Drought covers far less of Texas than it did a week earlier, but the water sitting in the state’s reservoirs has still not caught up. The U.S. Drought Monitor’s Oct. 8 map put 82% of the state in drought, down from 91.86% the week before. Statewide, the reservoirs that supply Texas cities, farms and industry were 72.3% full on Oct. 14, below the 74.5% recorded on the same date in 2025, according to Water Data for Texas.
The two measures answer different questions. The Drought Monitor, a weekly map produced by federal and university scientists, shows how dry the soil and landscape are. Reservoir storage shows how much water is in the bank. A week of rain can change the first quickly. It takes much longer to change the second.
The improvement on the map was largest at the dry end. The share of Texas in the two worst categories, “extreme” and “exceptional” drought, fell from 26.43% to 13.49%. Exceptional drought, the top category, covered 1.06% of the state, down from 3.63%. The share in moderate drought or worse dropped from 67.76% to 52.44%, and the Drought Monitor’s overall severity score fell from 288 to 245.
Reservoir storage tells a flatter story. Water Data for Texas, the state’s online reservoir tracker, shows the statewide figure at 72.6% on Oct. 7, 72.4% on Oct. 12 and 72.3% on Oct. 13 and Oct. 14. A month earlier, on Sept. 14, it was 73.1%. On July 14 it was 76.5%. In raw volume, conservation storage stood at 22,785,462 acre-feet on Oct. 14 against a conservation capacity of 31,531,332 acre-feet. An acre-foot is the amount of water that would cover an acre of land one foot deep, roughly 326,000 gallons.
The statewide figure hides large gaps between lakes. The tracker lists Palo Duro at 0.4% full, Greenbelt at 4.4%, Twin Buttes at 4.6 % and E.V. Spence at 9.1%. Choke Canyon, a South Texas lake that helps supply Corpus Christi, stood at 21.5% and Medina Lake, northwest of San Antonio, at 28.6%. Amistad, the large border reservoir on the Rio Grande, was at 43.6%.
Several of the consequences from the summer remain in place. The Edwards Aquifer Authority, which regulates pumping from the aquifer that supplies San Antonio, returned the San Antonio Pool to Stage 3 on Sept. 22, cutting pumping by 35%, as the Dispatch reported. The San Antonio Water System said Stage 3 watering rules for its customers returned Sept. 29. Corpus Christi’s city website continues to show Stage 1 drought restrictions. Further north, Childress County declared a disaster as Greenbelt Lake fell to 4.7% full, the Dispatch reported.
The comparison with last year is the clearest signal in the data. Storage is 2.2 percentage points lower than on Oct. 14, 2025, even though the share of the state in the worst drought categories has been cut roughly in half in one week. Whether the map’s improvement turns into higher lake levels depends on whether rain falls over the watersheds that feed the reservoirs, not only over the land around them.
The next Drought Monitor map is due Oct. 15, and it will show whether the one-week gain holds. Reservoir levels update daily at Water Data for Texas.