Buying 6 acres with no water or sewer - what did the well plus septic actually come to?

Ours in 2023, rural Vermont, itemised because nobody ever gives you the itemised version:

Well: 285 ft drilled at a per-foot rate, plus 60 ft of steel casing, plus the submersible pump, pressure tank, wire and the trench from wellhead to house. That whole package landed just under 14k. The per-foot number is the only part of a well quote that is real, everything after it depends on how deep the water is, and nobody knows that until they are drilling.

Septic: soils and design by an engineer, then a 1250 gallon tank and a conventional gravity field. About 16k with the design and permit.

Things I did not budget for: 400 ft of driveway trench for the water line at frost depth, a well cap and sanitary seal upgrade the county wanted, and 900 for the electrician to run a dedicated circuit and pressure switch. Add ten percent for the stuff nobody mentions.

Get the perc test before you close, in writing, from someone the county accepts. The septic is a quote, the well is a bet. Budget the septic accurately and leave the contingency on the well side.

I am the cautionary tale. Bought the land assuming a conventional field because the lot looked dry, closed, then failed the perc. Heavy clay, seasonal high water table, so the design came back as an engineered mound with a pump chamber and a dosing timer. That was not a 16k septic, that was a bit over 30k, and the mound is a large permanent lump in the middle of what was going to be the lawn.

Make the perc test a condition of the sale. A soils evaluation costs a few hundred and it is the cheapest number in the whole project.

Everyone says get three quotes. In my county there were two drillers, one of them was booked eleven months out and the other one set the price. The real cost of that job was time, not money. If you are building, ask both when they can actually be on site, because a house framed with no water in it is its own expense.

One line in your driller contract to look at before you sign: what happens if the first hole is dry. Some contracts have you paying full rate for a dry hole and full rate again for the second attempt. Ours capped the dry hole at materials plus mobilisation. We never needed it, but the guy who wrote that clause in was worth his fee.

We came from a city house with a water bill and now do both, so the comparison is fresh. The install is the headline but the running side is real: the pump is on your electricity bill, we pump the tank every three years, we test the water once a year, and the sediment and carbon filters get changed on a schedule or the pressure drops. None of it is expensive on its own. It is the difference between a utility that fails and a system that is yours to fix at 6am in February.