Lead in Maine school drinking water

What Maine 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.

MaineComprehensive but closed

Publishing status: Publishes results
Coverage: Comprehensive — essentially every school in the jurisdiction
Data vintage: 2021-2023 cycle, closed — the programme that produced it has ended
Evidence: confirmed at sourceConfirmed at source 2026-08-09

Programme ended or closed — data frozen at 2021-2023 cycle, closed. These figures describe the period they were collected in, not today.

Action level

Published action level, as verified in 2026: 4 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

Maine 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: Yes · verified 2026: Yes
Action level: 2021 baseline: 4 · verified 2026: 4
Publishes resultschanged: 2021 baseline: Unknown · verified 2026: Yes

Changed since the 2021 baseline: publishes results.

Source and verification

What we checked: https://data.mainepublichealth.gov/tracking/public-water
Checked on: 2026-08-09 — confirmed at source
Machine readability: T2 — structured but needs extraction (dashboard or web app)

Verified research note

Our field note for Maine, 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.

RESOLVES a NASBE Unknown to Yes. A 2019 law mandated every K-12 school in Maine test for lead; sampling ran Aug 2021 to 2023-06-30. MaineTracking publishes a Tableau dashboard with maps of average lead per school AND tables of INDIVIDUAL FIXTURE results, from standing-water first-draw samples. Caveat carried by the state: the dashboard shows INITIAL results only, not post-remediation, so it overstates current risk at remediated taps. The sampling program has ENDED, so this is a closed 2021-2023 cycle rather than live monitoring. Dashboard: https://oit-tableau.maine.gov/t/DHHS/views/MapSchoolLead-Prod1_0/Dashboard

Cite this page

TapWaterData Editorial. "School drinking water lead testing: Maine." 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/maine

@misc{tapwaterdata_school_lead_2026,
  author       = {TapWaterData Editorial},
  title        = {School drinking water lead testing: Maine},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.tapwaterdata.com/school-lead-testing/maine}},
  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.