How to Check for PFAS Near My Address (Free + Paid Tools)

"Is my house in a PFAS zone?" is one of the hardest questions to answer from a Google search. The federal data exists, but it lives in five different EPA datasets and none of them are organized by street address. This guide walks through how to actually check PFAS near your home — using the free public sources first, and then deciding whether a paid address-level lookup is worth it.

The 4 sources that actually matter

Every credible PFAS-near-me check rolls up the same federal records:

1. EPA UCMR 5 — Large public water systems tested for 29 PFAS compounds 2021–2024. Tells you whether your utility has detections.
2. EPA TRI (Toxics Release Inventory) — Industrial facilities that release or manage PFAS. Useful for spotting upstream sources within a few miles of a property.
3. DoD PFAS Installations— Military bases with documented PFAS contamination, mostly from firefighting foam (AFFF). High-risk if you're within ~5 miles downgradient.
4. EPA Superfund / SEMS — Hazardous-waste cleanup sites, many of which have PFAS listed as a contaminant of concern.

The free path (and what it leaves out)

You can absolutely DIY this. EPA's EnviroAtlas, UCMR 5 occurrence dashboard, and TRI Search are all free. The catches:

• None of them accept a street address. You query by ZIP, county, water utility name, or facility ID — and then have to figure out which utility serves your address.
• UCMR 5 only covers systems serving 3,300+ people. About a third of U.S. households on smaller systems or private wells are invisible to it.
• The DoD list is a PDF. Distance from a base matters, and you have to do that geometry yourself.

For a homebuyer doing one diligence pass on one address, the free route works if you have a couple of hours and you're comfortable with EPA data portals.

Faster: city-level summaries

If you just want to know "does this city have a PFAS problem," we already aggregate the federal data by city — see the Water & PFAS by City directory. Useful examples:

• Grand Rapids, MI — large UCMR 5 detections from the Wolverine Worldwide tannery cluster.
• Wilmington, NC — Cape Fear River GenX contamination from Chemours.
• Colorado Springs, CO — Peterson AFB AFFF plume affecting Security and Widefield water districts.

When the $9.99 address report makes sense

We built VetMyAddress because city-level data still doesn't answer the actual buyer question: "is this specific house at elevated risk?" Two homes a mile apart can sit on different water systems, on different sides of an industrial plume, and inside vs outside a flood zone.

The address report does the joins for you:

• Geocodes the address and identifies the serving public water system.
• Pulls UCMR 5 + SDWA violations for that exact utility.
• Lists every TRI/Superfund/DoD PFAS source within a tunable radius.
• Adds FEMA flood zone and AirNow air-quality context for the same point.
• Returns a plain-English A–F grade so a non-expert can act on it.

It's $9.99 for one address, $14.99 for two — designed for the moment in a home purchase where you have 24 hours to decide whether to go to inspection. If you have time and patience, the free EPA tools cover the same data. If you don't, that's the trade.

A quick action checklist

1. Find your city in the city directory.
2. If detections exist, check your state PFAS page for context.
3. If the home is within ~5 miles of a military base or known industrial source, run the address report.
4. If you're on a private well, get a NSF-certified PFAS lab test regardless — federal data won't help you.

Related reading: PFAS homebuyer guide, PFAS from military bases, drinking water quality checks.