What the government found in Orlando-area water.

Public records

Your water utility tests your water every year — and publishes the results.

Every community water system in the U.S. is required by federal law to test its drinking water and publish an annual water quality report (also called a Consumer Confidence Report). Most people never read theirs. We did — and we keep the links below current so you can read them too.

The actual reports.

Primary sources — no middleman. Download and read them yourself:

• OUC 2024 Water Quality Report (PDF) — Orlando Utilities Commission, the utility serving Orlando proper. The official annual report.
• Orange County Utilities 2025 Drinking Water Report (PDF) — unincorporated Orange County systems (much of this water is purchased from OUC).
• Orange County Utilities 2024 Drinking Water Report (PDF) — the prior year's county report.
• EWG Tap Water Database: Orlando Utilities Commission — the Environmental Working Group's independent analysis of the same government test data (2021–2023), comparing detected levels against health guidelines set by federal and state public-health authorities.

Which report covers you depends on who bills your water — check your water bill for your utility's name, then match it above.

What the testing detected.

From OUC's 2024 report — detected levels vs. the federal legal limit (MCL). Every result below was within the legal limit:

Orange County's 2025 report (systems buying OUC water) additionally detected radium 226+228 at 1.5 pCi/L (legal limit 5) and alpha emitters at 3.5 pCi/L (legal limit 15) — both naturally occurring radioactive minerals from the aquifer rock — plus barium, fluoride (0.89 ppm), nickel, nitrate, and sodium, all below legal limits.

Detected — and above health guidelines.

EWG compared OUC's 2021–2023 government test data against health guidelines from federal and state public-health authorities (such as California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment). Seven contaminants came back above those guidelines:

• Total trihalomethanes (TTHMs) — disinfection byproducts
• Haloacetic acids (HAA5 and HAA9) — disinfection byproducts
• Bromate — disinfection byproduct
• Chromium (hexavalent) — from erosion of natural deposits and industrial sources
• Radium, combined (-226 & -228) — naturally occurring in aquifer rock
• 1,3-Butadiene — industrial chemical

Also detected, but below health guidelines: barium, fluoride, manganese, molybdenum, nitrate, quinoline, strontium, vanadium, and 2-propen-1-ol. Notably, government testing did not detect arsenic, PFOA, or PFOS in OUC's water.

See EWG's full breakdown with per-contaminant test data →

Why "no violations" and "above guidelines" can both be true.

Federal legal limits (MCLs) are set through a regulatory process that weighs health research against treatment cost and feasibility — and many were set decades ago. Health guidelines from public-health agencies aim at a different question: the level with little to no health risk, without the cost-feasibility tradeoff. That is why a contaminant can be fully legal and still exceed a health guideline. Both numbers are real; they just answer different questions. We show you both so you can decide for yourself.

Florida in the national rankings.

Multiple national analyses have put Florida at or near the top of America's worst-water lists:

• #1 worst tap water state (2025) — a 2025 ranking of the 10 worst tap water states put Florida first, citing over 1.1 million lead pipes still in use statewide.
• #3 worst tap water state (2026) — a 2026 analysis of EPA violation records, lead service line inventories, and federal PFAS studies ranked Florida third, behind only Texas and Pennsylvania.
• Worst water city in America: Pensacola, FL — one widely cited ranking of U.S. cities named Pensacola #1, with 45 chemicals detected and 21 found in unhealthy amounts, including radium-228, trichloroethylene, benzene, and lead.
• First scientific grading of U.S. tap water (July 2026) — TownWaterCheck graded more than 40,000 U.S. communities using 2025 utility reports plus EPA monitoring data. Nationally, 37% of large cities had traceable PFAS "forever chemicals," and 15% exceeded the EPA's 2024 PFAS limits. You can look up any town's grade free on their site.

In fairness: one EPA-violation-based analysis ranked Florida the 10th cleanest state — but the same report notes that between 2013 and 2020, over 21 million Floridians were served by water systems that violated health-based standards at least once. Rankings measure different things, and "few violations" is not the same as "few contaminants." Read the underlying data and decide for yourself — that is what this page is for.

What reduces these contaminants.

According to EWG's analysis of OUC's water, activated carbon filtration reduces 5 of the 7 above-guideline contaminants, and reverse osmosis reduces all 7. That matches what we install every day:

• Disinfection byproducts (TTHMs, HAAs, bromate) and chlorine — reduced by whole-home carbon filtration.
• Hexavalent chromium, radium, and the full above-guideline list — removed at the drinking-water tap by reverse osmosis.