unusually expensive – Chicago has more than 400,000 known lead water service lines, and officials say replacing each one costs about $31,000 on average—more than six times the Environmental Protection Agency’s national estimate. A seven-month review of program documents and contrac
In Chicago, the bill comes with a warning letter.
Craig Hines and his wife live in Avondale, where last summer they received a notice from the city that they had a lead service line. Hines said they were immediately alarmed—he cooks regularly for young nieces and nephews, and he knows there’s no safe level of lead exposure.
So they did what homeowners are supposed to do: they called plumbers. They reached out to 14. and some refused to take the job or tried to steer them away. telling them it would be too expensive. One preliminary quote came in at $25,000. They were told permits alone could cost between $5,000 and $7,000. Hines called the situation “a city screw-up” and said he “just cannot believe that the permitting fees are so high to help fix a problem that the city created.”.
For Chicago, that mix of fear and financial strain is the human face of an enormous public works challenge. The city is dealing with more than 400. 000 lead water service lines—the largest known inventory of lead pipes of any city in the country. Officials say replacing each line costs about $31. 000 on average. which is more than six times the Environmental Protection Agency’s national estimate of $4. 700 per line.
The scale of the expense is not theoretical. A federal mandate to remove every lead pipe within roughly 20 years means Chicago is looking at a staggering timeline and an astronomical price tag. Replacing the city’s inventory at the current rate would cost more than $12 billion.
A seven-month review—hundreds of pages of program documents and contracts. plus dozens of interviews with city officials. policy experts. contractors. and homeowners—found several key contributors to the costs. 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.
The water department also faced a glaring lack of clarity. The Department of Water Management oversees the city’s replacement program. but its officials were unable to provide Grist. WBEZ. and Inside Climate News with consistent figures for replacement costs and the number of lines replaced. They also did not make clear whether the water department is tracking these costs systematically. Cyndi Roper. a senior policy advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s safe water initiative. said the frustration wasn’t just about money—it was about getting answers.
“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 said.
In an emailed statement. a spokesperson for Mayor Brandon Johnson said the administration is committed to accelerating replacements and minimizing the burden to residents. but the statement did not address specific questions about Chicago’s unusually high costs. The statement said 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.
Officials with the water department say there is room to bring expenses down as work ramps up. but they also disagree with outside experts who say Chicago’s high costs are unreasonable. A senior water department official speaking on the condition of not being named said people claiming they understand lead service line replacement “don’t know what they’re talking about.”.
Senator Tammy Duckworth. an Illinois Democrat 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. Duckworth said. “Cities just need to get their act together and get this done. and we’ve been slow to do this in Chicago. ” adding. “Other cities have moved much faster than us.”.
What Chicago’s numbers look like compared to other cities
The cost picture gets sharper when Chicago is compared to peers.
Grist. WBEZ. and Inside Climate News surveyed other cities with the most lead service lines in the country— including Detroit. Milwaukee. and New York—asking about the cost of fully replacing a lead service line. The 18 cities that responded provided averages between $6,000 and $25,000, with most less than half of Chicago’s figure. Engineering firm CDM Smith pegs the national average at $12,500 per line.
Chicago’s approach matters, too. The city replaces lead service lines through multiple programs, including emergency repairs, capital improvement projects, and equity initiatives targeting low-income neighborhoods and daycares.
But the city’s reliance on one-off fixes is the centerpiece of the cost story.
Replacing entire blocks of lead pipes at once is part of Chicago’s toolkit. yet analysis of city replacement data by Grist. WBEZ. and Inside Climate News found that block-level work accounted for just 3 percent of the approximately 15. 000 lines swapped out between 2021 and the end of 2025. Nearly all of the lines were fixed piecemeal, mostly when crews were sent out to fix leaks and breaks.
Both city officials and experts agree that full-block replacement is cheaper. In Milwaukee, the per-line cost to replace a full neighborhood is nearly $2,000 less than a one-off replacement. Chicago officials say they want to ramp up blockwide replacements, but legal and logistical barriers have limited the program.
Part of the obstacle is who controls the lines. In Illinois, property owners control half the service line, while the municipality is responsible for the other half. State law forbids partial line replacement because the process can flush more lead into drinking water. Municipalities willing to replace private lines must first get property owners’ permission. which officials described as harder and more time-consuming than it may seem.
Earlier this year, state lawmakers introduced a new bill at the water department’s request to fix that access problem. It grants city plumbers access to private lines without the owner’s permission. The bill passed in May and is awaiting Governor JB Pritzker’s signature. State Senator Ram Villivalam of Chicago. a co-sponsor of the bill. said. “We need to accelerate. as much as humanly possible. this process.”.
Even so, it’s not clear how much block-level replacements will actually reduce Chicago’s costs.
Water department officials pegged the average per-line cost for block-level work—the city’s cheapest program—at approximately $34,000. They pegged the average for one-off replacements at $39,000. Both figures are well above the $31,000 overall average the department has cited. When asked to explain how that could be, the water department did not respond. In her last email to the news organizations in May. water department spokesperson Megan Vidis said she would not answer any more questions on the topic.
Permits and complexity hit homeowners hardest
Any lead pipe a property owner replaces on their own is one the city doesn’t have to pay for. But homeowners who shoulder the work said it can be harder than they expected.
In Chicago, the city’s permitting process is expensive and complex. A single line replacement can require permits from the water and transportation departments as well as inspection-related charges. according to the city’s Department of Buildings. Fees vary based on the type of street and size of pipe.
The water department said it waives all its permit fees when the city pays for replacements. But when property owners want to pay for their own repairs, it’s not always so simple. Some qualify for a city program waiving up to $5,000 in fees; others do not. Water department officials could not provide an average cost for permits, saying it varies by project site.
After more than six months of research—contacting their alderman. district commissioner. and multiple city departments to track down answers about costs—Hines and his wife found a plumber who knew how to navigate the city’s permit waivers. That plumber quoted them $22,000 for the job, which they were told would include permits. They hope the replacement will take place in July.
Several miles south, the experience looked different.
Ryan Wilson and his wife, Alaina Harkness, said they did not qualify for the fee waiver. They paid nearly $25. 000 to replace the lead line at their Hyde Park home last year. and because they also upsized their service line while replacing it. they were not eligible for the waiver. Wilson said even with decades of experience in urban planning, the permitting requirements were extremely confusing. They never figured out how much of the final bill was allocated to permits.
“If Chicago wants to improve citywide replacement efforts, Wilson said, improving the permitting process should be high on the list.
“There’s not a single person to talk to about this,” Wilson said.
A system built with early inefficiencies and funding restrictions
City officials and outside experts point to different pieces of the puzzle.
Water department officials pointed to two key reasons for the high costs. First, they said the city lacked a firm grasp of costs when launching its replacement program in 2021 and that its first round of contracts was inefficient.
They said the early contracts bundled jobs poorly, tasking contractors with work outside their specialization—for example, having plumbers do restoration or outreach.
“At webinar last fall, the water department’s deputy commissioner Michael Grillo said, “Early on, the issue was … a lot of unknowns in our contracts,” adding, “We are trying to be smarter with our contracts that go out, be more specific, eliminate those unknowns.”
Grillo also said plumbing companies overbid to cover worst-case scenarios in those early contracts. The water department’s Vidis confirmed via email that the city implemented four new contracts this year focused on improving equitable access for small businesses to replace lead service lines. Vidis said the goal of those contracts was not to reduce per-line prices.
Grillo also blamed labor costs for part of the city’s high price tag—but the prevailing wage numbers complicate that explanation.
The base prevailing wage for a union plumber in the Chicago area is $99.52 per hour. By contrast, it’s about $97 in Minneapolis and roughly $121 in New York City—cities that replace their lead pipes for less than half of Chicago’s costs.
Betony Jones, a senior researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and former director of energy jobs under the Biden administration, said, “I have a hard time believing that the prevailing wage would be the cost factor.”
City officials say funding constraints add another layer. Chicago has to cobble together funding from a patchwork of local and federal sources in the form of grants and low-interest loans, which bring red tape and restrictions.
Duckworth’s office said the Biden-era Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act delivered a historic $15 billion for lead pipe removal. with Illinois getting about $1.2 billion. This month. Duckworth’s office announced a separate $22 million federal grant earmarked for Chicago’s majority-Black Austin neighborhood. where 92 percent of service lines require replacement according to last year’s lead service line inventory.
At Chicago’s price point, the state estimates that $22 million will only replace about 650 lines out of the nearly 17,000 reported in city data for Austin last year.
Elin Betanzo, a national drinking water expert who helped uncover the Flint water crisis, wrote that Chicago needs to explain where the money is going and justify the cost. Betanzo said she has not seen a realistic cost breakdown that demonstrates why Chicago is paying as much as it is.
“They need to figure out how to complete the most cost-efficient lead service line replacements in the country, not the most expensive,” she added.
Public health experts have also been warning that as Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funding runs out this year. more local. federal. and state dollars will be needed—especially for overburdened cities like Chicago. Betanzo said. “It’s a critical part of the infrastructure. ” adding that it is “that final piece of public health protection.”.
The questions now are blunt: how fast can Chicago move. and at what cost to people who can’t afford to wait?. The city has replaced more than 15,000 lead service lines since 2021. Program type determines location: emergency repairs are citywide. subsidized equity initiatives are concentrated in the South and West sides. and homeowner-initiated repairs cluster on the North Side.
But as lawmakers push new tools—like the May bill awaiting Governor JB Pritzker’s signature to allow access to private lines without permission—the central frustration voiced by residents remains the same.
Lead is not supposed to be a long-term problem. In Chicago, the clock is ticking, and the costs are rising in a way that homeowners say they’re only now beginning to feel in real time.
Chicago lead pipes lead service lines water department permitting Brandon Johnson Tammy Duckworth JB Pritzker Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act environmental justice public health