Texas RRC districts — the complete list, with 6E, offices and counties

This is the RRC district list: thirteen oil and gas districts plus a statewide code, as the Railroad Commission of Texas prints them and as its production system numbers them, with the district office behind each and the counties it contains. It is a reference page. RRC districts and counties is the explanation of what a district is and why the code is text; this is the table you come back to.

Every value below is read out of the Commission's own district and county directories, which ship inside the monthly production release and are published here as the district directory and the county directory, and as three code sets you can join to.

The thirteen districts, plus statewide

The thirteen districts, plus statewide

Printed	Internal	Office	Counties
01	01	San Antonio	33
02	02	San Antonio	10, plus 3 bay and offshore areas
03	03	Houston	29, plus 12 bay and offshore areas
04	04	Corpus Christi	15, plus 8 bay and offshore areas
05	05	Kilgore	24
06	06	Kilgore	23
6E	07	Kilgore	none — see below
7B	08	Abilene	24
7C	09	San Angelo	14
08	10	Midland	20
8A	11	Midland	21
09	13	Wichita Falls	15
10	14	Pampa	26
20	20	State Wide	—

Two columns of codes, because the RRC keeps two numberings and they do not agree.

The printed designation — 01 to 06, 6E, 7B, 7C, 08, 8A, 09, 10 — is what appears on permits, completions, ST-1 filings and inspection reports, in the file names of the per-district extracts, and in every URL on this site. It is published as rrc.district.

The internal number is what the production system stores: sequential, with the split districts numbered in place, so 6E is 07, 7B is 08, 7C is 09, District 08 is 10, 8A is 11, and — because there is no internal 12 — 09 is 13 and 10 is 14. Every district_no column in the PDQ production tables, the UIC database and the high-cost gas certifications uses it. It is published as rrc.district_number. A column holding 11 means 8A under this numbering and nothing at all under the other, which is why EZRRC keeps them as two code sets rather than one, and why a district filter on a production dataset asks for the internal number while a district page URL uses the printed one.

20 is the same in both. It is not a place: it is the code for filings the Commission handles statewide rather than from a district office, and it appears in the directory as "State Wide". Treat it as a district for parsing purposes and not as one for mapping.

Which counties are in which district

Texas has 254 counties, and the Commission's county directory assigns each to one district. It also carries 23 bay and offshore areas — Galveston, High Island, Matagorda Island, Mustang Island, Brazos, Padre Island and Sabine Pass tracts — which are not counties, have no FIPS code, and are attributed to Districts 02, 03 and 04 for reporting. That is how the directory reaches 277 codes.

Below, each district's counties as the directory has them. County codes are the three-digit Texas county number, which is also the FIPS code, and are listed with their names in rrc.county.

District 01 (San Antonio) — 33 counties. Atascosa, Bandera, Bastrop, Bell, Bexar, Blanco, Burnet, Caldwell, Comal, Dimmit, Edwards, Frio, Gillespie, Gonzales, Guadalupe, Hays, Kendall, Kerr, Kinney, La Salle, Llano, Mason, Maverick, McMullen, Medina, Milam, Real, Travis, Uvalde, Val Verde, Williamson, Wilson, Zavala.

District 02 (San Antonio) — 10 counties. Bee, Calhoun, DeWitt, Goliad, Jackson, Karnes, Lavaca, Live Oak, Refugio, Victoria; plus the Matagorda Island and Mustang Island offshore tracts.

District 03 (Houston) — 29 counties. Austin, Brazoria, Brazos, Burleson, Chambers, Colorado, Fayette, Fort Bend, Galveston, Grimes, Hardin, Harris, Jasper, Jefferson, Lee, Liberty, Madison, Matagorda, Montgomery, Newton, Orange, Polk, San Jacinto, Trinity, Tyler, Walker, Waller, Washington, Wharton; plus the Brazos, Galveston, High Island and Sabine Pass offshore tracts.

District 04 (Corpus Christi) — 15 counties. Aransas, Brooks, Cameron, Duval, Hidalgo, Jim Hogg, Jim Wells, Kenedy, Kleberg, Nueces, San Patricio, Starr, Webb, Willacy, Zapata; plus the Mustang Island and Padre Island offshore tracts.

District 05 (Kilgore) — 24 counties. Bosque, Collin, Dallas, Delta, Ellis, Falls, Fannin, Freestone, Henderson, Hill, Hopkins, Hunt, Johnson, Kaufman, Lamar, Leon, Limestone, McLennan, Navarro, Rains, Robertson, Rockwall, Tarrant, Van Zandt.

District 06 (Kilgore) — 23 counties. Anderson, Angelina, Bowie, Camp, Cass, Cherokee, Franklin, Gregg, Harrison, Houston, Marion, Morris, Nacogdoches, Panola, Red River, Rusk, Sabine, San Augustine, Shelby, Smith, Titus, Upshur, Wood.

District 7B (Abilene) — 24 counties. Brown, Callahan, Coleman, Comanche, Coryell, Eastland, Erath, Fisher, Hamilton, Haskell, Hood, Jones, Lampasas, Mills, Nolan, Palo Pinto, Parker, San Saba, Shackelford, Somervell, Stephens, Stonewall, Taylor, Throckmorton.

District 7C (San Angelo) — 14 counties. Coke, Concho, Crockett, Irion, Kimble, McCulloch, Menard, Reagan, Runnels, Schleicher, Sutton, Terrell, Tom Green, Upton.

District 08 (Midland) — 20 counties. Andrews, Brewster, Crane, Culberson, Ector, El Paso, Glasscock, Howard, Hudspeth, Jeff Davis, Loving, Martin, Midland, Mitchell, Pecos, Presidio, Reeves, Sterling, Ward, Winkler.

District 8A (Midland) — 21 counties. Bailey, Borden, Cochran, Cottle, Crosby, Dawson, Dickens, Floyd, Gaines, Garza, Hale, Hockley, Kent, King, Lamb, Lubbock, Lynn, Motley, Scurry, Terry, Yoakum.

District 09 (Wichita Falls) — 15 counties. Archer, Baylor, Clay, Cooke, Denton, Foard, Grayson, Hardeman, Jack, Knox, Montague, Wichita, Wilbarger, Wise, Young.

District 10 (Pampa) — 26 counties. Armstrong, Briscoe, Carson, Castro, Childress, Collingsworth, Dallam, Deaf Smith, Donley, Gray, Hall, Hansford, Hartley, Hemphill, Hutchinson, Lipscomb, Moore, Ochiltree, Oldham, Parmer, Potter, Randall, Roberts, Sherman, Swisher, Wheeler.

Do not retype this into a lookup of your own. The county directory is a dataset and a code set precisely so the mapping can be joined; and if the Commission ever moves a county, the directory changes and your hand-written table does not.

District 6E, the one with no counties

6E is real, it is current, and it is the district most lists leave out. It is administered from Kilgore alongside 05 and 06, it carries internal number 07, and it covers the East Texas Field — the giant oil field around Kilgore, discovered in 1930, that the Commission has regulated on its own terms ever since. In the production tables it reports oil and essentially no gas, which is what you would expect of it.

What makes it awkward is that the Commission's county directory assigns no county to 6E: the counties the East Texas Field lies under — Gregg, Rusk, Smith, Upshur and their neighbours — are listed under District 06. So 6E is a designation you meet on filings and in production rows, not a geography you can rebuild from the county table. Three consequences:

• A district-by-county roll-up will show 6E as empty and District 06 as larger than the sum of its filings suggests. That is the directory, not a bug.
• Any parser that assumed districts run 01 to 10 with three lettered exceptions has already dropped 6E. It has four: 6E, 7B, 7C, 8A.
• The gas ledger's three district groups are "1-3", "4-6 and 6E" and "7B through 10", so 6E is in the second file whether or not it has counties.

Where districts show up, and where they do not

Not every dataset carries a district column, and the ones that do disagree about which numbering. The rough map:

• Permits. The parsed permit table has no district column at all. A district view of permits — /permits/district/08/ — is built by taking the district's counties from the directory and filtering permits on the county name, and a permit download for a district is a county filter with several values. See downloading drilling permits.
• Production. Every PDQ table carries district_no in the internal numbering. /production/district/08/ takes the printed code in the URL and translates.
• Wellbores. The Full Wellbore Database's root record has a two-byte field_district that the layout declares numeric and that holds 7B. Read it as text.
• Per-district files. Inspections and violations, the oil ledger and the gas ledger are published as one file per district or district group, and the district is sometimes only in the file name — VIOLATIONS_DIST8A.txt. EZRRC materialises it as a column on those datasets.

If you take one thing from the table at the top: keep both columns. The day you join a permit's 08 to a production row's 10 and get nothing back is the day you will be glad the code sets exist.