (SONRIS) | 2026-10-21 |
| Utah | 19 | 114 | -95(-83%) | Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining | 2026-10-19 |
| Ohio | 15 | 27 | -12(-44%) | Ohio DNR | 2026-10-19 |
| West Virginia | 15 | 25 | -10(-40%) | West Virginia GES | 2026-10-15 |
What is and is not in these numbers
The post was scoped to 14 states. Five were dropped because their latest record on the capture date was more than 14 days old, which would make a 30-day count misleading: Michigan (latest 2026-10-07), Kansas (latest 2026-10-08), Mississippi (latest 2026-10-08), New York (latest 2026-10-09), Virginia (latest 2026-10-09). New Mexico is not included because the OCD source carries no permit date, so a dated count is not available for it.
Texas counts include every permit type the RRC records: 788 new drills, 58 recompletions and 9 re-entries in the current window. The other eight states recorded new drills only. 307 Texas permits in the current window had no county name in the normalized record; their county was taken from the county code embedded in the API well number, which is the standard Census FIPS code. Permits filed in the last few days of a window are often published by the regulator after the capture date, so the most recent week tends to be revised upward on the next refresh. This is a count of permits, not of rigs or spuds, and it says nothing about prices.
Pull the same data from the API
The well-permits endpoint returns one row per permit with state, county, operator, permit type, date and source. It is included in the Scale plan. The request below reproduces the Texas count in this post (856 rows across 9 pages):
curl "https://api.oilpriceapi.com/v1/ei/well-permits?states=TX&start_date=2026-09-25&end_date=2026-10-24&per_page=100" \
-H "Authorization: Token YOUR_API_KEY"A free key can call the bounded preview, which returns up to 25 of the most recent permits for one state over at most 90 days:
curl "https://api.oilpriceapi.com/v1/ei/well-permits/preview?state=TX&days=30" \
-H "Authorization: Token YOUR_API_KEY"For state totals, top operators and a weekly trend in one call, use /v1/ei/well-permits/summary?days=30. Note that days=30 is a trailing window from the request date and will not match the fixed dates above exactly.
Related pages
Get new-permit webhooks for your states
Permit webhooks on the Scale plan deliver each new permit as the regulator records it, with state, county, operator, well name and location. The webhook filters by state; filter to the counties you work on your side when the payload arrives.