Lead in Alabama school drinking water

What Alabama publishes about lead testing in its schools’ drinking water, what those numbers cover, and how we checked it. One row of a 51-jurisdiction survey, verified jurisdiction by jurisdiction rather than compiled from a single list.

AlabamaPartial

Publishing status: Publishes results
Coverage: Partial — some schools only
Data vintage: 2020-2025 grant round — currency not established by the evidence we hold
Evidence: reported, not verified at sourceChecked 2026-08-09; not confirmed at source

Action level

Published action level, as verified in 2026: 15 ppb

Action levels are not comparable between jurisdictions: across the 51 we surveyed they run from 1 ppb to 20 ppb, so a share of results above “the action level” measures the threshold as much as it measures the water. We never rank states on it. Where a jurisdiction explains how its own level was set, the verified research note at the foot of this page records the explanation verbatim.

No statistics on this page yet

Alabama publishes results, but we have not yet ingested them row by row, so this page carries no counts or rates for it — only what the survey verified about the publication itself. We publish a figure once we hold the rows it is computed from, and not before. The jurisdiction’s own results are linked below.

What changed since 2021

The baseline is the National Association of State Boards of Education’s 2021 survey. Every 2026 value below was re-checked for this survey; a value that did not move is a finding too.

Testing required: 2021 baseline: No · verified 2026: No
Action levelchanged: 2021 baseline: Unknown · verified 2026: 15
Publishes results: 2021 baseline: Yes · verified 2026: Yes

Changed since the 2021 baseline: action level.

Source and verification

What we checked: https://adem.alabama.gov/water/drinking-water-branch/child-care-facilities-and-schools-lead-testing-program
Checked on: 2026-08-09 — reported by a third party, not confirmed at source
Machine readability: T3 — document only (PDF or report)

Verified research note

Our field note for Alabama, published verbatim rather than summarised. Where it quotes a figure from a source, that is the source’s own number reproduced as we recorded it, not a rate we computed — everything we compute states its denominator and its unit.

Confirms NASBE. ADEM completed EPA-funded VOLUNTARY testing: over 5,000 samples analysed at over 1,100 schools and childcare facilities, in a grant round begun 2020 that expanded an earlier 2017-2019 programme. Results reported in state and local press November 2025. Program page live (HTTP 200); exact results surface not yet confirmed at source.

Cite this page

TapWaterData Editorial. "School drinking water lead testing: Alabama." TapWaterData national school drinking-water lead testing database. Last updated 2026-08-09. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. https://www.tapwaterdata.com/school-lead-testing/alabama

@misc{tapwaterdata_school_lead_2026,
  author       = {TapWaterData Editorial},
  title        = {School drinking water lead testing: Alabama},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.tapwaterdata.com/school-lead-testing/alabama}},
  note         = {Last updated 2026-08-09. Licensed under CC BY 4.0}
}

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) licence — free to republish, chart or build on with attribution. Last updated 2026-08-09.

All 51 jurisdictions — the national scorecard, the tier map, and the methodology behind every rating on this page.