Boerne TX Water Restrictions 2026

Current water restrictions in Boerne, Texas

Boerne has been watering one day a week for so long that the schedule has become part of the town's rhythm. City of Boerne Utilities moved its roughly 20,500 residents into Stage 2 Water Restrictions on August 7, 2023, and as of mid-July 2026 the city has never lifted them. That is coming up on three straight years of mandatory one-day-per-week irrigation — through two more summers of drought, a slow aquifer recovery, and, in a very Hill Country twist, a severe flood that prompted the city to issue a disaster declaration on July 15, 2026.

A word of caution if you have seen Boerne described as a "Stage 4" city: that label needs unpacking, because two different agencies restrict water here and they use similar stage names. The City of Boerne Utilities — the water provider for homes and businesses inside the city — is at Stage 2. The Cow Creek Groundwater Conservation District, which regulates wells across Kendall County, declared its own Stage 4 drought emergency on July 18, 2023, at the bottom of the worst stretch of the drought. That district-level emergency cut Boerne Utilities' allowable groundwater pumping by 40 percent and banned lawn irrigation for well owners in unincorporated Kendall County. The district has since stepped back down as the Trinity Aquifer recovered — to Stage 3 in July 2025, and to Stage 2 as of this summer. So in mid-July 2026, both the city utility and the groundwater district sit at Stage 2, and the Stage 4 chapter is (for now) history.

The numbers explain the caution that remains. Cow Creek's monitor wells averaged 1,191.82 feet of water-level elevation on June 30, 2026 — still 10.9 feet below the June average, though a world better than July 2023, when the district's Middle Trinity average had sunk to 1,177.20 feet, fifteen monitor wells hit record lows in a single month, and the Guadalupe River at Comfort ran at 0.0 cubic feet per second against a historical July norm of 84. Canyon Lake, one of Boerne's three supply legs, stood at 66.5 percent full on July 16, 2026, its highest mark of the year after spring and summer rains. Better, not healed — which is why the one-day schedule stays.

Your assigned watering schedule

Under Stage 2, every Boerne Utilities customer — residential and commercial — gets exactly one irrigation day per week, assigned by the last digit of the street address:

• Address ends in 0 or 1: Monday
• Address ends in 2 or 3: Tuesday
• Address ends in 4 or 5: Wednesday
• Address ends in 6 or 7: Thursday
• Address ends in 8 or 9: Friday

On your designated day, sprinklers and irrigation systems may run only from 7 to 11 in the morning and again from 7 to 11 at night. The midday window is closed because Hill Country afternoons routinely evaporate a third or more of what a sprinkler throws. Weekend sprinkler use is prohibited for everyone, no matter what digit your address ends in — a deliberate choice in a town whose population swells with visitors every Saturday.

The most important exemption: hand watering is allowed any time, any day, under Stage 2. If you are standing there with a hose or a bucket, you can keep a vegetable bed, young tree, or stressed shrub alive on a Sunday afternoon without violating anything. That safety valve matters, and it is the first thing that disappears if conditions worsen.

It helps to know the whole ladder, because Boerne's ordinance defines four stages and the city has used the upper rungs of the conversation before. Stage 1 keeps one day a week but opens generous hours (midnight to 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. to midnight). Stage 3 stretches the cadence to one day every other week in the same morning and evening windows. Stage 4 bans lawn sprinklers entirely, at any time — under it, customers may hand-water non-lawn vegetation only, on their designated day, in the 7-to-11 windows. When you read that and remember the district's 40 percent pumping cut in 2023, the seriousness under the small-town charm comes into focus.

Fines and penalties

Boerne keeps its enforcement language simple and its ceiling high: city ordinance authorizes citations for water-restriction violators with fines of up to $1,000 per violation. There is no published schedule of escalating amounts — no $50 first offense that doubles on the second. Each citation can reach the four-figure maximum, and each day or incident of unauthorized watering is its own violation. In practice, utility staff lead with education, and most residents comply once they understand the address-digit system; but a sprinkler system blasting a sidewalk on a Saturday in a town this small does not stay anonymous for long.

Reporting is resident-driven. The city maintains an online water-violation reporting form on its website, and Utilities Customer Care takes calls at (830) 249-9511 (option 1) during business hours, with an after-hours line at (830) 248-1633 for urgent issues like main breaks or a stuck irrigation controller flooding a street. The utility office sits at 447 N. Main Street, a block off the tourist stretch, which means the people writing the rules watch the town's water behavior on their walk to lunch.

Note that if you are on a private well outside the city limits, the enforcement authority is different: the Cow Creek Groundwater Conservation District ((830) 816-2504) administers its own drought rules for Kendall County wells, with its own stage triggers tied to district monitor wells.

Boerne's water supply and source

Boerne runs on a three-legged supply, and the drought of 2022–2023 stressed every leg at once. By the utility's own accounting, only about 25 percent of the city's water comes out of the ground — Trinity Aquifer wells regulated by Cow Creek GCD. The other three quarters is surface water: Boerne City Lake, the small reservoir on Cibolo Creek northwest of town, and Canyon Lake water delivered under contract with the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority (GBRA). The GBRA supply carries the city's baseline needs year-round; City Lake and the wells are the surge capacity that meets peak summer irrigation demand.

That design is smart until everything fails together, which is what a Hill Country drought does. In July 2023, the Guadalupe River — Canyon Lake's feed — stopped flowing entirely at Comfort. Boerne City Lake depends on rain falling on a modest Cibolo Creek watershed northwest of the city, and the utility has noted that rain has to land in exactly that footprint to help; a storm over downtown fills rain barrels and shuts off irrigation sensors but adds nothing to the lake. And the Trinity Aquifer, unlike the prolific Edwards that supplies San Antonio thirty miles south, is a stingy, slow-recharging formation — when Cow Creek's wells were dropping to record lows, the district's Stage 4 emergency slashed the city's permitted pumping by 40 percent at the exact moment customer demand was setting records.

The 2026 picture is recovery in progress. Canyon Lake's climb back to 66.5 percent restores confidence in the GBRA leg. District monitor wells have regained roughly 14 feet since the 2023 bottom but remain almost 11 feet below normal for June. The upper Guadalupe basin around Kerrville has seen the same whiplash of flood and shortfall. Three years of Stage 2 is Boerne's hedge against the next flash drought arriving before the aquifer finishes refilling from the last one.

A tourist town watering one day a week

Here is Boerne's particular tension: this is one of the Hill Country's marquee day-trip towns, and the visitor economy never went on a watering schedule. The Hill Country Mile fills with San Antonio and Austin plates every weekend; restaurants run dishwashers, hotels wash linens, and splash-happy kids line Cibolo Creek's banks — while the residents hosting all of it have been allotted one sprinkler day a week since the summer of 2023. Commercial customers are on the same one-day schedule for irrigation, so the lawns and streetscapes that frame the postcard get no special treatment, but indoor tourism use is simply demand the system has to carry. Meanwhile the town keeps growing: Boerne added roughly 2,700 residents between the 2020 census (17,850) and the 2024 estimate near 20,500, each new rooftop arriving into the same constrained supply.

Then came July 2026, which delivered the Hill Country's signature hydrological insult: severe flooding in a town still under drought restrictions. The city's July 15 disaster declaration for flood damage landed while the Stage 2 watering ordinance stayed on the books — and both were rational at once. Thin limestone soils and steep creek gradients mean a violent storm mostly runs off; Cibolo Creek can rage for a day while the Trinity Aquifer, recharging through slow fracture networks, barely notices. Flash flood and flash drought are the same coin here, flipped. It is why Boerne's utility managers do not lift restrictions when it rains hard — they lift them when monitor wells and reservoirs say the water actually stayed.

HOA rules during water restrictions

Texas Property Code §202.007 is the statute that keeps Boerne's homeowners associations from working against the city's ordinance. It bars a property owners' association from prohibiting drought-resistant landscaping and water-conserving natural turf, from restricting rainwater-harvesting systems, and from blocking efficient irrigation equipment like drip lines. An HOA in the subdivisions off Highway 46 or along Fair Oaks Parkway can require you to submit a xeriscape plan for approval — and can insist the result is not a yard of bare gravel — but it cannot deny drought-resistant landscaping outright.

Texas has no standalone "brown lawn" statute that flatly forbids an HOA from citing dormant grass. What protects Boerne homeowners in practice is the interaction of HOA authority with city law: an association cannot demand that you irrigate on days or at hours the city has made illegal, and with one watering day a week for three years running, a summer-dormant Bermuda lawn is the predictable, lawful outcome of compliance. If your HOA sends a letter about turf color, respond in writing, cite the Stage 2 ordinance and your assigned day, and keep records showing you water within your window. Associations that push past that point are effectively demanding an ordinance violation, which is not a position that survives scrutiny.

Lawn survival guide for Boerne

A Boerne lawn has to live on one deep drink a week, thin caliche-laced soil, and 100-degree stretches. The grasses that can do it are the warm-season trio suited to the Edwards Plateau's edge:

Make the single day count. Run your zones long enough to put down about an inch — set a tuna can under a sprinkler to time it — and split the total between the 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. windows if runoff starts before you finish, which it will on Boerne's shallow soils. Deep, infrequent watering pushes roots down; a daily-watered lawn grows shallow roots that fail the first week the schedule tightens.

Mow high — three inches or more for Bermuda under stress — and leave clippings to shade the crown. Skip summer nitrogen; fertilizer forces growth the water budget cannot support. And accept dormancy as strategy, not failure: a tan Bermuda lawn in August is asleep, not dead, and will green up within days of a soaking rain. Use the anytime hand-watering allowance for the things that genuinely die without water — young shade trees, foundation plantings, the tomato bed — and let the turf ride out the season. The Texas water restrictions page tracks how neighboring utilities handle the same trade-offs if you are comparing notes across the region.

Frequently asked questions

What stage of water restrictions is Boerne in right now?

As of mid-July 2026, City of Boerne Utilities customers are under Stage 2 Water Restrictions, in continuous effect since August 7, 2023. That means one assigned watering day per week, mornings 7–11 and evenings 7–11, with no weekend sprinkler use.

Is Boerne under Stage 4 restrictions?

Not currently. The Stage 4 declaration people remember came from the Cow Creek Groundwater Conservation District in July 2023 — a county-level groundwater emergency that cut the city's well pumping by 40 percent and banned lawn watering for rural well owners. The district stepped down to Stage 3 in July 2025 and stands at Stage 2 this summer, matching the city utility.

What day am I allowed to water?

Your day follows the last digit of your street address: 0–1 Monday, 2–3 Tuesday, 4–5 Wednesday, 6–7 Thursday, 8–9 Friday. Saturdays and Sundays are off-limits for sprinklers citywide.

Can I water by hand outside my assigned day?

Yes. Under Stage 2, hand watering with a hose or bucket is allowed at any time on any day. That is the tool for keeping trees, gardens, and new plantings alive between irrigation days.

What is the fine for watering on the wrong day?

City ordinance authorizes citations with fines of up to $1,000 per violation. Violations can be reported through the city's online form or to Utilities Customer Care at (830) 249-9511.

Didn't Boerne just flood? Why are restrictions still on?

The city declared a disaster for severe flooding on July 15, 2026 — and kept Stage 2 in place. Flood runoff races down Cibolo Creek and the Guadalupe without meaningfully recharging the slow-filling Trinity Aquifer, and district monitor wells remained nearly 11 feet below their June average at the end of June 2026. Restrictions track aquifer and reservoir recovery, not single storms.

Do the city's rules apply to my private well?

No — but the Cow Creek Groundwater Conservation District's rules do. Wells in unincorporated Kendall County follow the district's drought stages, currently Stage 2, with its own triggers and enforcement at (830) 816-2504.

What days can I water my lawn in Boerne?

By last digit of address: 0–1 Mon, 2–3 Tue, 4–5 Wed, 6–7 Thu, 8–9 Fri; no weekend sprinkler use Hand watering with a shut-off nozzle is typically allowed any day during permitted hours.

What time can I water in Boerne?

Watering is allowed 7:00–11:00 a.m. and 7:00–11:00 p.m. on assigned day; hand watering allowed anytime. Watering outside these hours is a violation even on your assigned day.

When will water restrictions end in Boerne?

Current Stage 2 Water Restrictions — City of Boerne Utilities restrictions are in effect through Until rescinded — in effect since August 7, 2023. Monitor https://www.ci.boerne.tx.us/1947/Water-Restrictions for the latest status.

How do I report a water waste violation in Boerne?

Contact City of Boerne Utilities at (830) 249-9511 or visit https://www.ci.boerne.tx.us/1947/Water-Restrictions. Most utilities accept online reports and respond within 48 hours.