About How Safe Is My Water

Who builds this

How Safe Is My Water is built by a small independent research team based in the United States. We are not lawyers, not licensed engineers, and not medical professionals. We are not affiliated with the US Environmental Protection Agency, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, NSF International, or any drinking-water utility. Everything we publish is sourced to primary public records, EPA rules, federal-register publications, peer-reviewed toxicology, and the standards documents from NSF/ANSI.

If you need a legal or medical opinion on your exposure, contact a licensed environmental attorney, your physician, or your state's PFAS hotline (in Michigan, the MPART hotline; in New Jersey, the DEP Bureau of Safe Drinking Water; in New Hampshire, the DES PFAS Response).

Why this site exists

In April 2024 the EPA finalised the first federally-enforceable Maximum Contaminant Levels for PFAS, 4.0 ng/L for PFOA and PFOS, 10 ng/L each for PFHxS, PFNA, and HFPO-DA (GenX), and a Hazard Index of 1 for the mixture (40 CFR § 141.61(c); 89 Fed. Reg. 32532). Compliance is not required until 2029. In the meantime, the EPA's UCMR 5 monitoring round is producing the largest single PFAS dataset ever collected, and almost no consumer-facing source has digested it into a "what's in my tap" answer.

The free EPA NCOD portal works, but it presumes you already know your PWSID, what an MRL is, and how to compare a UCMR 5 row against an April-2024 MCL row. How Safe Is My Water bridges that gap. We turn a ZIP code into a PDF that names your utility, lists its UCMR 5 results against the new MCLs, flags hotspot context if applicable, recommends a filter certified for PFAS, and points to credible lab tests if you want to verify your own tap.

How we make money

The single product is a $15 PDF brief. No subscription. No account. No upsell to a "premium" tier. Stripe processes the payment, the PDF is emailed within a minute. If your ZIP doesn't resolve to a public water system in our coverage, we refund automatically.

We accept no money from filter manufacturers, lab companies, utility consultants, or law firms. Filter recommendations are by certification (NSF/ANSI 53 P473, NSF/ANSI 58), not by brand. Lab recommendations are by EPA method (537.1, 533) and NELAP accreditation, not by referral.

Editorial standards

We will:

• Cite every numeric threshold to its primary source, a CFR section, a federal-register page, an NSF standard number, or a peer-reviewed paper with DOI.
• Quote published findings precisely (e.g. "PFOA 4.0 ng/L," not "around 4 parts per trillion").
• Date every page with a "last reviewed" stamp.
• Publish a public corrections log for any factual error a reader flags.
• Use measured language. PFAS is a real concern; scaremongering is unhelpful and corrodes trust.

We will not:

• Give medical, legal, or engineering advice.
• Claim affiliation or endorsement from any government agency or standards body.
• Recommend brands by name as "best", we recommend certification categories.
• Publish a claim we cannot trace to a named primary source.

What we don't cover

How Safe Is My Water is scoped to public drinking water systems in the United States. We don't cover:

• Private wells (you should test directly, see our testing guide).
• Food sources of PFAS (the EFSA tolerable weekly intake accounts for total dietary intake, not water alone).
• Occupational exposure (firefighters, chemical-plant workers, etc.).
• PFAS in soil, fish, or biosolids, except where they directly affect a drinking-water source.
• Non-US drinking water systems.

Contact

Email [email protected] for corrections, source pointers, or refunds. Replies within two business days.