North Carolina · beta
North Carolina water quality, county by county
What public records show about the water in every North Carolina county: state waterway assessments, drinking-water compliance records, PFAS testing, and the gaps in all of them. Never a safety verdict — the records speak, with every claim linked to its government source.
Counties
Major waterways
The 12 most-assessed of 4,630 waterways with a state assessment on record — every one has a page, reachable from its county and basin pages.
Largest water systems
Top 50 of 278 systems with pages, by population served. Every county page lists all of its systems.
Common questions
Where does this data come from?
Every page is built from public government records — EPA drinking-water compliance and PFAS monitoring, EPA/state waterway assessments under the Clean Water Act, USGS watershed data, and Census boundaries. Each claim links to its dataset, version, and retrieval date.
Why isn't my water system listed?
Detailed pages currently cover active community water systems serving 3,300 or more people — the tier federal rules also required to test for PFAS. Smaller systems appear in their county's roster, and any North Carolina address can be searched for a full report.
Sources
| Dataset | Agency version | Retrieved |
|---|---|---|
| EPA/state ATTAINS waterway assessments | ATTAINS_Assessment ArcGIS snapshot (gispub.epa.gov) | 2026-08-15 |
| ATTAINS waterway geometry | ATTAINS_Assessment ArcGIS lines + areas (gispub.epa.gov) | 2026-08-16 |
| Census TIGER county boundaries | Census TIGERweb Counties (current vintage) | 2026-08-16 |
| NC DEQ PFAS monitoring | NC DEQ DWR EQuIS export, samples through 2025-07-29 | 2026-08-17 |
| Census TIGER place boundaries | Census TIGERweb Places (Incorporated + CDP, current vintage) | 2026-08-16 |
| EPA water system service areas | EPA PWS Service Areas v3 (hosted layer, item 80c6912ef14f46e480f5afd807767b4b) | 2026-08-15 |
| EPA Safe Drinking Water Act compliance records | ECHO SDWA quarterly bulk download | 2026-08-16 |
| EPA standards & benchmarks | 2026-08 curation | 2026-08-15 |
| EPA UCMR5 PFAS monitoring | UCMR5 occurrence data (collections through 2025-12-10) | 2026-08-15 |
| USGS watershed boundaries | USGS WBD via National Map MapServer | 2026-08-15 |
Records lag their agencies' refresh cycles — a recent change may not appear yet. Absence from a dataset is absence of a record, never evidence that water is clean.
Search an address
A county page is the wide view. Search a street address for the report scoped to it — the system serving it, the waters it drains to, and what's permitted upstream.
Search your address