Clifton’s 2026 Water Quality Report Explains 2025 Testing

Clifton customers can now review Passaic Valley Water Commission’s 2026 Drinking Water Quality Report, but the document describes monitoring conducted during the 2025 calendar year. It is an annual compliance report, not a real-time notice about current water conditions in every home.

What PVWC reported for 2025

The report is dated April 7, 2026, and covers PVWC’s Main Service Area, which includes Clifton, Paterson, Passaic, Prospect Park and Woodland Park.

PVWC reported that it met applicable New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards during 2025. The report also says the system had no reported water-quality violations and detected no E. coli positives in 2,630 samples.

Those findings describe systemwide monitoring and compliance results. They do not establish that water conditions are identical at every address or that every private plumbing system has the same risk profile.

What the lead results mean

Lead and copper sampling was conducted at 206 homes. Four homes exceeded the lead action level, while none of the copper samples exceeded its action level.

An action level is a regulatory threshold that triggers treatment or other requirements for a water system when exceeded. It is not a statement that every household served by the system has water above that level.

Lead exposure can vary because of household plumbing, fixtures and service-line conditions. For that reason, the PVWC report is not a substitute for a household-specific test, particularly for residents with concerns about older plumbing or possible lead sources.

Why the report is arriving in 2026

Annual Consumer Confidence Reports generally summarize the previous calendar year’s monitoring. The EPA requires community water systems to provide these reports by July 1 each year. PVWC’s report therefore gives residents a formal look at 2025 testing rather than a snapshot of conditions on July 29, 2026.

What the report does not answer

The annual report should not be treated as a boil-water notice, taste-and-odor advisory, pressure warning, outage update or contamination alert. It also cannot determine whether a particular home currently has a plumbing-related lead concern.

Residents with a current water-quality or service question can contact PVWC Customer Service at 973-340-4300. The report says emergency assistance is available 24 hours a day through that number. Routine questions can also be directed to PVWC’s customer-service team, while residents should use current PVWC updates and alerts for time-sensitive conditions.

For Clifton, the report is most useful as an annual compliance snapshot: it records PVWC’s reported 2025 results, including no reported violations and four lead action-level exceedances among sampled homes. Current household questions require more specific information than the annual report provides.

Sources

• PVWC 2026 Drinking Water Quality Report
• EPA: Understanding Your Annual Water Quality Report
• PVWC Customer Service