Lead in Pennsylvania school drinking water

What Pennsylvania 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.

PennsylvaniaPublishes results, breadth not yet rated

Publishing status: Publishes results
Coverage: Not yet rated by this survey — the jurisdiction publishes results and it is our breadth rating that is outstanding, not the size of its dataset
Data vintage: the programme is running and the data is still being added to
Evidence: confirmed at sourceConfirmed at source 2026-08-09

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

Pennsylvania 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 level: 2021 baseline: 15 · verified 2026: 15
Publishes results: 2021 baseline: Yes · verified 2026: Yes

Nothing in this row moved between the 2021 baseline and our 2026 verification.

Source and verification

What we checked: https://www.pa.gov/agencies/education/programs-and-services/schools/school-climate-wellbeing/laws-and-regulations/lead-in-drinking-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 Pennsylvania, 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.

CHANGED 2026: July 2026 budget raised the REPORTING threshold from >0 ppb (Act 39 of 2018) to >=5 ppb. The xlsx schema also changed in May 2026, breaking the time series. Act 39 does not require testing - schools may opt out by discussing lead at an annual public meeting.

Cite this page

TapWaterData Editorial. "School drinking water lead testing: Pennsylvania." 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/pennsylvania

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