September 29, 2026
As discussed in our September 2025 report, Drawing the Line: Lead Service Line Inventories in New York State, 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.
Exactly how many lead service lines (LSLs) exist in New York or other states and, as importantly, where they exist in each state remained a very incomplete picture throughout the 20th and early 21st century, as documentation of this infrastructure has varied widely by water system and over time. While estimates ranged considerably, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) 2023 estimate of the number of LSLs in use across the United States was 9.2 million. This included nearly 500,000 (494,007) LSLs in New York State, which was the sixth-highest estimate among states and represented 5.38 percent of the national total. While this is generally consistent with New York’s large population, it also indicated the relative and potentially significant work and resources that would be needed to remove LSLs in the state.
Over the last few years, federal rulemaking has established new requirements for water systems aimed at identifying and removing LSLs to reduce lead exposures through drinking water. One of those new requirements was for drinking water systems to produce an initial service line material inventory by October 16, 2024, and to complete a baseline inventory by November 1, 2027.
Our earlier report analyzed the initial data submitted by water systems for the inventories to the New York State Department of Health (DOH) and made public as of July 2025. This new report updates our analysis with data made public by DOH through July 2026 and examines the progress that has been made during the past year. In doing so, it examines both the advancements and challenges related to submitting inventories, identifies the total service lines that are known, how many are made of each material, and, more specifically, considers how many of those identified so far are made of lead or other materials that will need to be replaced.
As discussed below, this analysis reflects a substantial decrease in the number of missing systems, from 243 in July 2025 to 52 in July 2026. Most of these newly included inventories were from small drinking water systems or new water systems (or both). Alongside this, our updated analysis reflects that the status of more than 800,000 service lines across New York State remains unknown, meaning inventories do not classify them into one of the material categories, and it is still unclear if they need to be replaced. Consequently, current service line inventories represent both progress toward completing inventories and continue to present an uneven and incomplete picture, with significant variation in both data quality and the distribution of LSLs and galvanized service lines requiring replacement (GSLRRs) across communities. Although New York’s overall service line landscape remains partially understood, analyzing this available data can provide valuable insight into the challenges of completing service line inventories in the short term (by the deadline in November of 2027), meeting regulatory requirements for replacements over the next decade, and better protecting public health in the long run.
