# Lead service line inventories: what the states actually published

URL: https://municorn.us/data/lcrr-service-line-inventories/
Updated: 2026-09-16
Tags: data, lead, service-lines

> **Cite as:** Municorn.us, "Lead service line inventories: what the states actually published", Municorn water loss index, https://municorn.us/data/lcrr-service-line-inventories/ (source filings retrieved 2026-09-16).
> **Licence:** CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ — reuse and redistribution are permitted with attribution to Municorn.us and a link to this URL.
> **Caveat that must travel with these figures:** "Water loss" is at least three different quantities depending on the jurisdiction, and nothing here supports a comparison between states.

Of twenty states, one publishes a service line inventory a reader can download, and two fifths of its lines have no known material.

Costing a lead service line replacement takes a count of the lead lines and a
count of the ones nobody has identified. The second is usually larger and it
decides the budget, because an unknown line has to be visited before it can be
ruled out.

Every US community water system had to file a service line inventory with its
state by 16 October 2024. This page is about how much of that record is
readable.

## What twenty states published

Most is a program page: the rule, the deadline, the filing template. That
establishes a state runs a program, and it is not data.

**One state publishes a downloadable inventory with a row per line**, New York,
and it is the only one here these pages can read.

**California publishes an inventory nobody can retrieve.** The links resolve and
the files are real, but the first is about 344 megabytes, served without
declaring its size, and every attempt to read it timed out.

**Four states refuse automated requests**: Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan
and Colorado. **Two have no confirmable inventory address at all**, Texas and
Georgia, both of which file the water loss audits published here.

A national figure built from sources this uneven is not evenly evidenced, and
the differences do not cancel.

## New York, the one that can be read

4,618,115 service lines, read on 16 September 2026 from the state's [Lead
Service Line
Inventory](https://health.data.ny.gov/Health/New-York-State-Lead-Service-Line-Inventory/j63k-4n92).
The state updates it, so a later reading differs.

| what the utility filed | lines | share |
|---|---|---|
| not lead | 2,529,135 | 54.8% |
| **unknown** | **1,798,577** | **38.9%** |
| lead | 248,843 | 5.4% |
| galvanized, requiring replacement | 38,352 | 0.8% |
| category was a spreadsheet error | 3,164 | 0.1% |
| no service line at that address | 43 | 0.0% |
| not recognized | 1 | 0.0% |

**Two fifths of New York's service lines have no known material**, and that is
the figure most likely to be reported away. About half of those rows have an
empty material column rather than the word "unknown". Drop the empties as
missing data and the state reports a fifth, wrong by nearly a million lines. An
empty cell in a mandated inventory is a line the utility did not categorize,
which is what unknown means.

The 3,164 rows whose category is a spreadsheet error are counted apart, never
folded into unknown. A spreadsheet that failed and a utility that does not know
are different facts, and only one is about pipe.

These are state totals. The inventory does not record which water system a line
belongs to, so nothing here is attached to a named utility.

_Municorn.us · https://municorn.us/data/lcrr-service-line-inventories/ · CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ · source filings retrieved 2026-09-16_

---