Des Moines does not buy its water. It makes it, for most of the metro. Here is what the 2025 testing found, what is still buried under the street, and what a system at the sink actually changes.
Every suburb on this site is downstream of a decision made in Des Moines. Three plants inside the city produce the water for roughly 600,000 central Iowans.
Since January 2025 the water is owned by Central Iowa Water Works, the regional authority formed in 2024, with Des Moines Water Works operating all three treatment plants under contract. The rivers are the same ones on the news every June: the Raccoon and the Des Moines. On the regional report Des Moines' distribution numbers also cover Alleman, Berwick, Cumming, Pleasant Hill, unincorporated Polk County and Windsor Heights.
Treats up to 75 million gallons a day from one of three sources: the Raccoon River, the Des Moines River, or the infiltration gallery under Water Works Park. If you are not in the far south or the far north of the city, this is your water.
Up to 25 million gallons a day from six radial collector wells and one horizontal well set in the sand and gravel beneath the Raccoon River. Serves southern Des Moines, plus Waukee and parts of Clive, Urbandale and West Des Moines.
Up to 10 million gallons a day from two radial collector wells along the Des Moines River, serving residents north of Des Moines. It softens and treats using ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis.
Worth sitting with for a second. When Des Moines Water Works built the treatment process at Saylorville, the technology it chose to soften and clean river water was ultrafiltration plus reverse osmosis. It is the same principle as a system under your sink, at municipal scale. RO is not a gadget; it is what the utility itself reaches for when it wants water genuinely clean.
Not sure what is in your Des Moines water? Find out for free.
Book a free water testEvery number below is from the 2026 Drinking Water Quality Report covering 2025 data, published by Central Iowa Water Works and Des Moines Water Works.
mg/L peak nitrate at the Fleur Drive plant in 2025, against a federal limit of 10. McMullen peaked at 9.04, Saylorville at 4.82.
2026 Water Quality Report ↗mg/L chlorine running annual average in the Des Moines distribution system, ranging as high as 2.18. Higher than any neighboring suburb on the same table.
2026 Water Quality Report ↗lead service lines confirmed under Des Moines in the utility's 2025 inventory, plus 13,266 lines whose material is still unknown.
DMWW to City Council, Feb 2026 ↗| Des Moines distribution system | Result | Range | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total trihalomethanes (TTHM) | 56 µg/L | 41 to 77 | 80 µg/L |
| Haloacetic acids (HAA5) | 11 µg/L | 9 to 17 | 60 µg/L |
| Chlorine (annual average) | 1.20 mg/L | 0.27 to 2.18 | 4 mg/L |
| Lead, 90th percentile (2024) | Non-detect | ND to 21 µg/L | 15 µg/L action level |
Des Moines water met every federal standard in 2025. We are not going to tell you otherwise, and a few of these numbers are genuinely good news.
Start with the good news. Des Moines' trihalomethane average of 56 is better than most of the suburbs it supplies. Norwalk ran 76, Urbandale 70, Waukee 61, Clive 60. Those compounds form over time as chlorinated water sits in pipe, so being close to the plants works in your favor.
Now the part that is specific to Des Moines. The chlorine residual here averages 1.20 mg/L and reaches 2.18, against 0.80 in Urbandale and Johnston, 0.90 in Ankeny and Clive, 1.00 in Norwalk and Waukee. That is well inside the 4 mg/L limit and it is not a safety finding. It is a taste and smell finding, and it is the single most common thing Des Moines homeowners bring up before we ever test anything.
Then lead. The 90th-percentile result was non-detect, which means Des Moines does not have a system-wide lead problem. But one sampled home came back at 21 µg/L, over the 15 µg/L action level. That is exactly how lead behaves: it does not ride in from the treatment plant, it comes from the pipe between the main and the faucet. In Des Moines that pipe is a bigger deal than anywhere else in the metro, which is the next section.
One clarification, because people get this wrong constantly: Des Moines is disinfected with free chlorine, not chloramine. Chloramine turns up in some fringe systems around the metro such as Bondurant, Warren and Xenia. The two behave differently in a filter, so it is worth knowing which one you actually have.
Those are citywide averages. Your kitchen tap is its own number.
Book a free water testThis is the one thing that makes Des Moines different from every suburb on this site. It is not about the plants. It is about what the water travels through in the last hundred feet.
Des Moines Water Works' CEO presented the numbers to the Des Moines City Council in February 2026: 15,764 lead service lines, 906 galvanized, and 13,266 still unknown.
A year earlier the count was 8,117 lead and 47,285 unknown. Nobody installed new lead pipe. The utility resolved unknowns, and a large share of them turned out to be lead.
DMWW to City Council, Feb 9 2026 ↗The EPA has mandated that lead and galvanized service lines be replaced, and the date on that mandate is 2037. Replacement is under way and funded partly through state loans, with federal money restricted to disadvantaged census tracts.
If your line is on the list, the realistic question is not whether it gets replaced. It is what you drink for the eleven years in between.
Des Moines Water Works is straightforward about this: the water is lead free when it leaves the treatment plants and as it travels through the distribution system, and a corrosion control program keeps the inside of the pipes protected. All of that is true. It is also why a lead result shows up in one house and not the one next door. Corrosion control reduces how much lead leaches out of your line. It does not remove the line. Des Moines Water Works offers a free water test to anyone with a lead line, and you should take them up on it whether or not you ever call us.
Iowa House File 876 passed unanimously and took effect January 1, 2026. A known lead water service line now has to be disclosed when a home is sold. If you are in an older Des Moines neighborhood and thinking about selling in the next few years, this stopped being an abstract water quality question and started being a listing question.
See what your Des Moines tap actually tests at, at no cost.
Book a free water testDes Moines Water Works has run a nitrate removal facility since 1992, and treated water has not exceeded the 10 ppm standard since. What has changed is how hard that is getting.
The first Stage III ban in the region's history. All residential and commercial lawn watering stopped. Nitrate in the Raccoon River hit 14.39 mg/L and the Des Moines River 14.04 mg/L on the day it was issued. Restrictions ran into late July.
CIWW Stage III updates ↗It happened again. Central Iowa Water Works issued a second mandatory ban on June 8, stating the system was "operating at the limits of its available treatment resources." The Water Works Park infiltration gallery hit 12.3 mg/L and stayed above 10 for roughly 90 days, a record.
Iowa Public Radio, Jun 2026 ↗Those restrictions were not about running out of water. They were about protecting the utility's ability to strip nitrate out fast enough to stay under the legal limit. Cutting lawn watering lowers total demand so the nitrate removal system can keep pace. Iowa has the second-highest cancer incidence rate in the country and the fastest growing, and researchers have linked long-term nitrate exposure in drinking water to several of those cancers. The tap water met the standard both summers. The margin is what changed. Investigate Midwest, Mar 2026 ↗
Free test, about 20 minutes, no obligation.
Book a free water testReverse osmosis is the one household filter that meaningfully reduces nitrate and lead together. Pitchers and fridge filters do not.
The system is the iSpring RCC7AK 7-stage unit, mounted under your kitchen sink with its own dedicated faucet and professionally installed. Pricing is $699, $899 or $1,099 fully installed depending on configuration, with no separate plumber charge on top.
Prime Flow does point-of-use drinking water only. No whole-house systems, no softeners, and you will get a straight answer if your situation does not call for anything at all.
Two 2025 detections worth naming, both at Fleur Drive and neither with a drinking water standard set: PFBA at 2.6 ng/L, one of the PFAS family, and metolachlor at 0.1 µg/L, an agricultural herbicide. "No standard" means unregulated, not absent.
Go deeper: nitrate in central Iowa water • what RO actually removes • Brita vs. reverse osmosis • full pricing
Outside the city limits? Water chemistry changes street by street across the metro:
Urbandale •
Clive •
Johnston •
Waukee •
Norwalk •
West Des Moines •
Ankeny •
Windsor Heights •
Grimes •
Adel •
Dallas Center
Free in-home water test, no obligation. We test your actual kitchen tap, show you the numbers, and tell you honestly whether a system is worth it.
Two fields. Then either pick your own time on Tate's calendar, or just send it and he'll call you.
Rather talk first? Call or text 515-585-9436