Most people never think about their drinking tap water until something goes wrong with it. But behind every faucet in North Myrtle Beach is a year-round testing program, and federal law requires the city to hand residents the results once a year. The 2025 report, released in July 2026, is largely a clean bill of health — every routine contaminant came in under its legal limit. Two items, though, deserve a closer look than the report’s tidy “No violation” column suggests. Here is what the testing actually found, translated out of regulator-speak and into plain English.
How your water gets tested
The quality of your tap water is crucial for health and safety, and regular testing ensures it meets the required standards.
Before the results make sense, it helps to know where the water comes from and how closely it’s watched. North Myrtle Beach doesn’t treat most of its own water. It blends supplies from the Grand Strand Water and Sewer Authority’s two surface-water plants with a small amount from a local well that makes up less than five percent of the total [North Myrtle Beach Water Quality Report, 2026].
On top of the testing done at the treatment plants, the city collects about fifty samples a month from points scattered across the distribution system to check the water that actually reaches homes [North Myrtle Beach Water Quality Report, 2026]. One detail that trips people up: the annual report lists only the substances actually detected during the year, which is why the tables look short. A blank space usually means “not found,” not “not tested.”
The everyday results: all inside the lines
With that context, the core results are genuinely reassuring. The water’s clarity, measured as turbidity, stayed under the strictest threshold in 100 percent of samples, and not a single routine sample tested positive for coliform bacteria [North Myrtle Beach Water Quality Report, 2026].
The numbers most families worry about were low: lead registered a 90th-percentile value of 1.3 parts per billion against an action level of 15, and copper came in at 0.14 against a limit of 1.3 parts per million [North Myrtle Beach Water Quality Report, 2026]. The city’s 2024 service-line inventory also reported finding no lead pipes anywhere in the system. Nitrate, fluoride, radium, and gross alpha radioactivity all landed far below their ceilings.
Even sodium, which carries no health limit, measured 51 parts per million in the well supply — negligible for most people, but worth knowing for anyone on a strict low-sodium diet. In short, on the contaminants people picture when they ask “is my water safe,” 2025 was a strong year.
The results closest to the limit — and the one rule that was broken
No report is all green, though, and two things stand out once you read past the headline. Among the routine contaminants, the disinfection byproducts — trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids, which form when chlorine reacts with natural organic matter — sat highest relative to their limits, with compliance averages around 31 parts per billion against ceilings of 80 and 60, and individual readings reaching the low forties [North Myrtle Beach Water Quality Report, 2026].
That is normal for any chlorinated surface-water system and remains comfortably compliant, but it is the figure most likely to drift upward over time. The report also lists one actual violation, and it is worth describing precisely. The city failed to send the state its certification confirming it had notified residents about older service lines. The notices to residents were in fact sent; it was the paperwork to the state that arrived late, and it was corrected in December 2025 [North Myrtle Beach Water Quality Report, 2026]. A missed deadline, in other words — not lead in anyone’s tap.
The one number above a federal limit
The most consequential result, however, isn’t in the regulated tables at all. It’s filed under “unregulated.” The city’s 2024 samples for PFAS — the so-called forever chemicals — showed PFOS averaging about 5 parts per trillion and PFOA about 4 [North Myrtle Beach Water Quality Report, 2026].
That matters because the EPA has since finalized a limit of 4 parts per trillion for each, which means the PFOS result already sits above the standard the city will eventually have to meet [EPA, 2024]. The reason it isn’t counted as a violation is timing: compliance is not required until 2029. And the source isn’t local.
The Grand Strand Water and Sewer Authority has stated that its raw water already exceeds the coming limits and has sued more than a dozen companies it blames for the upstream pollution [Grand Strand Water and Sewer Authority, 2024].
The bottom line for residents
Taken together, the 2025 results tell a consistent story. The water is safe by every standard currently in force, the everyday contaminants are well controlled, and the two things worth watching are disinfection byproducts, which are fine for now, and PFAS, which is a regional problem already moving through the courts.
None of this calls for alarm, but all of it is worth understanding. Any resident can read these reports each summer, ask questions at City Council, or add a certified home filter to lower their exposure while the larger fixes work their way upstream.
Further Reading
- North Myrtle Beach Water Quality Report & Public Works — https://www.nmb.us/
- U.S. EPA — PFAS in Drinking Water — https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/and-polyfluoroalkyl-substances-pfas
- U.S. EPA — Ground Water and Drinking Water (Consumer Confidence Reports) — https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water
- Grand Strand Water & Sewer Authority — Water Quality Reports — https://gswsa.com/index.cfm/water-quality-reports.cfm
- Grand Strand Water & Sewer Authority PFAS lawsuit (local coverage, MyHorryNews, 2024) — https://www.myhorrynews.com/news/grand-strand-water-and-sewer-sues-companies-over-pfas-pollution/article_8be46c4c-800b-11ef-b24a-87cbac747bf3.html
