Idaho irrigation water withdrawals
15.73 million acre-feet
Fresh water withdrawn for irrigation in Idaho per year, 2010 (estimate)
−15.2% since 2005 (18.54 million acre-feet); −17.7% since 2000 (19.12 million acre-feet); −31.8% since 1985 (23.06 million acre-feet)
Source: U.S. Geological Survey, Estimated Use of Water in the United States: Irrigation Withdrawals. Data period 2010. Status: estimate. Retrieved September 8, 2026.
What the number tells us
Fresh water withdrawn for irrigation in Idaho per year: 15,726,788 acre-feet in 2010 (an estimate). Fresh groundwater and surface-water withdrawn for irrigation per year, converted from USGS's published million-gallons-per-day figure.
Historical data
Source: U.S. Geological Survey, Estimated Use of Water in the United States: Irrigation Withdrawals. Retrieved September 8, 2026.
Data table (6 rows)
| Period | Idaho (acre-feet) |
|---|---|
| 1985 | 23,063,351 |
| 1990 | 20,926,512 |
| 1995 | 14,615,708 |
| 2000 | 19,118,725 |
| 2005 | 18,539,477 |
| 2010 | 15,726,788 |
Source
- Organization
- U.S. Geological Survey
- Dataset
- Estimated Use of Water in the United States: Irrigation Withdrawals
- Geography
- Idaho (statewide total, summed from county-level source files)
- Time coverage
- 1985-2010
- Update frequency
- Every 5 years
- Published
- not stated
- Retrieved
- September 8, 2026
- Original file
- https://water.usgs.gov/watuse/data/
- Methodology
- https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/accessing-water-use-data
- License
- Public domain. U.S. federal government work.
- Our copy
- usgs-water-use, built by
scripts/fetch-usgs-water-use.py
Caveats
- USGS publishes withdrawals in million gallons per day (Mgal/d), a unit this project's schema does not carry; values here are converted to acre-feet per year using a 365-day year and 325,851.427 gallons per acre-foot (1 Mgal/d = 1,120.14 acre-feet/year).
- USGS titles this series 'Estimated Use of Water'; county figures are compiled estimates, not metered totals, and are combined here by simple addition across Idaho's 44 counties.
- Covers irrigation of crops and, from 2000 on, golf courses, combined into one figure; figures include both groundwater and surface-water sources but exclude saline water and reclaimed wastewater reuse.
- 2015, the most recent circular year, is not included: USGS's 2015 county file is republished only on sciencebase.gov, whose robots.txt states it blocks all automated access by default, so it was not fetched. If USGS mirrors that file onto water.usgs.gov, which does allow automated access, it can be added.
- publisherUpdated is omitted: each of the six years here comes from a separate Water Use Circular published years apart (the 2010 circular, for example, was published in 2014), so the dataset as a whole has no single release date.
Data
Download the full dataset behind this page as CSV or JSON, or browse the data catalog. Cite this page as Understand Idaho, “Idaho irrigation water withdrawals”, https://understandidaho.com/water/irrigation-withdrawals/, retrieved on the date you read it.