What North Carolina 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.
North CarolinaComprehensive and current
Published action level, as verified in 2026: 10 ppb
The results below are counted against that level, which the source records as set in statute.
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.
The source publishes one row per sample taken at a fixture, so every figure below counts fixture samples. A sample is counted above the action level here when its measured value is at or above 10 ppb.
21,684 non-detects + 21,333 measured + 3,859 with no result published = 46,876 samples collected
1.8% (821 of 46,876 samples collected) — fixtures at or above 10 ppb, the state's action level
3.8% (821 of 21,333 measured samples) — fixtures at or above 10 ppb, the state's action level
Both figures count the same 821 results at or above 10 ppb. They differ only in what that count is divided by, and dropping the rows with no measured value can only raise the rate — for a state reporting mostly non-detects it raises it by more than an order of magnitude. So we publish both denominators, and neither figure is ever shown alone.
20.8% (433 of 2,083 schools with published results) — schools at or above 10 ppb, the state's action level
The two rates above count fixture samples; this one counts schools with at least one sample at or above the level. The gap between them is itself informative, and the two units must never be mixed inside one comparison.
Coverage of the results published so far: the platform that publishes North Carolina's results lists 10,482 facilities, and 2,083 of them carry results today. A facility with no results has none published under this programme; that is not a statement about its water.
Sampling period: 2023-10-17 to 2026-07-29.
20 dated rows fall outside the plausible window — 2000-01-01 through the day the data was retrieved (2026-08-09) — and are excluded from the range above: the earliest date it publishes is 1970-01-01. Those rows are still counted in every total on this page, and every date survives verbatim in the CSV below.
Testing is required by North Carolina's testing requirement for schools and child care facilities, which the Clean Classrooms for Carolina Kids programme delivers.
Every row behind the figures above, exactly as the source published it — the verbatim result string alongside the normalised value, the non-detect flag, the state’s own action level on every row, and the sample date with no window applied.
North Carolina results (CSV) · 46,876 rows · CC BY 4.0
This page names no schools. Named readings live on the lookup, where the state’s remediation note is rendered beside every one of them.
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.
Changed since the 2021 baseline: action level.
Our field note for North Carolina, 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, and NASBE's '10 ppb after 12/21' has taken effect. Clean Classrooms for Carolina Kids (NC DPI + NC DHHS + RTI International + Duke Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, launched 2023-09) covers public schools, licensed child care centers and family child care homes for lead in water plus lead paint and asbestos. Public per-facility Data Mapper is live (HTTP 200), browsable by county. Predecessor program Clean Water for Carolina Kids tested ALL child care centers in the state: 97% had lead present and 16% had very elevated lead in at least one tap.
TapWaterData Editorial. "School drinking water lead testing: North Carolina." 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/north-carolina
@misc{tapwaterdata_school_lead_2026,
author = {TapWaterData Editorial},
title = {School drinking water lead testing: North Carolina},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://www.tapwaterdata.com/school-lead-testing/north-carolina}},
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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