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Local water facts · Virginia

Town of Vienna: what’s in your tap water?

Town of Vienna serves 30,000 people from Fairfax Water wholesale. The numbers below are from the utility’s own published testing, compiled by the EWG Tap Water Database (June 2026). The water is legal. The question is how it compares to health guidelines, which sit well below the legal limits.

Reviewed by Tyler Griffin, Founder, SwiftPro Heating, Cooling & Plumbing

17/ 100
Water ScoreHigh Risk
13contaminants above health guidelines
464×the top flag, vs. the health guideline
30,000people served

📄 Download Town of Vienna’s one-page report, print it or share it (PDF) →

What the tests found

Each card shows how far a contaminant sits above its health guideline, the level scientists consider protective over a lifetime of drinking. A system can pass every legal test and still carry these levels.

Each bar starts at the health guideline and runs on a log scale. The faint ticks mark 10× and 100× over, and the dark notch is the legal limit where one exists.

Health-effect labels and guideline levels above come from the EWG Tap Water Database (June 2026), advisory benchmarks set by EWG’s researchers (methodology), not legal standards. The utility’s water meets federal legal limits.

What does 464× actually mean?

Think per glass: at 464× the guideline, one glass of tap water carries what 464 glasses would hold at the health-guideline level. The top flag here is Haloacetic acids (HAA9). Not an emergency, but worth knowing, because the fix is specific and usually simpler than people expect.

Get your free water report for your own ZIP: every flag scored, and which fix covers which one.

New to these reports? How to read a water report in 2 minutes.

How Town of Vienna compares

Every system we track, plotted by Water Score, 0 to 100, higher is safer.

050100YOURS

Town of Vienna scores 17/100, ranking #29 of 58 tracked systems.

What actually fixes it

No single filter does everything. Each option covers different flags, so the right answer depends on what’s in your water and how your house is set up. You’re weighing options, not grades of good.

Pitcher / carbon

Good on chlorine taste and some disinfection byproducts. Cartridges fade fast, about every 2 months.

Reverse Osmosis (RO)

The drinking-water workhorse: handles PFAS, nitrate, arsenic and most of the hard flags, at one tap. How Reverse Osmosis (RO) installation works →

Whole-home systems

Treats every tap and protects pipes and appliances, usually paired with Reverse Osmosis (RO) for the kitchen. What a softener fixes (and can’t) →

The full breakdown of what each option does and can’t do: the 60-second version · all the free guides.

Hard water and your water heater

Hardness isn’t in the EWG numbers above, but it’s the one you feel at home. Most Northern Virginia water runs hard, and the minerals settle out as sediment in a tank water heater and as scale in a tankless one. That’s what makes a heater rumble, run out of hot water sooner, and wear out early. A yearly flush clears it, and it’s the first step. Here’s how often to flush a water heater, and what it costs, and how hard the water runs in Vienna.

See the report for your address

Type your ZIP and get the full picture, free: every flag, what it means per glass, and which fix covers it. Then start with the water heater: a $99 flush (normally $199) with a plumbing safety check included. Tankless descaling is $300, regularly $350. You pay after the visit.

Get your free water report Book a $99 water heater flush

Know someone on Town of Vienna?

They probably haven’t seen these numbers. Send them this page. It takes 10 seconds, and they get their own free report.

📄 Get the printable one-page report (PDF) Town of Vienna Water Score share card preview Grab the postable Water Score card →

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