Fort Worth Water: What the City’s Latest Report Says

Fort Worth water comes from seven lakes, reservoirs and rivers, goes through five city treatment plants, and reaches your tap moderately hard and treated with chloramine. Those are the city’s own figures, from Fort Worth Water’s report on 2025 testing, and this article walks through them in plain English.

One thing first, because a lot of people searching for Fort Worth water are looking for the utility itself. We are not Fort Worth Water. Bills, new service and outages go to the city, and the number for that is printed on your water bill. We are Honest Water Co, a water treatment company with our shop on E Rosedale St in Fort Worth, and this is the water we work with every day.

Where Fort Worth water comes from

Fort Worth Water lists these sources:

• Lake Worth
• Lake Bridgeport
• Eagle Mountain Lake
• Benbrook Lake
• Richland Chambers Reservoir
• Cedar Creek Reservoir
• The Clear Fork of the Trinity River

Every source on that list is a lake, reservoir or river, so Fort Worth runs on surface water. The city buys its raw water from the Tarrant Regional Water District (TRWD), about 79 billion gallons in fiscal year 2025. Five treatment plants turn it into tap water for about 1.4 million people, and the utility serves 38 wholesale customer cities on top of its own customers.

That last number matters if you live in a suburb. If your city buys from Fort Worth, your water starts out as Fort Worth water, but your own city’s report is the one that covers your address.

How the city treats it

Fort Worth Water lists five treatment steps: ozonation, coagulation and flocculation, sedimentation, filtration and disinfection. Ozone goes first. The city uses it to break down organic material so the later steps can remove it.

For disinfection, the city adds monochloramine, which it describes as chlorine and ammonia, to protect the water from bacteria all the way to your tap. In 2025 the average chloramine level was 3.3 parts per million (ppm), against a limit of 4, with no violation.

That residual is there on purpose, and it is doing its job. It is also what many people taste and smell in a glass of Fort Worth tap water. Taking it out at home is a job for activated carbon. A softener’s resin does not touch it.

Fort Worth water hardness, by the numbers

The city publishes its hardness figure. Total hardness ran 108 to 150 ppm as calcium carbonate, which Fort Worth Water converts to 6 to 9 grains per gallon. Calcium alone ran 37.6 to 48.1 ppm.

That puts Fort Worth close to Dallas, where the city’s own figure is 120 to 155 mg/L (for water, ppm and mg/L are the same measure). We covered what that range means for a house, and how the federal scale rates it, in Dallas water hardness: what the city’s numbers mean.

The same table lists a few more minerals and measures:

• Total dissolved solids: 182 to 244 ppm
• Sodium: 19.5 to 27.9 ppm
• pH: 7.8 to 8.5

The city treats these as taste and appearance measures, not health ones. In a house, 6 to 9 grains of hardness shows up as white crust on faucets and showerheads, spots on glasses, and scale building up inside the water heater.

What the safety numbers show

Fort Worth Water’s statement is direct: “All results in this report met state and federal drinking water standards.” Here are the main results from the 2025 table, each against its federal limit or action level:

• Lead: 3.1 parts per billion (ppb), action level 15
• Copper: 0.42 ppm, action level 1.3
• Nitrate: 0.70 ppm, limit 10
• Total trihalomethanes: 13.8 ppb, limit 80
• Haloacetic acids: 9.3 ppb, limit 60

The city lists the source of lead and copper as corrosion of household plumbing, which is pipe inside the home, not water from the plant. It also offers lead testing at no charge, on request, to customers whose service line is listed as lead, galvanized requiring replacement, or unknown. That request goes to the city.

So we are not going to tell you Fort Worth water is unsafe. The reasons people treat it at home are practical ones: the chloramine taste, and the scale that hardness leaves on everything it touches.

What we install for Fort Worth water

For most Fort Worth homes on city water, the answer is one tank that handles both. Our Standard Whole-Home Softener + Filtration pairs a 48,000-grain softener with coconut-shell carbon for chlorine and chloramine. It is $2,650 installed. The resin takes out the calcium and magnesium. The carbon takes care of the chloramine.

Larger households have bigger options, and our page on water softeners in Fort Worth lays them out side by side. Our Fort Worth service area page covers how we work in the city.

Not on Fort Worth water?

Plenty of homes with a Tarrant County address are not. Arlington, for one, runs its own city department, Arlington Water Utilities, so Arlington’s figures are its own and not the ones above.

You may also see the North Texas Municipal Water District in your searches. It is a separate wholesale supplier with its own reports. Fort Worth’s raw water comes from TRWD.

If you are not sure who supplies you, check the name on your water bill, or use our water lookup by ZIP code to see which utility serves your address.