Search for your city’s water hardness and you will get a number. Look at who is giving it to you and it is usually a company that sells water softeners. We read the first page of results for several of these queries on 26 September 2026 and that is what came back: softener retailers and aggregator sites, with no city or utility among them. That is our own read rather than a published finding, but it is the reason this page exists.
So here is the same question answered a different way. We went to each city’s own water quality report or its utility’s own published analysis, and we are printing what they publish, in the units they publish it in, with the document and the year beside it. Where a system publishes nothing, we say that too, because that turns out to be the more interesting finding.
No federal standard covers hardness, not even a non-binding one, so a city that publishes a figure is volunteering it.
EPA’s National Secondary Drinking Water Standards are the list of nuisance properties utilities are asked to watch. EPA describes them this way: “In addition, EPA has established National Secondary Drinking Water Standards that set non-mandatory water quality standards for 15 contaminants.” And: “They are established as guidelines to assist public water systems in managing their drinking water for aesthetic considerations, such as taste, color, and odor.” EPA adds that it “does not enforce these ‘secondary maximum contaminant levels’ (SMCLs).”
Hardness is not one of the fifteen. The list runs aluminum, chloride, color, copper, corrosivity, fluoride, foaming agents, iron, manganese, odor, pH, silver, sulfate, total dissolved solids and zinc. Hardness appears on EPA’s page once, in the cell describing what you notice when total dissolved solids are high.
That is why this page looks the way it does. The systems that publish a hardness figure are doing it voluntarily, usually in a table headed something like “secondary and other constituents not regulated.” The systems that do not publish one are not hiding anything.
USGS states the position on why it matters plainly: “Hardness is a property of water that is not a health concern, but it can be a nuisance.”
Six Texas water systems publish a hardness figure, and they run from 93 ppm in Austin to 15 to 20 grains in San Antonio.
These are the six whose own documents we read on 26 September 2026 and which state a figure. It is not a survey of Texas and it is not a ranking of Texas cities. The order below is ours, not theirs: by the average each system publishes, and where a system publishes no average, by the midpoint of the range it does publish. Those midpoints appear nowhere in the documents.
| System | What the utility publishes | Units the utility used | Document and data year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Austin Water | 93 ppm average, 70 to 126 | ppm and grains: 5.4 gpg average, 4.1 to 7.4 | Annual Water Quality Report 2025, sampled in 2025 |
| City of Fort Worth | 79.9 to 134 ppm, no average given | ppm and grains: 5 to 8 gpg | Water Quality Report, 2023 data, “Secondary Constituents” |
| City of Frisco (water from NTMWD) | by plant: Wylie 105 to 202 ppm, Leonard 112 to 188 ppm, no average given | ppm only | Water Quality Report, 2024 data |
| El Paso Water | “about 175 mg/l” average, individual sources 63 to 236 | mg/L and grains: “about 10.2 grains per gallon” | Chemical Analysis, City Water, no date printed; the file itself dates to 2017 |
| City of Round Rock | 258 ppm average, 100 to 358 | ppm in the table, grains in the prose | Annual Drinking Water Quality Report, 2025 data |
| San Antonio Water System | 15 to 20 gpg, no average given | grains only | Water Quality FAQs, undated page, last modified 24 May 2024 |
The two hedged figures in El Paso’s row are El Paso’s own words, not our rounding. Three of the six print both units in their tables: Austin, Fort Worth and El Paso. Round Rock prints both too, but its grains figure sits in a prose sentence that has its own problem, which is the last section of this page. Frisco publishes parts per million only and San Antonio publishes grains only, so the conversions below are ours.
The years in that last column are not the same year, and we have not tidied that away. Each row is the most recent document that system had published when we read it. Austin and Round Rock are on 2025 data, Frisco on 2024, Fort Worth on 2023, and El Paso’s analysis carries no date at all. Hardness moves with the source water and the blend, so an older figure is an older figure.
El Paso is worth a sentence on its own, because it shows how voluntary this is. El Paso Water’s current 2025 water quality report contains no hardness figure anywhere. The only hardness number the utility publishes sits in a separate chemical analysis that prints no date, and whose file was created in 2017. We are citing a nine-year-old document because it is the one the utility still links.
On the USGS scale, one of the six is moderately hard, two straddle bands, and three are hard or very hard.
USGS publishes the scale: “0 to 60 mg/L (milligrams per liter) as calcium carbonate is classified as soft; 61 to 120 mg/L as moderately hard; 121 to 180 mg/L as hard; and more than 180 mg/L as very hard.”
Read the six rows off it. Austin’s 93 ppm average is moderately hard. Fort Worth’s 79.9 to 134 ppm crosses from moderately hard into hard. Frisco’s Wylie plant, at 105 to 202 ppm, crosses from moderately hard all the way into very hard. El Paso’s roughly 175 mg/L average is hard, and the individual sources it lists run from 63 to 236, spanning three of the four bands. Round Rock’s 258 ppm average is well into very hard. San Antonio publishes grains only, and 15 to 20 grains converts to roughly 257 to 342 ppm, which is very hard as well.
Two cautions.
The band is ours, not the utility’s. We took each published figure and read it off the USGS scale. No utility on this page says which scale it uses.
And where a utility does describe its own water in words, the word and the band do not always agree. El Paso Water’s FAQ says “Water in El Paso is described as moderately hard to hard”, while the average in its own chemical analysis sits in the USGS hard band and three of the individual sources it lists run above 180 mg/L. North Texas Municipal Water District says “The treated water supplied by NTMWD is considered ‘moderately hard’ primarily due to the minerals found in Lavon Lake”, while Frisco’s report of that same NTMWD water shows a high of 202 ppm, which is above the USGS threshold for very hard.
We are not saying either utility is wrong. Neither one names a scale, and there is more than one in circulation. If you are going to act on a word, check the number underneath it.
Divide the milligrams-per-liter figure by 17.12. That is the divisor North Texas Municipal Water District publishes to its own customers.
NTMWD tells them to “refer to our water quality reports and divide the total hardness (mg/L) by 17.12.” Most Texas reports print hardness in parts per million, which is the same as milligrams per liter, while softener equipment is sold in grains per gallon, so this is the conversion you need.
It is consistent with the three systems on this page that print both numbers in their tables. Austin’s 93 ppm average is printed as 5.4 grains. Fort Worth’s 79.9 to 134 ppm is printed as 5 to 8 grains. El Paso’s roughly 175 mg/L is printed as “about 10.2 grains per gallon.”
Using it on the two systems that publish one unit only: Frisco’s Wylie range of 105 to 202 ppm is about 6.1 to 11.8 grains, and San Antonio’s 15 to 20 grains is about 257 to 342 ppm. Those two conversions are ours.
Two of the documents we opened contain no hardness figure at all, and the largest city in Texas we could not open at all.
We read the City of Dallas Water Quality Report 2025 looking for hardness. It is not in there. The report covers inorganic contaminants, organic contaminants, disinfection byproducts, lead and copper and turbidity, and states no hardness figure. We read Amarillo’s 2025 report the same way, with the same result, and its 2024 report before that.
Houston is the largest city in Texas and we could not read its water pages. Houston Public Works’ drinking water pages did not serve us on 26 September 2026, by fetch or in a browser session. We are not going to fill that gap from a softener company’s table, so Houston is named here rather than filled in.
If your city is one of those three, the honest answer is that we could not find a published municipal figure for you.
Four organizations on this page say something about hard water: three of the six systems in the table, plus the district that supplies Frisco’s. They do not agree with each other.
Round Rock is the most direct. Under a heading reading “Water Hardness”, its report says:
Many consumers believe that their water must be softened to prevent damage to plumbing and fixtures. This is untrue. The average water hardness in Round Rock is 249 mg/L or approximately 14.55 grains per gallon. While this level of hardness may cause minor aesthetic problems, such as water spots and dry skin, it does not damage plumbing.
Round Rock publishes one of the two hardest figures in our table. Hold on to that 249, because the last section of this page is about it.
El Paso Water: “We do not recommend the installation of water softeners for drinking water.”
North Texas Municipal Water District takes the other side of it, gently. Hard water minerals “can cause spots on clean dishes and ‘lime scale’ on plumbing fixtures”, and “You may want to seek guidance from a licensed plumber about maintaining plumbing fixtures and water heaters which can build up with hard water mineral deposits over time.”
San Antonio’s FAQ stays out of it and answers only the health question: “Hard water is not a health hazard.”
We are not going to arbitrate between a city that says softening is unnecessary and a district that suggests you ask a plumber. What is worth noticing is that none of the four sells softeners.
Its table has moved three times and the sentence beside it has not moved at all.
The 2025 report’s table row reads 2025, Hardness, high 358, low 100, average 258 ppm. The passage quoted above, a few inches away in the same document, reads “The average water hardness in Round Rock is 249 mg/L or approximately 14.55 grains per gallon.”
249 is the average from the 2023 report. That row reads high 338, low 176, average 249. In the 2024 report the table moved to an average of 271, and the sentence still said 249. In the 2025 report the table moved again to 258, and the sentence still says 249, word for word and figure for figure.
So this is not a one-year lag. It is a sentence that has ridden unchanged through three consecutive filings while the number it describes changed twice underneath it.
We have printed the table figure in our table, because that is the 2025 data. We are printing the sentence too, because if you go and read the report yourself you will find a different number than ours, and you deserve to know why before you assume one of us got it wrong.
We do not tell you whether to install a softener. That depends on what your own water measures and what your fixtures look like, and in Texas it is a decision with a permit question attached: San Antonio, for one, charges a line-item fee for a water softener on its plumbing permit, which we set out in San Antonio plumbing permits.
What this page gives you instead is a figure you can check, in a document you can open, published by the people who treat your water.
If a softener does go in, it is plumbing, and the person installing it has to hold the license Texas requires for it. Here is how to check a Texas plumber’s license, screen by screen. The permit, the inspection your utility can require afterwards and what EPA publishes about sodium are all on do you need a water softener in Texas.
Water pressure is a different property with different rules, and it has its own page.
More: everything we cover on water quality and pressure.
Every figure on this page comes from one of the documents below, each published by the body that sets, measures or administers the thing it describes. We record the document’s own date and the date we read it, because published pages change without notice.
| Source | Document date | We read it |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. Geological Survey, Water Science School — Hardness of Water | undated page on the USGS Water Science School | 2026-09-26 |
| U.S. EPA — Secondary Drinking Water Standards: Guidance for Nuisance Chemicals | undated EPA guidance page | 2026-09-26 |
| Austin Water — Annual Water Quality Report 2025, hardness row | report titled 2025; the table heading reads ‘(Sampled in 2025 unless noted differently)’ and the hardness row takes no exception. Austin’s own key states one grain per gallon equals approximately 17.1 ppm. | 2026-09-26 |
| City of Fort Worth — Water Quality Report, ‘Secondary Constituents’ table | 2023 data; PDF CreationDate 2024-05-14. The current report. Fort Worth’s own water-quality listing page still links only 2022; the 2023 file sits at the predictable path and returns HTTP 200, and 2024 and 2025 return 404 there. | 2026-09-26 |
| City of Frisco — Water Quality Report, ‘Secondary & other constituents not regulated’ table (hardness published per treatment plant) | 2024 data; the latest report in Frisco’s own archive at Archive.aspx?AMID=45 | 2026-09-26 |
| City of Round Rock — Annual Drinking Water Quality Report, 2025 data (the current report; source of the table row and the quoted Water Hardness passage) | 2025 data; file name dated 6.12.26 | 2026-09-26 |
| City of Round Rock — Annual Drinking Water Quality Report, 2024 data (cited for the 2024 hardness row: 358 high, 184 low, 271 average) | 2024 data; file name dated 6.9.25 | 2026-09-26 |
| City of Round Rock — Annual Drinking Water Quality Report, 2023 data (cited for the 2023 hardness row: 338 high, 176 low, 249 average) | 2023 data; file name dated 6.14.24 | 2026-09-26 |
| San Antonio Water System — Water Quality FAQs | FAQ text undated; the page reports a modification date of 24 May 2024 | 2026-09-26 |
| El Paso Water — 2025 Water Quality Report (read in full; publishes NO hardness figure, which is why the undated chemical analysis is the cited source) | 2025 data; PDF CreationDate 2026-06-17 | 2026-09-26 |
| El Paso Water — Water Quality FAQ | undated utility page | 2026-09-26 |
| El Paso Water — Chemical Analysis, City Water | no date printed anywhere on the document; PDF CreationDate 2017-02-17, ModDate 2017-09-28, producer Microsoft Word 2013. A nine-year-old analysis, still the only hardness figure El Paso Water publishes. | 2026-09-26 |
| North Texas Municipal Water District — Water Quality, hardness section | undated district page | 2026-09-26 |
| City of Dallas — Water Quality Report 2025 (read for hardness; the document states none) | 2025 report | 2026-09-26 |
| City of Amarillo — 2025 Consumer Confidence Report (read in full for hardness; the document states none) | 2025 data; the current report | 2026-09-26 |
| City of Amarillo — 2024 Water Quality Report / CCR (read in full for hardness; the document states none) | 2024 data | 2026-09-26 |
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