Private well water testing at property sale: which states require it

For each US state whose statute or health department states a position: whether private well water must be tested when a home is sold, what must be tested for, and who is responsible. Four of the thirteen states here require it by law — New Jersey's Private Well Testing Act (seven named parameters, as a condition of sale), Oregon's ORS 448.271 (the seller tests for arsenic, nitrate and total coliform and reports the results), Rhode Island's RIGL 23-1-5.3 (eight analytes, prior to sale) and Maryland's Real Property 10-713 (since 2024, and the duty is the purchaser's, waivable in writing). The rest state that they do not: Virginia, Minnesota, Vermont, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Florida and Louisiana each say so in their own words, several while noting that the requirement a seller actually meets is the lender's or the county's — Minnesota names the lending institution and Dakota County in the same paragraph, and Washington's health department points at the county and the lender rather than at the state. Connecticut requires notice that testing material exists, not a test. Answers 'do I have to test the well water to sell my house in [state]', 'what does [state] require well water to be tested for at closing', and 'is a well test required for the buyer's loan or by law'. States whose authority states nothing get no record, and a duty to disclose a past test is not a duty to test.

The data

Where this came from

Every record above links the page it was taken from and quotes the sentence that states it. These are the 13 sources this dataset was assembled from.

• portal.ct.govhttps://portal.ct.gov/dph/-/media/departments-and-agencies/dph/dph/environmental_health/private_wells/pdf/for-real-estate-professionals---educational-materials-concerning-private-well-testing.pdf
• floridahealth.govhttps://www.floridahealth.gov/environmental-health/private-well-testing/index.html
• ldh.la.govhttps://ldh.la.gov/page/real-estate-testing-requirements
• mgaleg.maryland.govhttps://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Laws/StatuteText?article=grp&section=10-713&enactments=false
• health.state.mn.ushttps://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/environment/water/wells/disclosures/wellsatpropertytransfer.html
• pub.njleg.state.nj.ushttps://pub.njleg.state.nj.us/Bills/2000/PL01/40_.PDF
• oregonlegislature.govhttps://www.oregonlegislature.gov/bills_laws/ors/ors448.html
• webserver.rilegislature.govhttps://webserver.rilegislature.gov/Statutes/TITLE23/23-1/23-1-5.3.htm
• tn.govhttps://www.tn.gov/environment/program-areas/wr-water-resources/water-quality/well-water.html
• healthvermont.govhttps://www.healthvermont.gov/environment/drinking-water/new-drilled-well-testing-what-you-need-know
• vdh.virginia.govhttps://www.vdh.virginia.gov/environmental-health/real-estate-transfer-faq/
• doh.wa.govhttps://doh.wa.gov/community-and-environment/drinking-water/contaminants/testing-your-water
• dnr.wisconsin.govhttps://dnr.wisconsin.gov/topic/Wells/RETransfer.html

Machine-readable

• data.jsonThe whole dataset — every record with its source URL and source quote.
• Open Knowledge Format bundleOne JSON object per line — every record's frontmatter and quoted span exactly as it is held here, in one fetch.
• data.csvThe same records as one flat table, for a spreadsheet or a dataframe. The last four columns are the source URL, the quoted sentence it was read from, the date we last checked it, and which columns are our reading rather than the page's words.
• How this is made and checkedWhat "verified against source" does and does not mean.

From your own code

Same records, same quotes, without scraping the page: refsource is on PyPI and npm. Each value comes back carrying the URL it was read from and the sentence on that page that states it — .source and .quote sit on the value itself rather than in a side channel, so the checking step is available instead of skipped.

pip install refsource
refsource lookup well-water-testing-at-property-transfer state=Connecticut

npx -y refsource lookup well-water-testing-at-property-transfer state=Connecticut

Set your AI assistant up to use this

Two files and no account. Put this in .mcp.json at the root of your project — Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code and Codex all read that file — and your assistant can look this dataset up instead of recalling it. The server is remote, keyless and read-only.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "referencesource": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://referencesource.org/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Add to Cursor · or, on the command line: claude mcp add --transport http referencesource https://referencesource.org/mcp --scope project

Then one line in the project's CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, so the assistant knows when to reach for it:

When a question needs "Private well water testing at property sale: which states require it", call the referencesource MCP server at https://referencesource.org/mcp (tool `search_records`, dataset_slug `well-water-testing-at-property-transfer`) instead of answering from memory — every record it returns carries its source URL and a verbatim quote from that page.

What each tool does, and the servers built over single registers: Connect your AI assistant.

13 records. last verified against source 2026-09-29. due for re-check by 2027-08-18.

Licence. unknown