State of Home Safety 2026: 41,344 ZIP Codes, A C Grade for America

Data source: ZipCheckup comprehensive analysis — 49 federal data sources (EPA, FEMA, CDC, USGS, NOAA, Census, and others)

Every year, millions of Americans make the largest financial decision of their lives — buying a home — without knowing whether the water carries lead, the air carries wildfire smoke six months a year, or the pipes underneath the street were laid before the Eisenhower administration.

ZipCheckup was built to surface those facts. Today we're publishing the State of Home Safety 2026, an annual data report covering 41,344 U.S. ZIP codes scored across 17 environmental risk verticals using 49 federal data sources.

The headline number is uncomfortable: 67 out of 100. A C grade. No state earned an A.

Here's what the data shows.

The Big Numbers

A 67-point national average is not a passing grade by anyone's rubric. It also masks enormous geographic variation: a 27-point gap separates the safest state (Texas, 82) from the most challenged (Wyoming, 55). Inside states, neighbors on different water systems can sit four letter grades apart.

Finding 1: One in Four ZIP Codes Is Already Failing

10,053 ZIP codes — 24.3% of the country — earned a D or F. That's more than one in four U.S. residential addresses sitting at the bottom two tiers of the Home Safety Score.

The composite score isn't a single-issue verdict. A D or F grade typically reflects compounding problems: aging service lines on top of unresolved violations on top of elevated PFAS detections, or wildfire and smoke exposure layered on top of infrastructure that hasn't been recapitalized in 50 years. Single-issue rankings miss this. A composite makes the layering visible.

20 states earned a B. 31 states earned a C. Zero states earned an A — a structural finding about how federal datasets describe the country in 2026, not a stylistic choice.

Finding 2: The Hidden Cost Has a Number

For the first time, we modeled the annual environmental cost carried by each ZIP code as a function of its risk profile — health expenditures, mitigation, insurance, and asset depreciation tied to the 17 verticals.

The median U.S. household quietly absorbs $1,020 per year in hidden environmental costs. The 90th percentile reaches $3,370 per year. The mean — pulled upward by the worst tail — sits at $1,466.

1,158 ZIP codes classify as critical under the compound-risk model. These are the communities where multiple high-risk verticals stack on the same households, and where the annual cost is no longer hidden so much as quietly devastating.

The framing matters. Environmental risk is not theoretical and it is not free. It is a recurring tax that some ZIP codes pay every year while others don't.

Finding 3: Enforcement Is Up. Silence Is Still There.

5,084 ZIP codes experienced EPA enforcement action over the past 12 months — the largest single anomaly category in the dataset.

Enforcement is a double-edged signal. Action means regulators are paying attention. The post-2024 PFAS standards and the Lead and Copper Rule Revisions are forcing utilities to disclose, test, and remediate at a pace the system is still adjusting to.

But the more concerning pattern is the opposite. 616 ZIP codes show documented contaminant exceedances with no enforcement record — the "silent danger" signature. These aren't communities the system is fixing. They're communities the system hasn't reached yet.

Read more: 5,084 ZIP Codes Hit with EPA Enforcement Actions This Year

Finding 4: PFAS Is Mapped Now — And It's Spreading

1,022 PFAS cluster zones — areas where three or more adjacent ZIP codes all show PFAS exceedances — are now visible in the data. Two years ago this map didn't exist. The 2024 EPA standards (with limits as low as 4 parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS) forced systematic testing, and the result is the first national PFAS picture worth looking at.

The geographic story is one of point sources radiating outward. Military installations using AFFF firefighting foam for decades, manufacturing plants, airports, landfills, and wastewater treatment facilities each leave signatures. A cluster pattern — three adjacent ZIPs all elevated — is what differentiates a true source contamination event from a single utility's bad lab day.

The PFAS story for 2026 is no longer "is it there." It's "what does it cost to take it out." For thousands of small utilities, the answer is more than they have.

Read more: PFAS Contamination and the AFFF Legacy: 1,022 Cluster ZIPs Mapped

Finding 5: Wealth No Longer Hides the Problem

The most striking shift from prior datasets is in the wealth paradox. 1,579 ZIP codes with median household incomes above $100,000 carry a D or F safety grade — more than double what we tracked a year ago.

This isn't a worsening of those neighborhoods. It's improved measurement catching up to a structural reality. Water quality, infrastructure age, geological exposure, and regulatory attention are not priced into the housing market. A $2 million home on a private well in a PFAS plume has the same molecular truth as a $200,000 home next door. Detection is what changed.

The wealth paradox used to be a curiosity. With 1,579 ZIPs flagged, it's a category.

Read more: The Wealth Paradox: 1,579 High-Income ZIP Codes With D or F Grades

Finding 6: The Infrastructure Is Old, And Some of It Is Failing Faster

17,030 ZIP codes run on water infrastructure older than 50 years. The median age across the country is 48 years; the average is 53. These are pipes, treatment plants, and distribution networks designed in an era when PFAS wasn't named, the Lead and Copper Rule didn't exist, and per-capita water demand had a different shape.

Most of these systems are aging gracefully — slow decay, manageable on a long replacement cycle. But 1,154 ZIP codes show accelerating decay: violation rates climbing year over year, treatment performance degrading, replacement deferred past the point where it can be caught up incrementally. That subset is where the next decade's headline failures will come from.

The cost framing in Finding 2 is partly a measurement of this. Old infrastructure is the substrate; the hidden $1,020 per household is one of the bills it sends.

Read more: The Hidden Cost of Aging Infrastructure: 1,154 ZIPs in Accelerating Decay

Finding 7: Lead, Smoke, and the Risks That Don't Make Headlines

A few categories don't get the airtime PFAS does, but they touch more households.

• Lead. 2,466 ZIP codes scored 70+ on the lead exposure index, blending water lead levels, pre-1986 housing stock, service-line data, and CDC blood lead surveillance. These overlap heavily with 125 school-zone risk areas — communities where children attend school in the highest exposure tier and infrastructure dates to the 1940s and 1950s.
• Wildfire and smoke. 3,512 ZIP codes are classified as high or very high wildfire risk. The smoke story is bigger: 33,283 ZIP codes score 8-10 on the smoke risk index. That's chronic particulate exposure for tens of millions of households who may not live in fire country but live downwind of it.
• Islands of safety. 369 ZIP codes are 2-4 letter grades better than the ZIPs immediately around them — usually because they sit on a different utility, a different aquifer, or a different funding history. These are the inverse of the risk story: proof that the local system, not the regional average, is what determines outcomes.
• Double burden. 11 ZIP codes meet all three criteria for our most severe classification: lead contamination above EPA action levels, recurring documented flood damage, and housing stock predating 1960. Each problem in this stack makes the others worse.

Read more: Children in 125 School Zones Drink From Lead-Risk Plumbing · 369 A-Grade Islands Surrounded by Failing Neighbors · Lead + Flood + Old Housing: America's 11 Double-Burden ZIP Codes

The State Scoreboard

No state earned an A. The top of the table is a tight cluster of B-grade states; the bottom is a tight cluster of low-C states.

The leading states share two structural traits: relatively younger infrastructure stock in the population centers, and consistent enforcement posture. The bottom five share the opposite — older infrastructure, dispersed populations on small utilities with thin operating budgets, and elevated rural exposure to legacy contamination and natural-hazard layering.

A B grade is not a clean bill of health. A C grade is not a death sentence. The point is that the gap between best and worst is 27 points — wider than most homebuyers, lenders, or insurers price into their decisions.

What You Should Do With This Data

For Homebuyers

1. Check before you buy. Pull the free ZipCheckup report for any ZIP you're considering. The 17-vertical breakdown shows you what the score is hiding.

2. Compare side by side. Use the compare tool to put neighborhoods next to each other. Two ZIPs that look identical on Zillow can sit four letter grades apart on environmental risk.

3. Budget for protection. If your target ZIP carries elevated risk, $200-$2,000 toward water testing, filtration, radon mitigation, or air filtration is a rounding error against the home price and a meaningful change against the $1,020 median annual environmental cost.

For Homeowners

4. Know your baseline. Your ZIP report shows current conditions across all 17 verticals. Use it to decide where to spend first — a $30-$80 lead test, a radon canister, an HVAC filter upgrade.

5. Test annually. Conditions change. Utilities switch sources, pipes corrode, neighbors install service lines, regulations shift. A yearly check is the cheapest health investment available.

6. Push for infrastructure investment. When your community votes on water bonds, rate increases, or capital improvement plans, the alternative isn't the status quo — it's the accelerating-decay tier from Finding 6.

For Journalists and Researchers

7. Use the data. Everything in this report comes from public federal sources we've aggregated, normalized, and made searchable. The full dataset is available under CC BY 4.0 via GitHub, HuggingFace, and Kaggle. Individual ZIP reports include source citations.

8. Investigate locally. The anomalies — a PFAS cluster, a silent-danger ZIP, an island of safety, a wealth paradox — are starting points. Each is a reporting lead with a name and a number attached.

Methodology

ZipCheckup aggregates and analyzes data from 49 federal and state sources, including:

• EPA SDWIS — Safe Drinking Water Information System (violations, system inventory)
• CCR Rich Dataset — Consumer Confidence Report fields parsed from EPA records for 5,572 utilities, covering phone (51.2% disclosed), email, website, Spanish-language requirements (22.9%), source water type, treatment disinfectant, and PFAS detections with substances list.
• EPA ECHO — Enforcement and Compliance History Online (enforcement actions, PFAS detections)
• EPA Superfund / NPL — site proximity and exposure pathways
• FEMA NFIP — National Flood Insurance Program (flood claims by ZIP)
• Census ACS — American Community Survey (housing age, income, demographics)
• USGS — geological surveys, radon zones, earthquake hazard maps
• NOAA / AirNow — air quality, smoke risk, wildfire indices
• CDC — blood lead surveillance and environmental health indicators
• BLS / EIA — labor and energy cost data
• PHMSA — pipeline safety and incident records
• Department of Defense — military installation locations and characteristics
• NCES — National Center for Education Statistics (school district data)

The Home Safety Score (0-100, A-F grades) is a weighted composite across 17 risk verticals: water quality, lead exposure, PFAS, radon, flood, wildfire and smoke, earthquake, mold, CO/gas safety, infrastructure decay, air quality, Superfund proximity, school environmental health, nuclear proximity, bridge safety, energy costs, and respiratory risk. Anomalies are identified by an engine that cross-references multiple data sources to find patterns that single-source analysis misses.

Data is refreshed daily for violations, alerts, and AQI; weekly for EPA ECHO and CCR reports; monthly for Census, BLS, and FEMA. All underlying data is public.

Data covers 41,344 ZIP codes across 51 states and territories. Analysis current as of April 3, 2026. For methodology details, see our score explanation guide.