Water Quality & Forever Chemicals
If you searched "is Newark tap water safe" and your shoulders crept up, let's lower them a notch. This page is a plain-English summary of what public federal water records show for Newark, New Jersey, pulled together so you don't have to dig through the datasets yourself. What varies house to house is the specific utility serving your address and the source feeding it, and that's the part genuinely worth confirming.
1
PFAS detections in nearby water systems
EPA UCMR 5 (2021–2024) results matching the city name
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Industrial PFAS facilities in city
EPA TRI 2024 reporting
2
DoD PFAS installations statewide
In New Jersey
Much of the Newark area tends to rely on treated surface water drawn from the Pequannock watershed reservoirs in the northern New Jersey highlands, a long-documented arrangement for the city, with regional interconnections supplementing supply. Some surrounding communities lean differently. Because your street's water depends on the system serving it, treat this regional picture as background rather than a description of your own tap.
In and around Newark, two homes a mile apart can sit on different public water systems, so the regional view above isn't necessarily your tap. The reliable way to know is to find the system listed for your address and read its annual Consumer Confidence Report, which utilities are required to publish for free. A call to the utility named in the live list above settles the rest. It's exactly the kind of record worth reviewing when evaluating an address.
"Newark water hardness" gets searched plenty, and it's usually the dishes-and-dry-skin question rather than a health one. Surface supplies fed by highland reservoirs tend to run more moderate, but blends vary, so we won't assign your tap a figure, and no dataset honestly could. The simplest move: a cheap test strip, or a glance at your utility's annual report, which often lists hardness. Then your kettle's faint mineral ring finally has an explanation.
EPA required public water systems serving 3,300+ people to test 29 PFAS compounds between 2021 and 2024.
City-level numbers describe the broad pattern around Newark; two homes a mile apart can sit on different water systems with very different profiles. The address report fills that gap — it identifies the public water system serving a specific property, lists any PFAS detections on that exact system, and maps the nearby industrial and Superfund sources.
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EPA data tells you what your utility reported on the days they tested. A Tap Score kit tells you what's coming out of your faucet, right now. Mail-in lab, certified results in about a week. The same labs cities use.
Order a Tap Score kit →Guide
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We won't hand you a verdict, and any page that does deserves a raised eyebrow. This page summarizes what federal records like UCMR 5 show for Newark. Remember a detection isn't an exceedance, and UCMR 5 mainly covers larger systems, so a quiet result means "nothing on record here," not certified clean. The only address-level answer comes from the specific system serving you.
Check the system or systems listed on this page, then look up that utility's published contact information and its annual Consumer Confidence Report. Because nearby addresses can be served by different public water systems, the dependable approach is matching your exact address to its provider rather than assuming the city-wide utility covers your home.
Broadly, much of the Newark area tends to rely on treated surface water from the Pequannock watershed reservoirs in the northern New Jersey highlands, with regional interconnections supplementing supply. That's the well-established regional picture; your actual source depends on the system serving your address and is detailed in that utility's annual report.
We don't publish a hardness number, since no reliable address-level hardness dataset exists to cite. Highland reservoir supplies tend to run moderate, but treated blends vary. To learn yours, use an inexpensive test strip or check whether your utility's annual report lists hardness. It's a household nuisance topic, not a safety matter.
Enter an address — we'll identify the serving water utility, pull PFAS detections, FEMA flood zone, and nearby Superfund sites, then give you a plain-English A–F grade. $19.99 single, $29.99 two-address bundle.
One-time report. PFAS, water violations, Superfund sites, flood zone, air quality, and a plain-English A–F grade for the address.
More New Jersey data: Superfund sites · PFAS in New Jersey
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