Lead service lines and lead at the tap, water system by water system in Central Ohio

Every community water system in Ohio has had to count the water service lines in its ground by material, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency now publishes those counts system by system, as it publishes each system's lead tests at the tap in its drinking water records. This page sets out both for 22 water systems across Franklin, Delaware, Licking, Fairfield, Union, Madison and Pickaway counties, exactly as the federal record carried them in September 2026: how many lines each system reports as lead, as galvanized requiring replacement, as unknown and as non-lead, and what its 90th percentile lead results at the tap have been since 2016: the latest, the highest, and how many periods went above 10. Each number belongs to a water system, never to a house.

Last updated September 2026 · Service line counts are the federal Environmental Protection Agency's Service Line Inventory report, 2026 second-quarter submission, and lead results are its SDWIS records through Envirofacts, both read September 24, 2026 · No prices on this page; the Estimate Builder carries those · Part of the knowledge base

What the federal inventory is, and what it counts

The Lead and Copper Rule Revisions required public water systems to inventory the service line materials in their distribution systems and to submit that inventory to their state, which passes it on to the federal Environmental Protection Agency. The agency publishes the result as its Service Line Inventory report, in four categories it defines in its own words: lead service lines, where all or a portion is made of lead; galvanized requiring replacement, made from iron or steel dipped in zinc, which lead can adhere to over time from nearby lead sources; non-lead service lines; and service lines made of unknown materials. The figures on this page are the report's 2026 second-quarter submission, read on September 24, 2026.

Two cautions come from the report itself. It says the rule does not require states to report non-lead counts until November 1, 2027, so the non-lead column may be an undercount in some states. And a count belongs to the system that reported it: it says how many lines of each kind a utility has recorded across its whole service area, not which kind runs to any one address. The pipe inside the house, the part a bathroom remodel opens up, is not in these counts at all; what that pipe is by decade, and what the city of Columbus says about its own service lines, is on the page on supply pipes in Central Ohio houses by era.

The count, system by system

The 22 community water systems below include the largest in the seven counties, and are listed in the order of the lines each reports. They are not every system: Heath, Johnstown, Groveport, Obetz and Mount Sterling, among others, run their own systems and are not in the table. A system left out is left out for length, not for anything it reports. Names are the report's own, with the town CDC's fluoridation records attach to the two Mid-Ohio Water and Sewer District plants. The water source is the federal record's code for each system.

Read down the lead column and the Columbus system stands apart: 25,155 lines reported as lead and 8,093 as galvanized requiring replacement. Outside it, the Jackson Street plant that CDC names as Plain City's reports 180 lead lines, Bexley 89, Delaware 43, Marysville 23, Circleville 11, Del-Co 9 and Newark 3, and fourteen of the 22 report none. Galvanized requiring replacement tells a different story: Newark reports 4,103 of them and Lancaster 2,349, with no lead line in Lancaster at all.

The unknown column is the one to read slowly. Delaware City reports 12,049 of its 15,297 lines as lead status unknown. Granville Village reports all 1,609 of its lines that way and Sanitary District #4 all 3,427, and neither reports a single non-lead line. Five systems, Licking Regional Water District, Pickerington, Fairfield County Utilities, Jefferson Water and Sewer District and Canal Winchester, report every line as non-lead. An unknown is not a finding of lead; it is a line the system had not yet identified when it reported.

Why a suburb on Columbus water can have its own count

Buying water and reporting an inventory are separate things. The federal record codes Bexley, Gahanna, Reynoldsburg and Sanitary District #4 as buying surface water, and each is a separate water system in that record that reports its own inventory: Bexley's 89 lead lines are counted in Bexley's report, not Columbus's. By contrast, no active community water system named Dublin, Upper Arlington, Hilliard, Grove City, Whitehall or New Albany appears in the federal water system table at all, and no document read for this page says in which system's inventory their lines are counted. Which utility serves each town is on the page on water and sewer providers town by town.

Lead at the tap since 2016

The inventory counts pipe. The tap test measures water: under the Lead and Copper Rule a system samples water at customers' taps and reports the 90th percentile, the level that nine in ten sampled taps were at or below. The federal record carries those results in milligrams per liter; the table converts them to parts per billion, the unit the annual water reports print, by multiplying by 1,000. A period is the system's monitoring period, which in these records runs from six months to three years.

No system in the table reported a 90th percentile above the current action level of 15 parts per billion in any period ending 2016 or later. The table's last column counts periods above 10, because that is where the action level goes next: the federal Environmental Protection Agency's Lead and Copper Rule Improvements lower it from 15 to 10 micrograms per liter, the same unit as parts per billion, with a compliance date of November 1, 2027. Three systems crossed 10 at least once. The Jackson Street plant reported 12.0 in 2018, 10.9 in 2019, 13.2 in 2021 and 14.3 in 2023, with 5.3 in 2025; Jefferson Water and Sewer District reported 13.0 in 2019 and between 2.0 and 7.5 in every year since; Licking Regional Water District reported 12.8 in 2022 and 0 in every other period.

Two cautions about the figures themselves. The federal record enters many results as 0 and does not say whether a 0 means no lead was detected or a result below a reporting limit, so the table prints a 0 as the record does. And the record and a city's own report do not always print the same number: for Columbus the federal record carries 0.0012 milligrams per liter, or 1.2 parts per billion, for 2021 to 2023, while the city's 2025 water quality report prints 1.3 for lead checked in 2023. Neither document explains the difference. What the Columbus report says in its own words is on the water quality report page.

Fluoride, from the same systems

CDC's My Water's Fluoride lists 21 of the 22 systems in the table as fluoridated. The exception is Lancaster City, which it lists as not fluoridated. The same county lists show other small Central Ohio systems that are not fluoridated, among them West Jefferson Village in Madison County and Lithopolis Village in Fairfield County.

What none of this says about a house

Scope, plainly. A system's count says how many lines of each kind it has recorded, and its tap result says what nine in ten sampled taps were at or below in one period; neither says what runs under a particular yard or what comes out of a particular faucet. The utility that serves an address is the one that knows what it has recorded for that address. And the service line stops where the house begins: the supply pipe behind a shower wall is the household's, chosen by the decade the house went up, and is the subject of its own page.

Sources

Every figure, date and quotation on this page comes from one of these documents, read on the date given. Where two of them disagree, the page says so.

• United States Environmental Protection Agency, SDWIS Federal Reporting Services, Service Line Inventory report, submission year and quarter 2026Q2, read per water system September 24, 2026; read September 2026.
• United States Environmental Protection Agency, Envirofacts, Safe Drinking Water Information System tables LCR_SAMPLE, LCR_SAMPLE_RESULT and WATER_SYSTEM, queried September 24, 2026.
• United States Environmental Protection Agency, EPA's Lead and Copper Rule Improvements, fact sheet for the general public, October 2024; read September 2026.
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, My Water's Fluoride, Ohio, all water systems by county, read September 24, 2026.
• City of Columbus, 2025 Drinking Water Consumer Confidence Report, 2026; read September 2026.

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