Per-property classification of the pipe material connecting each NYC building to the city water main, published per the EPA's 2024 Lead and Copper Rule Improvements. The headline is the staggering "Unknown" classification — a public-health signal more than a public-health record.
data through 2026-01-30 · 856,912 service lines
all NYC service lines
Lead is 13.7% of NYC service lines, and "Unknown — Lead Status Unknown" is 13.4%. They're nearly identical — for every confirmed lead pipe, there's another whose material the city hasn't determined. The EPA's 2024 LCRI rule gives utilities until December 2037 to reclassify or replace each one.
582K
582,483
The other 4 · scale below excludes the leader
Mapping the unknowns is the public-health story this dataset tells. Even buildings classified "Non-Lead" can leach lead from internal plumbing — but a Lead or Unknown-Lead-Status classification is the trigger for replacement work.
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The unknown pipes
NYC's lead service line inventory looks like a public health story. Scroll through the density maps and it starts to look like a construction program — 231,000 properties across five boroughs, all with a 2037 deadline. The 'Unknown' classification is where the mandate gets complicated.
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NYC's decade of pipe work
231,000 properties. One EPA deadline: 2037. Framing NYC's lead service line replacement program as a construction-industry challenge — which boroughs carry the heaviest load, and what annual pace the city needs to hit.