Who supplies water to Houston?

CITY OF HOUSTON, EPA public water system ID TX1010013, serving 2,970,543 people across 990,181 service connections.

Houston, TX

Is Houston tap water safe to drink?

Q: Is Houston tap water safe to drink?

CITY OF HOUSTON serves 2,970,543 people in Houston from surface water. Its federal record shows 3 violations, 1 of them health-based. A violation record is a compliance history, not a water quality test — the contaminant levels themselves are in the utility's annual Consumer Confidence Report.

CITY OF HOUSTON supplies 2,970,543 people here, drawing surface water. Here is its entire federal compliance record — and, just as importantly, what that record cannot tell you.

Kitchen tap running — Houston municipal drinking water

People served

2,970,543

CITY OF HOUSTON

Source

surface water

Violations on record

all time

Health-based

see below

What this page is, and what it is not

This is the federal compliance record — what EPA has cited this utility for. It is not a water quality test. A system with no violations has not been shown to be clean; it has nothing reported, which is a weaker claim than it looks. The actual measured contaminant levels are in the utility’s annual Consumer Confidence Report, which every US utility must publish and which is not in this dataset.

Health-based citations

What CITY OF HOUSTON has been cited for

EPA contaminant code 0300

1 citation · 2025

The full record

Every violation, most recent first

From	Contaminant	What happened	Health-based
2025-05-01	EPA contaminant code 0300	failed a required treatment technique	yes
2019-12-01	EPA contaminant code 8000	missed required monitoring	no
2015-10-01	EPA contaminant code 5000	missed monitoring or reporting	no

What it means for filter choice

This system has no violations on its federal record. That is not the same as clean water, and we will not pretend it is — it means nothing has been reported. It does mean there is no recorded reason here to spend money on filtration. Test your own tap first.

What filtering costs here →This utility on EPA ECHO

Test before you spend

Fourteen dollars beats a compliance record

A federal record describes a utility. It cannot describe the pipe between the main and your kitchen, which is where lead usually comes from. Your own tap is the only thing that answers your own question.

HoneForest TDS meter

$13.97

4.5★ 16,400 reviews · 2,000+ bought last month

Tells you your dissolved-solids number in about four seconds, which is where every decision on this site should start.

Against it: TDS is not a safety measurement. It counts dissolved solids and cannot see lead, PFAS or bacteria. It tells you how hard your water is and whether a filter is still doing anything — nothing more. Anyone selling you a system on a TDS reading alone is misleading you.

Check price on Amazonchecked
2026-08-31

HM Digital TDS-3

$13.60

4.6★ 1,800 reviews · 1,000+ bought last month

The one that has been in service vans for fifteen years. Holds calibration better than the cheap ones.

Against it: Same limitation as every TDS meter, and it looks like it was designed in 2009 because it was.

Check price on Amazonchecked
2026-08-31

Source: US EPA Safe Drinking Water Information System, retrieved 2026-08-31 from data.epa.gov. Public water system TX1010013. Nothing on this page is written by hand — if a figure is not in EPA’s response, it does not appear here. All cities.