The Seven-Year Rule: Utah Water Right Forfeiture, in Plain Language
Among the questions that arrive at the firm most often, none arrives more often than this one: my family has not actively used this water right in years, perhaps decades, and I have read that Utah law forfeits unused rights — have I already lost it? The answer is more nuanced than the question, and the nuance is significantly in the owner’s favor. Utah’s forfeiture statute, Utah Code § 73-1-4, is real and is enforced, but its actual mechanics — including its statutory exemptions, its administrative safe-harbor procedure, and its substantial protections within the general adjudication — are widely misunderstood by the population most worried about them. This article explains, in plain language, what the statute actually says and how it actually operates, so that an owner of a Utah water right can know which side of the seven-year rule they are on before treating the right as either secure or lost.
What the statute actually says.
The operative provision of Utah Code § 73-1-4 is short and worth quoting in its substance rather than its formal text. When an appropriator or the appropriator’s successor in interest abandons or ceases to beneficially use all or a portion of a water right for a period of at least seven years, the unused right or the unused portion of it is subject to forfeiture. The forfeited water reverts to the public and becomes available to satisfy other rights in the hydrologic system, in order of priority. That is the rule. The popular shorthand for it is “use it or lose it,” and as shorthand goes, it captures the gist while obscuring almost every detail that matters.
The first detail it obscures is that the seven-year clock does not run automatically against an owner. Forfeiture under § 73-1-4 is a result, not an event. A right is not extinguished by the passage of seven years on its own; it becomes subject to a claim of forfeiture, which someone — either the State Engineer in the course of a general adjudication, or a private party with standing to bring such a claim — must affirmatively assert and prove. Many owners read the statute and conclude that an unused right is already gone. This is not what the statute says. What the statute says is that an unused right is at risk of being declared forfeit, and that risk can be addressed before it ripens.
The second detail the shorthand obscures is that “beneficial use” is a flexible concept and has been interpreted broadly in Utah law for over a century. The most important Utah water-law principle, stated in the statute itself, is that beneficial use shall be the basis, the measure, and the limit of all rights to the use of water in this state. The relevant question is not whether the owner of record personally used the water, but whether the water was put to a beneficial purpose by anyone with the appropriator’s permission or under the appropriator’s authorization. Use of the water by a tenant, a lessee, a downstream irrigator under an informal sharing arrangement, or any other party acting under the appropriator’s authority generally constitutes beneficial use for forfeiture purposes. Many rights that appear unused on the surface of the public record are, in fact, being used in ways the public record does not capture.
The exemptions the statute carves out.
The statute also carves out a substantial set of exemptions in which the seven-year clock does not run at all. These exemptions are the part of the law most often missed by owners, and several of them are likely to apply to a typical pioneer-era right held in family hands. They include, in summary form, the following.
A right is exempt from forfeiture during any period in which a surface water source fails to yield sufficient water to satisfy the right, or in which groundwater is unavailable because of sustained drought. In other words, the years during which the owner could not have used the water because the water was not physically there do not count against the owner. For Utah, where multiple basins have been in formal drought conditions for substantial portions of the last two decades, this exemption alone can re-characterize what looks like a long period of nonuse into a much shorter period of legally relevant nonuse.
A right held in storage under a valid water right is exempt while the water is held for present or future use. A supplemental water right is exempt during periods when the primary right available to the appropriator was providing sufficient water that the supplemental right did not need to be exercised. A right that is the subject of an approved change application is exempt while the applicant is diligently pursuing certification, which protects owners who are actively in the process of moving the right from one use or location to another. A right held by a public water supplier — including municipal water districts and certain irrigation districts — is exempt so long as the right is being held for the reasonable future water requirement of the public, evidenced by a formal forty-year plan.
And the statute contains a substantial-use exemption that owners frequently overlook: a right is exempt if the water user has beneficially used substantially all of the water right within a seven-year period, even if the use was not continuous. This exemption is significant. An owner who irrigated regularly through 2019 and then ceased use does not begin the seven-year forfeiture clock running on the day of last use; the clock runs from the end of the most recent seven-year period within which substantial use occurred. The arithmetic is more forgiving than the shorthand suggests.
The nonuse application — the administrative safe harbor.
The statute also provides an administrative procedure that any owner may invoke before forfeiture exposure ripens. An appropriator may file a nonuse application with the State Engineer, identifying the water right and the period during which beneficial use is anticipated to be excused. If approved, the nonuse application excuses the beneficial-use requirement from the date of filing forward, for as long as the extension lasts. A shareholder in a water company may file such an application on the water represented by the shareholder’s stock, after giving written notice to the company. The application requires identification of the water right, including its point of diversion, place of use, and priority. The State Engineer publishes notice of the application in a newspaper of general circulation in the relevant county, and interested parties have twenty days to file a protest.
The nonuse application is, in practical terms, the cheapest insurance available against forfeiture. The application fee is modest, the administrative process is comparatively straightforward, and an approved application converts a right that was accumulating forfeiture exposure into a right with documented administrative protection. Owners who know they will not be able to put the water to beneficial use in the immediate future, but who do not wish to lose the right, should be aware that this option exists and that the firm or any Utah water rights attorney can guide an owner through filing one.
The protections inside the general adjudication.
The protections built into the general adjudication itself deserve particular attention, because they are the protections most likely to apply to the rights this firm typically encounters. Under § 73-1-4, the State Engineer, when filing a Proposed Determination of rights in the course of a general adjudication, may not assert forfeiture against a right unless the most recent seven-year period of nonuse ends or occurs within the fifteen years immediately preceding the day on which the Proposed Determination is filed with the court. That fifteen-year window is a meaningful protection. A right that was actively used by an ancestor through, say, 1995, and that has been substantially unused since, is not subject to a forfeiture claim in a Proposed Determination filed in 2026, because the most recent seven-year period of nonuse falls outside the fifteen-year look-back window.
Further, after a Proposed Determination is filed, a person may not assert that the right was forfeited before the Proposed Determination’s issuance unless the State Engineer asserts forfeiture in the determination itself, or unless a person makes a timely objection to the determination asserting forfeiture. In effect, the Proposed Determination operates as a procedural cut-off: once the State Engineer has reviewed the right and not asserted forfeiture, claims of prior forfeiture by other parties become difficult to maintain. For owners whose subdivisions are entering the Proposed Determination stage, this is a moment of substantial procedural significance. A right that survives the Proposed Determination without a forfeiture assertion is materially more secure than the same right was the day before the determination was filed.
What this means for an owner this year.
The takeaway from the above is not that forfeiture is a phantom risk. It is a real risk, and the owners most exposed to it are owners whose rights have shown no documented beneficial use within the past fifteen years, whose subdivisions are approaching the Proposed Determination stage of the adjudication, and who have not filed a nonuse application or otherwise taken affirmative steps to document the right’s status. For those owners, the seven-year rule is exactly as serious as the popular shorthand suggests, and the appropriate response is to engage with the right immediately rather than to wait for a Proposed Determination to land.
But the takeaway also is not that every owner with a long history of inactive use has already lost the right. The combination of the substantial-use exemption, the drought and unavailability exemptions, the nonuse application option, and the fifteen-year look-back protection in the adjudication means that a meaningful fraction of rights that appear lost on a superficial reading of the statute are, in fact, recoverable, defensible, or already protected. The question for the individual owner is which fraction the owner’s specific right falls into, and that question cannot be answered without an examination of the public record, the basin’s adjudication status, and the history of beneficial use as it can be reconstructed from available evidence.
This is what a written assessment is for. The assessment offered by Old Mountain Commons Covenant, prepared at the firm’s expense and delivered to the owner within ten business days, addresses precisely this question: it states the current condition of the right, the realistic forfeiture exposure given the basin’s adjudication status, the cost of defending or filing a nonuse application, and the value of the right both in current condition and as fully defended through final decree. It is a business and valuation document, not a legal opinion, and an owner who finds the assessment encouraging should retain Utah counsel before relying on its conclusions for any specific transaction. But for the owner who does not yet know whether the right is worth defending, worth nonuse-filing, worth selling, or worth transferring, the assessment is the document that turns the question into an answer.
The single most useful thing you can do this week.
The single most useful thing an owner can do this week, regardless of which path they ultimately choose, is to look the right up in the public record at waterrights.utah.gov, write down the priority date, the source, the point of diversion, the place of use, and the claimed quantity, and confirm that the address on file with the State Engineer is the address at which the owner currently receives mail. That last item is the single most common cause of preventable forfeiture exposure: a Proposed Determination is mailed to an address that has been stale for thirty years, the owner never receives notice, and the objection window closes with no objection filed. Correcting the address on file is a simple administrative step that no owner regrets having taken.
If you would like a free written assessment of a Utah water right, including a specific evaluation of forfeiture exposure under Utah Code § 73-1-4, the form is here. The assessment is delivered within ten business days, at our expense, and it is yours to keep.
Sources for the legal description in this article: Utah Code § 73-1-4 (current version, 2024 amendments incorporated), Utah State Legislature; Utah Code § 73-4-11 (Proposed Determination procedure); Utah Division of Water Rights public records and procedural materials at waterrights.utah.gov; Utah Code § 73-3, Appropriation; Utah Code § 73-4, Determination of Water Rights. This article is general information and is not legal advice. The specific application of § 73-1-4 to any particular water right requires independent legal counsel familiar with Utah water law and the specific basin’s adjudication status.