1.85 Million New Yorkers on Lead Pipes as $2B Delaware Aqueduct Fix Slips Past 2027

Roughly 1.85 million New Yorkers — about 21% of the city’s residents — may be drinking water delivered through lead or probable-lead service lines, according to the New York City Department of Environmental Protection’s own inventory, even as the city’s single largest water-supply repair slips further behind schedule. The $2 billion Delaware Aqueduct bypass tunnel, built to stop a decades-old leak that loses an estimated 35 million gallons a day beneath the Hudson River, is now not expected to reach final connection until after 2027 — delayed again by the need for a new construction contract and by drought conditions that complicate taking the aqueduct offline. The two stories are separate pieces of infrastructure, but together they capture the scale of what New York is up against: an aging delivery network feeding water through lead pipes the city is only beginning to replace.

The lead-pipe figure is not an estimate of contaminated water at the tap — most of NYC’s water leaves the reservoir system clean, and the utility runs corrosion control to limit how much lead leaches from pipes. The risk is the service line: the pipe connecting the street main to the building. Where that line is lead, every glass of water passes through it. For background on how lead enters tap water and what it does to health, see our lead contaminant profile and our guide to lead in water.

The Lead Service Line Problem

DEP estimates there are roughly 150,000 lead service lines still in need of replacement across the five boroughs, with a total replacement cost on the order of $2 billion — coincidentally similar to the aqueduct repair. The structural complication is ownership: in New York, as in most U.S. cities, the service line is privately owned, so the property owner is normally on the hook for replacement, a job that can run $8,000 to more than $10,000 per line.

To break that logjam, DEP has been standing up a free replacement program for eligible properties in low-income and environmental-justice neighborhoods, funded so far with about $72 million from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, with another roughly $48 million anticipated. The program replaces lead and galvanized-steel lines with new copper at no cost to the owner. After starting in the Bronx, the program is expanding on a rolling basis — Flushing, Queens in early 2026, followed by Borough Park, Brooklyn in the fall.

The arithmetic is sobering. At $120 million committed and anticipated against a $2 billion total, federal money covers a single-digit percentage of the citywide need. The rest will have to come from additional federal cycles, state funding, or property owners. This is the same gap playing out nationally: EPA’s $2.9 billion in FY2026 lead-pipe allotments and its redirected $4.1 billion for lead-line removal are real money, but small against a national replacement bill measured in the tens of billions. Cities like Milwaukee, which is replacing 65,000 lines on a timeline running to 2037, illustrate how long full removal takes even with funding in hand.

Why the Delaware Aqueduct Repair Matters

The Delaware Aqueduct delivers roughly half of New York City’s daily water supply — about 500 million gallons a day from reservoirs in the Catskills. For more than two decades it has leaked through cracks in a segment running about 700 feet below the Hudson near Newburgh. In 2021, DEP completed a 2.5-mile bypass tunnel around the most compromised section; the final step is connecting that bypass to the existing aqueduct, which requires shutting the aqueduct down entirely for several months.

That shutdown is exactly what keeps slipping. Taking half the city’s supply offline demands that the other half of the system — chiefly the Catskill Aqueduct and the Croton system — carry the full load, which is only safe when reservoir storage is healthy. This year’s lower-than-average precipitation and lingering regional drought conditions across the Northeast make that margin too thin. Combined with the need to rebid a construction contract and upgrade pumps, DEP has pushed the final connection past 2027.

The delay is not a contamination event — the leaking water is clean Catskill water lost to the ground, not sewage entering the supply. But every year the connection waits is another year of losing tens of millions of gallons daily from a system that, as the drought shows, has less slack than it used to.

What New York Residents Should Do

1. Find out if your service line is lead. DEP publishes a service-line inventory and a lookup tool tied to your address. If your line is lead or galvanized and you live in an eligible neighborhood, the city’s free replacement program may cover you. Our guide to lead in water walks through how to identify your line and what replacement involves.

2. Test your water if you’re unsure. A lab test is the only way to know your actual lead level, since it depends on your specific plumbing, not just the city’s average. Our guide to testing your tap water explains certified-lab and at-home options.

3. Use a certified lead filter in the meantime. If you have or suspect a lead line, a filter certified to NSF/ANSI 53 for lead is the most reliable interim protection. Our best faucet water filters, best water filter pitchers, and best under-sink water filters guides flag lead-certified models. Renters, who can’t replace a service line themselves, should see our water filters for renters guide.

4. Flush before drinking after long stagnation. Lead leaches most when water sits in the pipe. Running the cold tap for 30 seconds to two minutes after water has been unused for hours measurably lowers exposure — a free, immediate step.

5. Protect the most vulnerable first. Lead is most dangerous to fetuses and young children. Pregnant residents and families with infants should review our pregnancy water quality guide and baby and infant water safety guide, and consider bottled or certified-filtered water for drinking and formula until a lead line is confirmed gone.

What Comes Next

DEP’s lead program will keep expanding borough by borough, but at the current funding pace, full citywide replacement is a multi-decade project barring a much larger infusion of state or federal money. The 2024 Lead and Copper Rule Improvements set a federal expectation that most lead service lines be replaced within a decade — a timeline New York, like many large legacy cities, will struggle to meet without a step change in funding.

On the aqueduct, the next milestone is DEP awarding a new construction contract and identifying a window when Northeast reservoir storage is healthy enough to safely shut the Delaware system down. Until both projects advance, New York’s water keeps arriving reliably — but through infrastructure that is older, leakier, and more lead-laden than the system the city needs.

How WaterVerge Tracks This

WaterVerge integrates EPA lead-and-copper compliance data into city pages, including 90th-percentile lead results and service-line inventory status as utilities report them. As New York’s lead-line inventory and replacement progress flow through SDWIS, the city’s WaterVerge page will reflect the latest figures. Search your city to see current lead data for your utility.