PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) have been produced and used in the United States since the 1940s. However, public concern about these chemicals has grown significantly over the past decade. This concern, and the increasingly robust array of related research, have resulted in substantive public policy proposals and changes to protect public and environmental health, including the adoption of the first federal drinking water standards for a handful of PFAS chemicals last year. The recent release of data by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reflects an estimated 46 million Americans, including 3.5 million New Yorkers, are served by water systems that had levels of PFAS above existing standards. More broadly, the EPA data reflect that 73 million Americans are served by water systems in which PFAS were detected (at any level). This only serves to underscore the continued importance and relevance of public policies to address PFAS in drinking water and across a significant number of uses, sites, and different environmental media.
On a state level, the Rockefeller Institute’s PFAS Policy Dashboard has tracked legislation (both introduced and enacted) across all 50 states related to PFAS since the first such bills were introduced in 2016, and coded them according to dozens of categories depending on the focus of the legislation (such as: drinking water, consumer products, appropriations, agriculture, etc.). This update adds 2024 legislation and laws to the database, making nine years of data now available.
Broader Stats and Trends
We identified 179 pieces of state legislation related to PFAS in 2024, the second-highest year included in the dashboard, bringing the total number of state bills in the dashboard to 866 across 41 states. The 2024 bills were introduced across 31 states, with the most being introduced in Massachusetts (18), Minnesota (17), New York (13), Maine (12), as well as New Hampshire and Rhode Island (with 11 each). These states, along with Michigan and North Carolina, have all frequently introduced the most legislation related to PFAS each year. Nine states—Alabama, Idaho, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming have not introduced or passed any legislation relating to PFAS (though they may have taken other regulatory actions).
State PFAS Legislation Introduced: 2016–24
| State | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | Grand Total |
| Minnesota | 4 | 12 | 14 | 19 | 18 | 17 | 84 | |||
| Michigan | 1 | 8 | 10 | 6 | 13 | 10 | 7 | 10 | 65 | |
| New Hampshire | 2 | 7 | 9 | 12 | 9 | 11 | 11 | 61 | ||
| Maine | 1 | 1 | 16 | 6 | 14 | 12 | 50 | |||
| New York | 1 | 3 | 2 | 7 | 3 | 6 | 8 | 7 | 13 | 50 |
| North Carolina | 2 | 3 | 7 | 6 | 13 | 3 | 9 | 6 | 49 | |
| Massachusetts | 2 | 11 | 3 | 14 | 18 | 48 | ||||
| California | 1 | 2 | 15 | 3 | 12 | 9 | 42 | |||
| Rhode Island | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 11 | 6 | 11 | 42 | ||
| Vermont | 2 | 4 | 7 | 4 | 8 | 7 | 3 | 35 | ||
| Pennsylvania | 3 | 1 | 8 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 8 | 3 | 34 | |
| Illinois | 3 | 6 | 3 | 11 | 9 | 32 | ||||
| Washington | 1 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 5 | 5 | 4 | 28 | ||
| Wisconsin | 2 | 7 | 6 | 1 | 2 | 5 | 23 | |||
| Connecticut | 2 | 6 | 1 | 8 | 5 | 22 | ||||
| Maryland | 3 | 2 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 18 | ||||
| Hawaii | 1 | 2 | 5 | 7 | 15 | |||||
| Indiana | 4 | 1 | 1 | 6 | 2 | 14 | ||||
| New Jersey | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 14 | ||
| Florida | 1 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 13 | |||||
| Virginia | 1 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 12 | ||||
| Colorado | 1 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 4 | 11 | ||||
| Alaska | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 10 | ||||
| Iowa | 4 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 10 | |||||
| Delaware | 2 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 9 | |||||
| West Virginia | 3 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 9 | |||||
| Arizona | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 8 | |||
| Kentucky | 1 | 2 | 1 | 4 | 8 | |||||
| Oregon | 2 | 4 | 1 | 7 | ||||||
| Oklahoma | 1 | 2 | 3 | 6 | ||||||
| South Carolina | 2 | 1 | 2 | 5 | ||||||
| Ohio | 1 | 1 | 2 | 4 | ||||||
| Utah | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | |||||
| New Mexico | 1 | 2 | 3 | |||||||
| Texas | 2 | 1 | 3 | |||||||
| Georgia | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||
| Nevada | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||||||
| Tennessee | 2 | 2 | ||||||||
| Arkansas | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| Louisiana | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| Mississippi | 1 | 1 | ||||||||
| Grand Total | 1 | 14 | 20 | 71 | 93 | 172 | 125 | 182 | 179 | 857 |
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NOTE: Green highlight indicates a state was among the top five most legislatively active for that given year. Some years may have more than five when there are states with the same number of bills. |
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The most common issues identified in PFAS legislation largely remained consistent between 2023 and 2024. The top four issue areas in both years were drinking water, appropriations, firefighting foam or protective equipment, and consumer products. Rounding out the top five in 2023 were bills addressing monitoring and detection, and in 2024 were bills addressing remediation. Nonetheless, there was increased attention to certain issue types in 2024, these included: biosolids, agriculture, animals, food, children’s products, and essential uses. Notably, four of these issue types—biosolids, agriculture, animals, and food—had considerable crossover and appear to reflect growing attention by policymakers to the interrelated nature of these issues. The Rockefeller Institute’s ongoing series on PFAS in biosolids further explores some of those intersections. While children’s products have been a steadily growing area of PFAS legislation since 2019, the framing of “essential uses” has newly appeared as a legislative approach in the last couple of years.
Essential Uses
As evidenced in the dashboard, for close to a decade, legislation related to PFAS has grown significantly, rising from just a couple of bills in a single state in 2016 to nearly 179 pieces of legislation across 31 states in 2024, reflecting efforts to address its widespread and innumerous uses across many sectors.
This legislative approach to addressing chemical contaminants like PFAS (but not only PFAS) in policy is often referred to as a game of ‘whack-a-mole.’ The regulation of essential or un/avoidable uses (sometimes also referred to as critical uses in certain domains like aerospace and military applications) presents a meta-regulatory framework. One that could be used more broadly with other contaminants, to avoid continually playing whack-a-mole.
The model for this new legislative framework stems most directly from “Amara’s Law” in Minnesota (part of an omnibus environmental bill, HF 2310/SF 2438 of 2023). That law, which was passed in 2023, directed the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) to develop rules in order to determine currently unavoidable uses of PFAS in products. Those provisions are set to be implemented between 2025 and 2032. The concept of essential uses with respect to regulating PFAS has been discussed by recognized PFAS scholars in environmental health research since at least 2020, who further built on the framework in the Montreal Protocol to phase out uses of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which are known to damage the ozone.
This year’s update, therefore, includes the additional issue type of “essential uses” as there appeared to be a new and, if nascent, emerging trend. In 2024, nine bills introduced across eight states (California, Illinois—which had two such bills, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin) were coded as “essential uses”—meaning that, like Amara’s Law, the bill (or part of it) approached the regulation of PFAS through the designation of certain uses or products as either necessary or unavoidable (as opposed to other unnecessary or avoidable uses that would be restricted). In some cases, this was further predicated on the availability of alternatives. These bills varied in the scope of uses they addressed, but all addressed consumer products, and five addressed children’s products more specifically. One of these bills, the Comprehensive PFAS Ban Act of 2024, was enacted into law in Rhode Island (S2152 or Chapter 345).
Definitions
In our previous update of 2023 state legislation, we first included definitions of PFAS in our database. That is, we tracked if a bill included either directly or indirectly a definition of PFAS—beyond simply stating that PFAS are per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—and we categorized those definitions into a handful of types. Definitions of PFAS are increasingly becoming the terrain on which policy about these contaminants is being negotiated, leaning either towards broader and more inclusive definitions or towards narrower ones, and sometimes distinguishing between both a broader definition and a more specific subset of PFAS that fall under particular laws or regulations. PFAS definitions determine in a significant way the scope of a law or regulations’ purview, given that there are nearly 15,000 PFAS compounds listed in the Environmental Protection Agency’s chemical database (CompTox). The difference between regulating the most common compounds (namely, PFOA and PFOS) and regulating all such compounds is therefore very significant.
In our 2023 update, our tracking and analysis of these definitions found that 49 bills or laws included a definition of PFAS, with 40 of those defining PFAS as having at least one fully fluorinated carbon atom—the broadest and most inclusive definition. Of those laws, 10 were enacted, and of those 10 laws, five used that definition. Other bills defined them, for example, as having at least two fully fluorinated carbon atoms (sometimes with exceptions), or defined them as a specific list of chemicals (ranging from only PFOA and PFOS, to all those with EPA detection methods available).
Of the 179 bills introduced in 2024, 64 included definitions. Of those 64 bills, 51 used a “one fully fluorinated” definition. Out of all the bills introduced, 40 were enacted into law—27 of which did not include a definition, and 13 of which did. Of those 13, 11 used a “one fully fluorinated” definition. This data appears to reflect the continued and growing tendency of state lawmakers to use this definition in legislation over others.
Conclusion
As states take legislative action to address PFAS, the PFAS Policy Dashboard will continue to track trends related to the issues that are most and newly being addressed across states, and the Rockefeller Institute will continue to provide further in-depth research and analysis of those issues through our policy briefs and blog series. It is our hope that the centralization and sharing of legislative approaches to the litany of issue areas PFAS involves will provide more models for states to draw on as they address the PFAS challenges in their own backyard.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Laura Rabinow is director of research at the Rockefeller Institute of Government
Mathilda Scott is a policy analyst at the Rockefeller Institute of Government
Francis Ofori-Awuku is a graduate research assistant at the Rockefeller Institute of Government