September 3, 2025
As discussed in our earlier report, the harms of lead exposure have been well-documented for many decades, including at very low levels and particularly for children. The federal health-based goal for lead in drinking water is 0 μg/dL (i.e., none). Service lines—pipes that connect homes and buildings to municipal water systems—that are made of lead are known to be a common source of exposure when they corrode and lead enters the drinking water supply.
Over the last few years, federal rulemaking has established new requirements for water systems aimed at identifying and removing lead service lines. One of those new requirements was for drinking water systems to produce an initial lead service line material inventory by October 16, 2024.
Exactly how many lead service lines (LSLs) exist in New York or other states and, as importantly, where they exist in each state has remained a very incomplete picture, as documentation of this infrastructure has varied widely by water system and over time. While estimates have ranged considerably, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) most recent (2023) estimate of the number of lead service lines in use across the United States was 9.2 million. This includes nearly 500,000 (494,007) LSLs in New York State, which is the sixth highest estimate among states, representing 5.38 percent of the national total. While this is generally consistent with the state’s large population, it also indicates the relative and potentially significant work and resources needed to remove lead service lines in the state.
Now that the due date has passed for systems to submit initial inventories of LSLs, we can delve more deeply into what those inventories do and, importantly, don’t yet tell us in the context of lead service line replacement in New York. This brief provides an analysis of those initial inventories submitted by water systems in New York, the progress and challenges towards submitting inventories, identifying what each service line is made of, and how many of those identified so far are made of lead or other materials that will need to be replaced.
As will be discussed below, at this early stage, the incompleteness of inventories and the number of missing inventories (which was less expected) prohibit us from meaningfully observing and accurately sketching out the landscape of lead service lines in New York. The current inventories reflect a very uneven terrain of data and therein highlight the underlying challenges that water systems, state and local public health staff, and the public face in their collective efforts to meet regulatory requirements and protect public health. While the full picture of the LSL landscape in New York remains somewhat opaque, analyzing this limited data can help us better understand existing hurdles to completing service line inventories in the short term, achieve further regulatory requirements over the next decade, and better protect public health in the long run.
