4,218 U.S. Water Systems Have Open Health-Based Violations Right Now. These Are the States With the Most.

We pulled the EPA's violation records for every public water system in the United States and asked one question: how many are breaking a health rule right now — and where.

The answer is 4,218 water systems. Each one is under at least one open health-based violation — a violation tied to a limit the government set to protect your health, recorded as still unresolved. Not a missed report. Not a late form. A health rule, currently being broken.

Here's where they are.

The states with the most systems under open health-based violations

| Rank | State | Systems | | --- | --- | --- | | 1 | California | 801 | | 2 | Texas | 479 | | 3 | Connecticut | 328 | | 4 | Florida | 319 | | 5 | Puerto Rico | 243 | | 6 | Louisiana | 231 | | 7 | New Mexico | 199 | | 8 | Oklahoma | 198 | | 9 | West Virginia | 108 | | 10 | Illinois | 105 | | 11 | Arizona | 100 | | 12 | Pennsylvania | 94 | | 13 | New Jersey | 64 | | 14 | Ohio | 63 | | 15 | Wisconsin | 59 |

California and Texas leading isn't a surprise — they're the two biggest states with the most water systems to begin with. The surprise is Connecticut at number three. Connecticut has 328 systems under an open health-based violation, ahead of Florida and more than every state larger than it except California and Texas.

The rest of the top ten tells the same story: New Mexico, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Louisiana, Puerto Rico. These aren't the most populous states. They're places where a lot of people drink from small systems — the rural districts, mobile-home parks, schools, and roadside towns that run their own wells and treatment. Those systems break a health rule and stay broken far more often than the big-city utilities most people picture when they think "tap water."

What "open" and "health-based" actually mean

Two words are doing the work here, and both come straight from the EPA's records, not from us.

Health-based. The EPA splits violations into two buckets. One is health-based: a system exceeded a contaminant's legal limit, or failed a treatment or monitoring step tied to that limit. The other is everything procedural — late paperwork, a missed notice. We counted only the first kind. Every one of these 4,218 systems tripped a rule written to keep something out of your water that hurts people.

Open. A violation in the records is either resolved or it isn't. We counted only the ones still flagged Unaddressed or Addressed — meaning the system has not returned to compliance. Resolved and archived violations are out. This is the live list.

And it's recent. Most of these open violations were first recorded in 2024 and 2025 — not a decade-old backlog. They're current.

See your own system

The number for your state is an aggregate. What matters is the system that fills your glass — and that's on the map. Every public water system in the country, with its real EPA lead, copper, contaminant, and violation data, is plotted at thewatermap.com. Search your city and click your system to see whether it's one of the 4,218.

A few of the states carrying the most open violations:

• California water systems — 801 under open health-based violations, the most in the country
• Texas water systems — 479
• Florida water systems — 319
• Louisiana water systems — 231
• Arizona water systems — 100

A violation doesn't always mean the water is dangerous the day you drink it — some are monitoring failures, where the system didn't test on schedule and the EPA treats the gap as a health risk because nobody knows what was in the water. But an open health-based violation does mean this: a rule built to protect you was broken, and as of the latest records, it still hasn't been fixed.

The part the violation records don't cover

Here's the limit of this data. The EPA tracks violations for regulated contaminants — lead, copper, nitrate, bacteria, disinfection byproducts, the list the Safe Drinking Water Act already covers. Microplastics aren't on that list yet. The EPA only added them to its contaminant candidate list in April 2026, the first step toward any legal limit. There is no microplastics violation to break, because there's no standard to break it against.

So a system can have a spotless violation record and still send plastic particles through your tap. The two aren't connected. If you want to know what's in your water beyond what the EPA currently regulates, you have to test for it directly — you can run a microplastics test kit at home for $50 and count the particles yourself.

All of our data is public. Every system, every violation, every test we run goes on the map.