Implementations of pay zone prediction are described. More particularly, apparatus and techniques described herein allow a user to predict pay zones in wells. By accurately predicting pay zones, the user can perforate an existing well at predefined well depths to access hydrocarbon bearing strata while avoiding other undesirable strata (such as water bearing strata). For example, in one possible implementation, well data and syntactic data from a first set of one or more existing wells can be used to create one or more syntactic models. These syntactic models can then be used with water cut and well data from the one or more existing wells to create a pay zone prediction model which can be used with wells outside of the first set of existing wells.