Microproduct data guideintermediate

EPA ECHO Drinking Water Systems

SDWA public water-system inventory and compliance records for building local drinking-water system lookups.

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At a glance

Difficulty
Intermediate — some data preparation helps
Size
Small · ≤0.5 GB
Formats
JSON, CSV
Access
API or Download
API key
Not required
Provider
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Updates
Weekly
Data terms
U.S. Government public data / federal copyright guidance

From source to product signal

Test a product idea in four steps

ECHO Drinking Water System Search services expose SDWIS/Fed inventory and compliance attributes for public water systems. Start with one state and JSON output. Do not use the web service as a bulk-download substitute, and do not treat these records as real-time water-quality measurements.

1

Check the setup

  • Python 3.10 or newer
  • A notebook environment such as Jupyter or Google Colab
  • An internet connection
2

Access the data

  1. 1.Open the ECHO web-services page and locate Drinking Water System Search.
  2. 2.Query get_systems for one state with JSON output.
  3. 3.Keep the request bounded to that state rather than paging a national extract.
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3

Run the Python example

Install the packages, then run the notebook cell.

python -m pip install pandas requests

import pandas as pd
import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://echodata.epa.gov/echo/sdw_rest_services.get_systems",
    params={"output": "JSON", "p_st": "RI", "p_act": "Y"},
    timeout=30,
)
response.raise_for_status()
payload = response.json()
systems = pd.json_normalize(payload.get("Results", payload).get("Systems", payload))
systems["retrieved_at_utc"] = pd.Timestamp.now(tz="UTC")
print(systems.head(20))
4

Test a useful signal

Profile active public water systems in one state

Count active Rhode Island public water systems in a bounded ECHO search and note compliance fields that are present.

  1. 01Confirm the JSON response includes water-system identifiers for the selected state.
  2. 02Summarize system counts by county or type without requesting a national download.
  3. 03State that ECHO web services are not a bulk-download path and that SDWIS/Fed is not a real-time water-quality feed.

Dataset details

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is a government source. Last verified 2026-08-14. Temporal coverage: SDWIS/Fed records with weekly ECHO refreshes.

Theme

Environment & Hazards

Domains

Water ResourcesEnvironmental HealthPublic Health

Data types

Registry DataTabularGeospatial

Tasks

Safety MonitoringGeographic AnalysisCompliance Monitoring

Geography

United States

Formats

JSONCSV

Provider

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Data terms

U.S. Government public data / federal copyright guidance