No city dealing with a lot of lead pipes spends as much as Chicago does to replace them.
With more than 400,000 lead water service lines, Chicago has the largest known inventory of lead pipes of any city in the country. Officials say replacing each one costs about $31,000 on average — more than six times the Environmental Protection Agency’s national estimate of $4,700 a line.
Grist, WBEZ, and Inside Climate News surveyed other cities with the most lead service lines in the country — including Detroit, Milwaukee, and New York — about the cost of fully replacing a lead service line. The 18 that responded provided averages between $6,000 and $25,000, with most less than half of Chicago’s figure. Engineering firm CDM Smith, which works with cities across the country, pegs the national average at $12,500 per line.
Now, with a federal mandate to remove every lead pipe within roughly 20 years, Chicago is facing a daunting timeline and an astronomical price tag. Replacing the city’s inventory at the current rate will cost more than $12 billion.
“It is absurd,” said Cyndi Roper, a senior policy advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s safe water initiative. “You can’t play victim to your own policies. … You actually can make changes to bring the cost down.”

A review over seven months of hundreds of pages of program documents and contracts, plus dozens of interviews with city officials, policy experts, contractors, and homeowners, found several key contributors. The most significant include inefficient early contracts, cumbersome permitting requirements, and the city’s reliance on one-off replacements rather than undertaking whole blocks at once.
A glaring lack of clarity from the Department of Water Management, which oversees the city’s replacement program, has also made it difficult to pinpoint the exact reasons for the high cost. Its officials were unable to provide Grist, WBEZ, and Inside Climate News with consistent figures for replacement costs and the number of lines replaced, or make clear whether the water department is tracking these costs systematically.
“It seems like the story here is how hard you have to work to get information that’s needed in order to figure out why the costs are so high,” Roper added.
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Chicago has the most lead pipes in the nation. We mapped them all.
A spokesperson for Mayor Brandon Johnson said in an emailed statement that he is committed to accelerating replacements and minimizing the burden to residents, but did not respond to specific questions about the city’s unusually high costs.
“The Johnson administration is working across departments in coordination with local, state, and federal partners to accelerate replacements, streamline processes, and maximize every available dollar so more residents can access safe, reliable drinking water,” said the statement.
Officials with the water department said they see some room to bring expenses down as work ramps up. But they’ve also disagreed with outside experts who say Chicago’s high costs are unreasonable, and they don’t appear to be treating the drastic cost differential with other cities as a high priority to address.
“There’s a lot of people that claim they know lead service line replacement,” said a senior official with the water department, who spoke with Grist, WBEZ, and Inside Climate News on the condition of not being named. “They don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat who has been working to secure federal funding for lead service line replacements across the state, said she wasn’t aware of the cost discrepancy but hoped the city would be transparent with the public about why costs are so high.
“Cities just need to get their act together and get this done, and we’ve been slow to do this in Chicago,” Duckworth said. “Other cities have moved much faster than us.”
Replacing pipes on an entire block
Chicago replaces lead service lines through several programs, including emergency repairs, capital improvement projects, and equity initiatives targeting low-income neighborhoods and daycares.
It also replaces entire blocks of lead pipes at once. But that program accounted for just 3 percent of the approximately 15,000 lines swapped out between 2021 and the end of 2025, according to analysis of city replacement data by Grist, WBEZ, and Inside Climate News. Instead, nearly all of those lines were fixed piecemeal, mostly when crews were sent out to fix leaks and breaks.

Replacements under the breaks and leaks program have ramped up faster than other city initiatives
Monthly lead service line replacements by program, 2021–25
Source: City of Chicago DWM
Cam Rodriguez / WBEZ / Amy Qin / Clayton Aldern / Grist



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