Watering Restrictions by City in Northeast Tarrant County

DFW watering restrictions are not the same from one city to the next, and most of them are permanent rather than drought-triggered. Here’s the whole twelve cities we serve in one table, then the detail for the three with the most distinctive rules — Fort Worth, Southlake and Euless.

Southlake: the strictest window we work in

Southlake runs a year-round twice-per-week schedule by address — even-numbered addresses Wednesday and Saturday, odd-numbered Thursday and Sunday. What sets it apart is the time window: automatic irrigation may run only between 6:00 p.m. and 10:00 a.m., and only on your assigned day.

On a large Southlake system that constraint bites. Twelve zones at fifteen minutes each is three hours of run time that has to finish before 10 a.m. We routinely find controllers whose last few zones are still running at 10:30, watering illegally every cycle, with nobody any the wiser because who is standing in the yard at that hour.

Euless: no assigned days at all

Euless is the one that catches people out in reverse. Its published water conservation page bans outdoor watering between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. year-round — and sets out no address-based day-of-week schedule. If you moved to Euless from Hurst or Fort Worth, you may be restricting yourself to two days you do not need to.

Euless also explicitly permits watering foundations by hand-held hose, drip or soaker. On North Texas clay that is not indulgence. A foundation that goes through August with nothing around it moves, and that repair costs orders of magnitude more than a soaker hose.

Fort Worth watering restrictions

Fort Worth’s twice-per-week schedule is year-round and assigned by the last digit of your street address:

No sprinkler or irrigation system may run from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Runoff waste and broken, misaligned or missing heads are prohibited outright. Hand-held hoses may be used at any time.

Fort Worth also requires rain and freeze sensors on systems installed on or after June 1, 2007, and an annual inspection on all commercial systems.

Penalties are administrative fees added to your next water bill:

Exemptions cover up to 30 consecutive days to establish new hydromulch, sod or seed with an approved variance; registered alternative water sources such as a well or reclaimed water; dust control on sports fields; and testing or repair of an irrigation system.

Violations that have nothing to do with your assigned day

This catches people out. Even on your correct day, inside the correct hours, you can still be in violation for:

• Runoff. Water leaving your property onto the street or into a storm drain.
• Watering in rain. Which is what a failed rain sensor causes.
• A head spraying hardscape. Driveway, sidewalk, street, fence.
• Broken, missing or misdirected heads. A violation in its own right, whether or not any water is being wasted at that moment.

That last one is worth sitting with. If you have a head that’s been snapped off or spraying sideways since the spring, you are not merely wasting water — you are out of compliance, and in Fort Worth that starts the penalty ladder on your water bill.

How much water your lawn actually needs

Two days a week is a ceiling, not a target. Texas A&M AgriLife Extension guidance is roughly one inch of water per application, with frequency varying by season:

On North Texas clay, one long cycle mostly runs off. Two or three shorter cycles with a soak between them put the same inch into the soil instead of the gutter — which is what cycle-and-soak programming on a modern controller is for.

Staying compliant without thinking about it

A working rain and freeze sensor, a controller that holds its schedule, and heads that point at grass. That’s the whole list. If you’re not sure your sensor still works — they commonly fail silently after a few years — a system inspection will tell you, and we’ll set the controller to your city’s assigned days while we’re there.

DFW watering restrictions: frequently asked questions