What’s In My Water? — ZIP Lookup

What’s In My Water? — ZIP Lookup

Every public water system in the U.S. reports to the EPA — who they serve, where their water comes from, their lead and copper sampling results, and every violation of federal drinking water rules. It’s all public, but it’s buried in a federal database written for regulators. This tool translates it: enter your ZIP and see your own system’s record, in plain English.

Free, no email required. We look up the public water systems the EPA lists for your ZIP's city and show their own reported records. First lookups can take several seconds — we pull live federal data, then cache it for a week.

How to read these results

Lead and copper are reported as a “90th percentile”: the level below which 90% of the system’s sampled homes fell. EPA’s action levels are 15 parts per billion (ppb) for lead and 1,300 ppb for copper. Going over an action level doesn’t trigger a fine — it triggers required corrosion control and public education. Remember that lead usually enters water from a home’s own plumbing, so a good system result doesn’t test your tap.

Health-based violations are the serious kind: a legal contaminant limit was exceeded, or a required treatment step was missed. Monitoring violations are missed or late testing and paperwork — worth knowing about, but they are not findings of contamination, so we list them separately as a single count.

What this data doesn’t cover

  • Private wells. The EPA only tracks public water systems. If your home has its own well, there is no public record — testing is the only way to know. Start with our well water guide.
  • Hardness. Hardness isn’t a health-regulated contaminant, so it doesn’t appear in EPA reports. If scale on fixtures is your problem, jump to the softener sizing calculator.
  • Emerging contaminants like PFAS are only beginning to appear in federal records as new rules phase in. Your system’s Consumer Confidence Report is still the most complete single document.

Go deeper: your Consumer Confidence Report

Every community water system must publish an annual Consumer Confidence Report (CCR) — usually posted on the system’s website each summer, covering the previous year. It lists every detected contaminant and its measured level, not just violations. Read it alongside this lookup: the CCR gives you levels, the EPA record gives you the system’s compliance history. Between the two, you’ll know more about your water than most review sites do. Then, when you’re ready to act on it, our water quality hub explains what each contaminant means for filter choice.

Data: U.S. EPA Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS) via Envirofacts, plus ZIP-to-city reference data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Records are as reported to the EPA by state agencies; EPA notes that some state reporting is incomplete. Nothing here is medical advice — if you have health concerns about your water, talk to your local health department.