About us

What we do

The United States runs one of the most extensive drinking water monitoring programmes in the world, and publishes the results in full. It publishes them as raw files running to hundreds of megabytes, indexed by identifiers no member of the public has ever seen. The information is genuinely open and effectively unavailable.

We close that gap. We take the federal record, join it to the places people actually live, and present it in a form that can be read in ten seconds — without changing what it says.

How we work

Four commitments govern everything published here.

• Measurements, not scores. We do not rank cities, grade utilities or compute a safety index. Composite scores obscure the underlying numbers and invite comparisons the data cannot support. We show what a laboratory measured.
• The limits of the data, stated on the page. Every dataset has blind spots. Ours are documented in detail rather than left for the reader to discover, because a result presented without its caveats is not a more useful result — it is a less true one.
• No alarm as a business model. Water contamination is a subject where fear converts well. We write about risk in proportion to the evidence, which frequently means reporting that a result is unremarkable.
• Traceable to source. Every figure we publish comes from a named federal dataset that you can download and check. Where we calculate something ourselves, we say so and describe the method.

Editorial standards

Articles on this site are researched from primary sources: federal regulations, published monitoring data, and the scientific and regulatory assessments of the agencies responsible. We cite what we rely on. We date what we publish, and we re-check anything affected by a change in regulation.

Health information is drawn from the published positions of public health bodies and presented as those bodies state it, including their uncertainty. Nothing here is a clinical judgement about any individual, and nothing here substitutes for one.

How the site is funded

IsMyTapSafe.com is independent and is not funded by any water utility, filtration manufacturer, law firm or advocacy organisation.

The water lookup is free and always will be, and it carries no advertising or affiliate links. Where we review consumer products, we may earn a commission if you buy through a link, and any page where that applies says so. Commercial relationships have no influence on what the data shows or on which results appear — the results come from a federal file we do not control.

Corrections

We correct errors promptly and note substantive changes on the page. If something here is wrong, tell us what and where, and we will check it against the federal source.