How deep is Lake Powell right now?

Sources for the reading above are USGS site 09379900 for the live elevation and the NPS Glen Canyon FAQ for the published constants, as of Sep 21, 2026.

Most pages answering this question hand you the 561 ft maximum depth the National Park Service publishes for a full reservoir. That figure is real. It just describes a lake filled to the brim, not the one out there today.

So this page computes the number instead. It starts from the live surface elevation at USGS gage 09379900, currently 3,517.2 feet above sea level, and subtracts the streambed at the dam. Nobody types it in.

The arithmetic is short. Surface elevation minus the 3,139 ft streambed gives the depth. And that streambed figure is itself two published NPS numbers subtracted, the 3,700 ft full pool minus the 561 ft maximum depth at the dam.

Why another site says Lake Powell is deeper

Search this question and you'll get more than one answer. The trackers publish a depth around 385 ft while this page says 378.2 ft, and both are working from roughly the same surface elevation.

The whole gap is one constant. Depth is surface elevation minus the streambed at the dam, so whichever streambed you pick decides the answer.

Ours is the one you can check. Both inputs come off a single National Park Service page, so you can redo the subtraction yourself. We haven't found a published source for 3,132 ft, which doesn't make it wrong, only unverifiable.

Where today's level sits in the operating band

The surface sits 182.8 ft below the 3,700 ft full-pool line. For hydropower the number that matters is the gap to minimum power pool, and today that gap is 27.2 ft above 3,490 ft. Below that line Glen Canyon Dam stops generating.

The harder floor is dead pool at 3,370 ft, where water can no longer reach the outlet works. Today's surface holds 147.2 ft above it.

Each depth above is the landmark elevation minus the 3,139 ft streambed. By elevation alone, the surface has moved 55.4 percent of the way down the band from full pool to dead pool.

Read that as an elevation share, not a volume share. A true percent full needs the reservoir's area-capacity curve, which this page doesn't compute, so we don't publish one.

How the depth is changing

Every foot the surface moves is a foot of depth at the dam. So elevation changes read straight across as depth changes. Over the last 24 hours the gage moved up 0.2 ft. Across the roughly 30-day series the surface fell 1.3 ft.

Plenty of pages quote a level. Few recompute a validated month-over-month delta on every build, and that's what this figure is.

Today's surface sits 0.58 ft above the lowest reading since the reservoir first filled, 3,516.62 ft on September 15, 2026, from Reclamation's daily pool-elevation archive. The whole-record minimum is lower still, 3,394.50 ft on May 11, 1964, but that was the initial filling and is not a comparable operating state. Both figures are recomputed from that archive on every build, and the 1981-01-01 boundary used for "since first fill" is ours, not Reclamation's. The April 2023 low is documented by NASA Earth Observatory.

Check the depth for any surface elevation

Getting on the water

A depth reading at the dam won't tell you whether the ramp you're towing to still reaches the water. That depends on where the waterline sits against that one ramp, and it moves as the lake does.

Treat the depth and the trend here as a starting point. The live level page has the full gauge, and the water level chart ranks today against every daily reading Reclamation has published since 1963. If you are towing a boat, the published minimum elevation for each ramp is the number that decides it. Then check the ramp itself with the people who run it, because these are point-in-time readings and they can lag real conditions.

Questions about Lake Powell's depth