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We’ve updated this guide to include information on PFAS in tap water, with advice on which home tests are relevant for those concerns. petri dish
If you’re worried about your home’s water quality, a water-quality test can ease your fears or help you identify any problems. After testing 11 different home water-quality test kits, the Tap Score Advanced City Water Test is our pick. It measures a wide range of more than 100 potential contaminants and delivers the results in an easy-to-read, richly detailed report.
This send-away kit delivers lab-tested measurements of more than 100 contaminants, and it explains what they mean and what to do if there’s a problem.
The CityCheck Deluxe kit is just as accurate as the best water test kit, but it produces less-readable results.
The Safe Home Ultimate kit is just as accurate as the best water test kit, but it produces less-readable results.
This DIY test kit quickly tells you if you have a lead problem—the number-one concern for many people.
This send-away kit delivers lab-tested measurements of more than 100 contaminants, and it explains what they mean and what to do if there’s a problem.
The Tap Score Advanced City Water Test is a send-away kit: You take samples of your water, put them into a handful of bottles, and ship them off (using an included mailing label) to a company called SimpleLab. Your water is then tested for more than 100 compounds, including metals such as lead, mercury, and arsenic; volatile organic compounds (VOCs) like chloroform; bacteria; and industrial and agricultural compounds like pesticides and nitrates. Tap Score is not the only highly accurate send-away kit, but no other kit we tested delivered nearly as useful a report. Tap Score tells you, in plain language, exactly which compounds are in your water (and the amount), and it also explains their potential health risks and suggests ways of addressing any concerns. Tap Score also offers unmatched online support. You can chat with a representative, and if your questions go beyond their knowledge, the questions are passed on to experts, who follow up with a detailed email. All of this makes Tap Score by far the most user-friendly and informative home water-quality test kit we found.
The CityCheck Deluxe kit is just as accurate as the best water test kit, but it produces less-readable results.
The Safe Home Ultimate kit is just as accurate as the best water test kit, but it produces less-readable results.
If for some reason you are unable to use Tap Score, we recommend two runners-up: the WaterCheck CityCheck Deluxe and the Safe Home Ultimate Drinking Water Test Kit. Like Tap Score, these are send-away kits; you put samples into bottles and ship them to a certified lab. We found that the testing was just as accurate as Tap Score’s (and, in fact, National Testing Laboratories, which makes the CityCheck Deluxe kit, is among the more than 60 labs Tap Score partners with). But both of these kits are more expensive than Tap Score, and their reports aren’t as easy to understand. The reports are still much more readable than those of some other send-away kits: They’re color-coded, so you can quickly see contaminant levels of concern. But they lack Tap Score’s clear explanations, actionable advice, and robust online support. The CityCheck kit also lacks an included mailing label, so you’ll have to take a trip to the post office or another shipper.
The Tap Score PFAS kit tests for 14 “forever chemicals,” including perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS). (It does not test for metals, chlorine, or volatile organic compounds.) As with the top-pick Advanced City test, you take water samples directly from your tap and ship them to a certified lab using the included mailing label. The test results are delivered via email as a PDF and include clear explanations of the findings. You can also chat (online) with a company representative for more-detailed answers.
This DIY test kit quickly tells you if you have a lead problem—the number-one concern for many people.
Our also-great pick, the Safe Home Do-It-Yourself Lead in Drinking Water Test Kit, doesn’t have to be sent away—you can get the results at home yourself. It tests only for lead, but if that’s your sole concern, this DIY test is a great option. The Safe Home Do-It-Yourself kit is widely available, inexpensive, and fast (the test takes a total of 10 minutes and less than 30 seconds of active work). And it delivers a clear positive or negative result: Your lead levels are either below the EPA standard or above it. You simply dip a strip of test paper into a sample of your water, and the presence or absence of a blue line tells you whether you have a lead problem. If you don’t, you’ll have peace of mind. If you do, you’ll know it’s time to enlist a professional plumber or an environmental service to help you find and address the source of the problem.
We do not recommend any of the more-comprehensive DIY test kits that are available. We tested six of them and found that the tests were so rushed and the results so subjective (you’re asked to match the color of your test sample to a chart by eye, with only seconds to do so) that we didn’t trust our ability to interpret them. If you want a complete picture of what’s in your water, we strongly recommend that you go with one of the send-away kits and let a professional lab do the testing.
I’ve been covering water-quality products for Wirecutter since 2015. In addition to conducting tests on pitcher filters, under-sink filters, and the Big Berkey countertop system, I’ve spoken extensively with filter engineers; with NSF International, the de facto certification agency for water filters; and with the labs we’ve partnered with for our testing. Through this in-depth reporting, I’ve become something of an expert on water quality.
This guide is for anyone who’s worried about the safety of the drinking water in their home.
Such concerns are more than justified. The lead crises in Flint, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey, the troubling news out of California, and an alarming national water study in Canada have all called into question the safety of North American public water supplies, which had long been considered among the best and most tightly regulated on earth. (In 2001, the American Society of Civil Engineers named the US water supply one of the 10 “civil engineering achievements that had the greatest positive impact on life in the 20th century.”)
These crises have exposed some major vulnerabilities in our public water supply: aging infrastructure, imperfect public-safety practices, and a simple lack of knowledge about what’s actually in the water that flows from the nation’s faucets. In the US, municipal water suppliers have to meet strict EPA limits for hundreds of contaminants, including lead, mercury, pesticides, and industrial compounds. Every US municipal water supplier must share how well it measures up against the EPA standards in what’s known as a Consumer Confidence Report, or CCR. The CCR lists almost every conceivable potential contaminant and its actual presence in the municipal water, at the plant, and (usually) at numerous monitoring stations in the neighborhoods that the plant supplies water to. Checking your local CCR is a good first step toward knowing what might be in your water.
However, as the Flint and Newark lead crises demonstrate, a CCR cannot account for problems that crop up downstream of testing stations. In both cities, changes to the water treatment regimen at the plant caused previously stabilized lead (in the form of old lead pipes and lead-rich solder) to dissolve, creating dangerously high levels of lead in the water that flowed from residents’ taps.
Flint and Newark share common characteristics that put their water at higher risk for this problem: Both cities contain many aging pipes, from the era when solid-lead “service line” pipes were used to carry water from the mains into houses and apartment and office buildings. And both cities were largely built before 1986, when new EPA rules lowered the amount of lead allowed in solder to 0.2 percent (and to 0.25 percent for pipes and plumbing fixtures).
If your home or town dates from before 1986, your water is at a higher risk of lead contamination. And any aging municipal pipes are at some risk of developing leaks, which can let in other types of contamination (like petrochemicals from gas station tanks).
One last but important note: All of our recommended test kits are aimed at people who use public water supplies. (If you pay a water bill, that’s you.) The kits will work equally accurately for the roughly 43 million Americans who rely on well water—that is, they’ll tell you everything that’s in your water that they test for. But none of them test for radon, a groundwater concern in some regions. If you use well water, the EPA recommends getting a radon test; its Safe Drinking Water Hotline (1-800-426-4791) can advise you on qualified local labs. If you’re on a municipal supply but still concerned about radon, call or visit the website of your supplier and request a Consumer Confidence Report (CCR), which will give you your municipal water plant’s radon readings.
Nearly half of tap water contains forever chemicals. Here’s how to figure out if you’re at risk and limit your exposure.
Home water quality test kits come in two distinct types. First, there are true DIY kits, which have you dip a series of color-changing paper strips into a sample of your tap water and compare the results against a standardized color chart. Second, there are more-expensive, send-away kits, which have you take water samples and ship them to a lab for detailed, direct measurement of the contaminants.
The two types of kits have very different price tags: Send-away kits cost anywhere from $100 to $500 or more, depending on how comprehensive an analysis you decide to get. DIY kits start at about $20 (for basic, lead-only testing) and run up to roughly $50 for a kit capable of detecting 20 or so potential contaminants.
Send-away kits are capable of detecting a far wider range of contaminants than DIY kits. Both will tell you if you’ve got lead in your water—the ability to do so was one of our criteria. But a top-of-the-line send-away kit can detect 100 or more metals, industrial compounds, and farm chemicals.
We treated the two types of kits as separate product categories and researched each differently.
For DIY kits, we looked at those that are widely available online and in hardware stores and that list the contaminants they test for individually (rather than in generalities, such as “tests for metals and pesticides”). Lead had to be among them. But this is a brand-new category for us, so rather than aggressively winnowing down the list of contenders, we cast a wider net, ultimately buying six different kits. Most manufacturers offer multiple similar kits with varying levels of comprehensiveness; we always bought the most comprehensive tests, reasoning that their performance would stand for all.
For the send-away kits, we again did our usual research, looking widely at what’s available and at comments from people who’ve purchased them, as well as learning more about how labs are certified to conduct water quality testing. The labs that sell our send-away test kits must be certified by the federal or state EPA to conduct compliance testing on public water supplies; this means, among other things, that they have to use tightly defined testing methods and frequently demonstrate compliance with them. Many labs have additional national and international governing-body accreditations, including from the National Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Program (NELAP) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Then we reached out to all of our contenders to verbally confirm that they actually had the proper paperwork, and we reconfirmed this via public records.
Just like the DIY kits, send-away kits come in multiple versions that test for different ranges and categories of contaminants. We again selected each manufacturer’s most comprehensive kit and wound up with a final group of five contenders.
To reasonably compare the various kits, we needed a control. So we worked with Pace Analytical—a national water testing firm, whose credentials appear here—to do extensive testing and give us an independent measure of what was in the tap water at my apartment in Queens, New York. Though the city’s water supply itself is exceptionally clean (it doesn’t even get filtered), I live in an apartment building that was constructed in 1964, before the low-lead rules for plumbing went into effect. So my tap water is at elevated risk of lead contamination.
To test each kit with identical water, I bought a water cooler—the kind you see on sidelines and at construction sites—so I could collect a single large (approximately 3-gallon) sample of my tap water. To minimize the cooler’s potential impact on the sample, I gave it a thorough wash with a simple industrial degreaser to remove any oily residues, followed by a rinse with pure white vinegar. That was followed by multiple rinses with plain tap water and 12 hours of drying in the airflow from our top-pick air purifier (to minimize the accretion of dust, pollen, and other airborne particles).
When taking the water sample, I followed the kits’ instructions as well as general best practices for water testing. That meant collecting the main sample in the now squeaky-clean cooler right before the testing began. And I’d left the source of the water—my kitchen faucet—off for 12 hours prior to the collection. That ensures an accurate “worst case” reading of, in particular, metals like copper and lead, which can leach from pipes and concentrate in the stagnant water overnight. Finally, I removed the faucet’s aerator in order to minimize the amount of gases trapped in the sample, which can affect the readings. Then I drew off samples from the cooler into the collection jars provided in the kits.
We knew going in that this approach was not ideal—it’s best to take a sample directly from the faucet to put into the test vials. But we judged that by using a single, unified sample, we would have a better chance of giving our multiple test kits common starting conditions, versus taking repeated faucet samples over the course of several hours. And common conditions were a higher priority than ideal conditions, because our chief aim was to judge the accuracy of the test kits relative to one another and to our control test. That meant giving each kit the same water to start with.
All of our send-away kits contained a separate set of collection vials for measuring VOCs—volatile organic compounds, like chloroform—that can contaminate tap water. For these, the best practice is to flush the pipes for several minutes before sampling. I did this, and then collected all the VOC samples one after the other, to best replicate common starting conditions.
All of the send-away-kit samples were immediately refrigerated after collection, again as best practice and per instructions.
For the DIY kits, I dispensed samples from the cooler into clean glass cups or the provided vials and ran the tests according to the manufacturers’ instructions.
All of the testing was done sequentially over the course of several hours, and all of the send-away kits were mailed the same day (or, in the case of PACE Analytical, hand-delivered the next day, packed in ice for the trip to the lab).
This send-away kit delivers lab-tested measurements of more than 100 contaminants, and it explains what they mean and what to do if there’s a problem.
The Tap Score Advanced City Water Test is our pick among all the test kits—both DIY and send-away—we looked at. It covers a range of 105 different contaminants, including lead, mercury, arsenic, and other metals; trihalomethanes (a wide class of industrial chemicals); pesticides; bacteria; and nitrates (from farm runoff). On the critical point of accuracy, Tap Score, like all of our send-away kits, performed exceptionally well, closely mirroring the results we got from our control sample. But it completely outshone all of the rest in the way the results were reported. Some send-away kits return a virtually unreadable spreadsheet that simply lists which contaminants were detected and the EPA-designated maximum contaminant level (MCL), leaving you to try to make sense of what your results mean. Others do a bit better, color-coding the spreadsheet to make it easier to see where your readings indicate a potential problem. But Tap Score highlights areas of concern right up top, and it explains in plain English what your readings mean and what steps you might take to address anything problematic (for example, installing an under-sink filter or using a filter pitcher).
Tap Score’s instructions for taking your samples were clearer than any competitor’s, too. And its online registration (used by send-away kits to track and report your test) is easier to fill out. You also get a mailing label with the kit, which saves you the hassle of waiting in line at the post office or another carrier when shipping the samples back; not all kits provide this. Finally, Tap Score offers online chat support, so you can immediately speak with someone about questions your report raises.
In short: All of the send-away kits we tested are accurate. But Tap Score makes it easier than the others to take your samples, mail them in for testing, and understand what your results mean and what you can do if there’s a problem. Take a look at three reports, from Tap Score, CityCheck, and Bang-for-the-Buck:
The differences are plain. Tap Score’s report gives you your actual readings, an explanation of what each individual reading means, and why it matters. CityCheck color-codes and uses symbols to indicate whether your readings are below or above federal guidelines or recommendations—which is helpful when you’re scanning the spreadsheet for things you might be concerned about, but not for interpreting those concerns. Bang-for-the-Buck just lists your sample’s readings and the EPA’s limits in a black-and-white chart. It’s barely readable and almost completely uninterpretable.
Tap Score also pulls out any readings of special concern and puts them front and center. My water, for example, registered an elevated (but nonetheless very low: 0.00353 parts per million) level of bromodichloromethane:
That result accorded with the results from our other send-away test kits and our independent control test. But only Tap Score highlighted this result (instead of leaving me to find it in a spreadsheet). And only Tap Score offered any explanation of what bromodichloromethane is (a byproduct of disinfectants and of municipal water treatments); described its health risks (developmental defects, kidney and liver damage, nervous system problems); told me what level is considered risky (0.1 ppm, or 28 times my tap water’s level); and suggested how I might remove it from my tap water (use a carbon or reverse-osmosis filter).
Tap Score (and our other send-away lab-tested kits, and our control lab test) also showed slightly elevated levels of chloroform, copper, and iron in my water. The readings were all similar; none of them exceeded federal limits; and the latter two were readily explained: My apartment building was constructed in 1964, and its iron and copper pipes have begun to corrode. The readings on dozens of other contaminants—which in most cases showed “none detected”—were also similar. That all adds to our confidence that Tap Score is accurate.
In addition to Tap Score’s accurate test results and useful analysis of them, we also highly favored this kit’s overall ease of use. Registering our tests was simple thanks to Tap Score’s clean, modern website. The instructions for how to take your samples, included with the kit, are well written and sensibly organized. And Tap Score includes a mailing label and utilizes multiple carriers (USPS by default; UPS and FedEx by request), which means you’re likely to be near a convenient drop-off. None of our competitors matched all—or, in some cases, any—of these benefits.
SimpleLab, the company that produces the Tap Score kit, is not itself a lab. Rather, it acts as a middleman and contracts with (as of this writing) more than 175 labs nationwide to do the tests themselves. All of the labs are certified, and SimpleLab actually contracts with some of the other labs we worked with, including PACE Analytical (which ran our control test), National Testing Laboratories (which offers the CityCheck kit we recommend as a runner-up, below) and Envirotek Labs (which makes the Test Assured kit we tried and dismissed). This allows SimpleLab to match your testing needs and conditions to the lab best equipped to do the testing. My own sample was sent to ETR Labs in Massachusetts.
Another feature that set Tap Score apart from the competition was its customer support. When you get your report (it’s sent as a Web page, downloadable as a PDF), there’s a live chat function that you can use to ask questions about your report directly. If the chat moderator can’t answer it—for example, if you have a technical question about treatment options or want to know details about a specific contaminant—your question is forwarded to one of SimpleLab's staff experts (they include a licensed professional engineer and a team of academic experts who specialize in water-quality issues). One of them will email you an answer within a day or two.
Finally, Tap Score is competitively priced. (Similar tests from competitors are priced in the $130 to $325 range.)
As a general rule with these kits, you’re buying directly from the manufacturer. That makes the transaction a little bit cumbersome. There is an option to order Tap Score on Amazon, but to get your report, you have to affirm to Amazon that it can share your email with Tap Score. According to a company representative, about 15 percent of Amazon buyers either miss or ignore the confirmation request, meaning they cannot get their test results.
The CityCheck Deluxe kit is just as accurate as the best water test kit, but it produces less-readable results.
The Safe Home Ultimate kit is just as accurate as the best water test kit, but it produces less-readable results.
If for some reason you can’t find or use Tap Score, we recommend the WaterCheck CityCheck Deluxe or the Safe Home Ultimate water testing kits. They, too, cover a broad range of potential contaminants, including lead, mercury, arsenic, and other metals; trihalomethanes; bacteria; and farm chemicals. And they are each analyzed by nationally certified labs, meaning you can use them no matter where you live in the US. (CityCheck is sold and analyzed by National Testing Laboratories, and Safe Home Ultimate by Environmental Laboratories.)
The big drawback with both of these kits is that their reports lack the clear explanations that set Tap Score apart. Instead, they simply color-code the results. That lets you quickly scan your results for any problem areas, but it doesn’t help you understand what the results mean and what you can do to address any concerns.
Both kits are more expensive than Tap Score, as well. And you have to pay to ship the CityCheck Deluxe kit to the lab. To be clear, part of their higher cost is that both kits test for a somewhat wider range of contaminants than Tap Score. The WaterCheck CityCheck Deluxe gives readings for 114 contaminants, versus Tap Score’s 108, and the Safe Home Ultimate gives readings for 149. But the additional readings are largely minor variants of compounds that Tap Score already tests for and that are themselves uncommon to begin with, so we don’t think this outweighs Tap Score’s superior report.
The Tap Score PFAS Water Test specifically looks for 14 different so-called forever chemicals, which are of increasing concern in the US water supply. It delivers the same ease of use, clear and actionable reports, and responsive customer service that make the Tap Score Advanced City Test our top pick. (The Advanced City test does not look for PFAS. And this test does not check for the chlorine, metals, and volatile organic compounds that the Advanced City test does.)
PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are used in the manufacture of many common household goods, including nonstick cookware, water-resistant clothing, and stain-resistant upholstery. That means there are multiple sources of potential exposure.
But because PFAS do not break down over time, they can also accumulate in the environment and end up in drinking-water supplies. So people and animals who use that water will be exposed to PFAS daily. Nearly half of US tap water—both from public utilities and from private wells—contains PFAS, according to a 2023 US Geological Survey study. And the risks of PFAS exposure are well documented and have been linked with a host of health risks, including cancer, obesity, and weakened immune function.
Not all municipal water suppliers test for PFAS—check your consumer confidence report, which should be delivered with or before your July water bill. So a home test may be the only way to know for sure whether your water is affected.
This DIY test kit quickly tells you if you have a lead problem—the number-one concern for many people.
If you just want to check your water for lead, and you don’t care about testing for other chemicals, we recommend the Safe Home Do-It-Yourself Lead in Drinking Water Test Kit.
Truth be told, every DIY test kit we looked at contained the exact same lead-test materials; the Safe Home Do-It-Yourself kit is our budget pick because it’s widely available at hardware stores and comes from a long-established lab. To do the test, you place a small sample of tap water into a test tube and then insert a clearly marked paper strip. Ten minutes later you simply check whether your test strip shows a blue line, indicating the presence of lead above the federal limit of 15 parts per billion. (Yes, it reminded us of home pregnancy tests, too.)
We think DIY lead-test kits are genuinely useful. They’re inexpensive, virtually foolproof, and quickly tell you whether you’ve got lead in your water—the most common concern people have about their plumbing. If you do get a positive result, you can then take further steps, like getting a full lab test or calling in a water-treatment specialist. If you get a negative result, you’ve given yourself peace of mind for about $20.
Though we think DIY lead tests are worthwhile, we didn’t like the more comprehensive (and more expensive) DIY kits that we tested, and we recommend against using any of them.
It’s not that they’re difficult to use. It’s that they’re almost impossible to read.
First of all, most of the readings are subjective: You have to try to match, by eye, the color of the various test strips to the printed charts that come with the kits. It’s rarely a black-and-white, positive-or-negative distinction; you’re instead judging your results against a subtle range of a single color. And outside conditions (like the quality of light in the room, or color blindness) can make the task even harder. I repeatedly found myself questioning my own eyes.
Second, the tests are rushed. A typical test strip might need to be swirled in water for 20 seconds, shaken off, and then read against the chart within another 30 seconds. That’s because the test reading (the color the test strip turned) continues to change after the strip is removed from the sample. Mess anything up, or get stuck on trying to decide which color best matches your results, and you’ve lost your chance of an accurate reading. And all of this is made much harder when, as is the case with some kits, you have multiple different tests on a single strip. (One such kit, the Med Lab 16 in 1, asks you to judge 16 different readings simultaneously.)
I tested six different DIY kits, taking (or, more precisely, attempting to judge) close to a hundred measurements. And when I finished, I was less confident that I knew what was in my water than I had been at the beginning.
A couple more points against the DIY kits: They don’t give you the actual contaminant levels in your tap water; all you get (if you trust your eyes) is a rough estimate of their concentration. And finally, even the best DIY kits are not very comprehensive. The most thorough one we found covers just 20 potential contaminants; send-away kits can detect and directly measure 100 or more, across a wider range of contaminant classes.
Again, we think DIY lead-test kits are an excellent value, and if lead is your only worry, they are a quick and inexpensive way to tell whether you have a problem. But if you want a broader analysis of what’s in your water, we strongly believe send-away lab tests provide value worth paying for.
Drinking Water Specialists’ Bang-for-the-Buck was the least-expensive send-away kit we tested, but despite that, it measured a wider range of contaminants than many such kits, including our top-pick Tap Score. But many of those contaminants are of little practical concern (they’re either rare, or minor variants of more common contaminants whose general presence would stand for all). More important, this kit’s report was barely readable: just a black-and-white spreadsheet of names, test results, and incompletely explained EPA standards. Also, while we were writing this guide, this kit became unavailable on Amazon, and the direct-purchase link (above) is hard to navigate.
The Test Assured Home Inspection Water Test Kit advertises that its “tests can detect lead and heavy arsenic, chlorine, fluoride, radon, bacteria, and hundreds of other contaminants.” In reality, it delivered measurements of only six: arsenic, coliform bacteria, E. coli itself, lead, nitrate, and nitrite. That extremely limited range of contaminants, plus the high cost for so few measurements and the very basic report—which offers no analysis or advice—made this kit an easy dismissal.
We tested six DIY water test kits: Safe Home Starter 20, Labtech H2O OK Plus, Med Lab 16 in 1, WaterSafe Well Water Test Kit (which is also suitable for testing tap water), Health Metric Drinking Water Test Kit, and Culligan Essential Water Lab Test Kit. As explained in detail, above, we recommend none of them: It’s simply too difficult to read and judge the results yourself, and even the most complete of these kits don’t cover nearly the range of contaminants that our send-away kits do. As well, because they rely on your own, subjective judgment, none of them offer specific contaminant readings the way send-away kits do, and none of them are able to highlight areas of concern and offer analysis and advice.
Tim Heffernan is a senior staff writer focusing on air and water quality and home energy efficiency. A former writer for The Atlantic, Popular Mechanics, and other national magazines, he joined Wirecutter in 2015. He owns three bikes and zero derailleurs.
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Petri Dish Cell Culture Wirecutter is the product recommendation service from The New York Times. Our journalists combine independent research with (occasionally) over-the-top testing so you can make quick and confident buying decisions. Whether it’s finding great products or discovering helpful advice, we’ll help you get it right (the first time).