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Estimated scores for general guidance · not medical advice
Whether tap water is safe to drink depends entirely on where you are. We score drinking-water safety for all 195 countries, all 50 US states, and every French région on a 0–100 scale, blending official data — WHO/UNICEF JMP, the US EPA, and France’s Hub’Eau — with a traveler-drinkability assessment. Every place is rated across four everyday uses — drinking, brushing your teeth, ice, and cooking — plus the treatment and pipe infrastructure behind the tap. Spin the globe above, search a country, or browse the full list below.
Some countries have famously clean, drinkable tap water — treated to a high standard and reliably safe straight from the faucet. Others are best avoided from the tap. Here are the highest- and lowest-scoring countries for drinking-water safety on our index.
Highest-scoring countries
Lowest-scoring countries
Traveling across a whole region? Each hub ranks every country in it from safest to least safe, with the regional average at a glance.
Heading somewhere specific? Here’s whether you can drink the tap water in some of the world’s most-visited cities.
Treated to a high standard and reliably drinkable from the tap.
Treated, but distribution and storage vary — many filter or drink bottled.
Best avoided from the tap — boil, filter, or choose bottled water.
Four factors — drinking, brushing, ice, cooking — are derived from the score with use-specific thresholds. Read the full methodology & sources.
In the United States, tap-water safety is set by your local utility, so it varies from state to state. We score each state from the US EPA’s compliance data — the share of the population served by community water systems with no recent health-based violation. Here are the top-scoring states.
See all 50 US states & DC · or check France by région.
The highest-scoring countries for tap-water safety on our index include Iceland, Denmark, Finland, Liechtenstein, Netherlands — all with modern treatment and reliably clean, drinkable tap water straight from the tap.
Among the lowest-scoring are Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Somalia, South Sudan, where tap water should be boiled, filtered, or replaced with bottled water before drinking.
Each place gets a 0–100 score that blends a traveler-drinkability assessment with official data — WHO/UNICEF JMP for countries, the US EPA for states, and France’s Hub’Eau for régions — then rates four everyday uses: drinking, brushing teeth, ice, and cooking.
Boiling tap water at a rolling boil for one minute kills bacteria, viruses, and parasites, so it makes microbiologically unsafe water safe to drink. It does not remove chemical contaminants such as lead, nitrates, or PFAS — for those you need a certified filter or bottled water.
Yes. The small amount of chlorine used to disinfect public tap water is considered safe to drink and is what keeps the water free of harmful microbes. If you dislike the taste or smell, a simple carbon filter or leaving water to stand removes most of it.
Cloudy, brown, or foul-smelling water is a warning sign, but many contaminants are invisible and odorless. Check your local water quality report, look up your country, US state, or French région here, and use a certified home test kit if you have specific concerns.
It depends entirely on the destination. Search any of the 195 countries for its score and a breakdown of whether the water is safe to drink, brush your teeth with, use as ice, or cook with.
Go deeper with our data-backed guides to drinking-water safety.