Lawn watering rules in Dallas, Fort Worth and Arlington

Fort Worth runs a year-round twice-a-week schedule for all water customers under City Ordinance 21194-07-2014. Monday is a no-watering day. Tuesday and Friday are for non-residential sites. Residential addresses ending in 0, 2, 4, 6 or 8 water Wednesday and Saturday; addresses ending in 1, 3, 5, 7 or 9 water Thursday and Sunday. Irrigation systems and sprinklers may not run between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. Hand-held hose watering is allowed at any time. The city publishes administrative fees for violations at 25 dollars, then 50, then 75, with a citation and meter lock-out at the fourth.

Dallas Water Utilities publishes a maximum twice-weekly watering schedule. No watering is allowed on Mondays, Tuesdays or Fridays from April 1 to October 31. Addresses ending in 0, 2, 4, 6, 8 or with no address number water Sundays and Thursdays; addresses ending in 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 water Saturdays and Wednesdays. Separately, and more consequentially for anyone planning turf, Dallas Development Code Section 51A-10.103(a) provides that artificial plant materials, including synthetic turf, may not be used to satisfy the requirements of the landscaping article. The source document does not address whether turf may count toward pervious cover, or whether it is barred from a private yard carrying no required-landscape obligation.

Arlington is the outlier. Its code prohibits irrigation of lawns and landscape between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. daily, year round, under the Water and Sewer Chapter Section 4.27. Hand watering and soaker hoses are excepted. Section 4.27 contains no days-per-week limit, no address-based schedule and no variance process. A days-per-week restriction reaches Arlington only when its wholesale supplier enters a drought stage. The chapter was last amended by Ordinance No. 24-052 on September 17, 2024.

Both cities take water from the Tarrant Regional Water District, whose drought plan sets stages on combined storage in the Bridgeport, Eagle Mountain, Richland-Chambers and Cedar Creek reservoirs. Stage 1, Water Watch, begins below 75 percent of conservation storage and caps outdoor watering at twice per week. Stage 2, Water Warning, begins below 60 percent and caps it at once per week. Stage 3, Water Emergency, begins below 45 percent and prohibits hose-end sprinklers and automatic systems. Keller and Grand Prairie, where PGC's showrooms are, both appear in the district's plan as successive wholesale customers.

Plano, Frisco, McKinney and nine other cities are North Texas Municipal Water District members, which runs a different standing baseline: no more than two days per week from April 1 to October 31, and no more than one day per week from November 1 to March 31. The district also publishes two figures useful to anyone planning drainage in this region. Clay soil absorbs water at about a tenth of an inch per hour, and a fixture dripping once per second can waste more than 3,000 gallons per year.