What Montana 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.
MontanaComprehensive and current
Published action level, as verified in 2026: 5 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.
Montana 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.
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.
Nothing in this row moved between the 2021 baseline and our 2026 verification.
Our field note for Montana, 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 (5 ppb). Mandatory for all schools accredited by the Montana Board of Public Education, effective 2020-01-17, with initial sampling due 2021-12-31: all drinking fountains and kitchen fixtures, plus all other human-consumption fixtures unless DEQ approves a representative sampling plan. DEQ publishes sample results WITH REMEDIATION STATUS via an EQuIS portal. Note Montana's 5.0 ug/L is chosen as the practical quantitation level for lead -- the lowest reliably measurable concentration -- not as a health-based threshold. Worth stating precisely; it is a different justification from NY/WA/MD's 5 ppb.
TapWaterData Editorial. "School drinking water lead testing: Montana." 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/montana
@misc{tapwaterdata_school_lead_2026,
author = {TapWaterData Editorial},
title = {School drinking water lead testing: Montana},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://www.tapwaterdata.com/school-lead-testing/montana}},
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 .
All 51 jurisdictions — the national scorecard, the tier map, and the methodology behind every rating on this page.
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