ASCE Releases Report Detailing Water Infrastructure Health Plateau

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) recently released its 2025 American Infrastructure Report Card, an assessment of the condition and performance of American infrastructure conducted every four years. The report card assigns letter grades to different categories of infrastructure, including aviation, energy, rail, and schools. The report card gave America’s infrastructure an overall grade of C.

Water infrastructure scored below average across its three categories in the 2025 report. Drinking water infrastructure received the highest grade of the three with a grade of C-, Stormwater infrastructure received a D, and wastewater infrastructure received a D+. Each of these letter grades are unchanged from the 2021 report card release. Of drinking water infrastructure, the report card said that infrastructure is underfunded, siting specifically a lack of adequate funding from the state revolving funds. According to the report, other issues faced by the drinking water sector and its infrastructure include emerging contaminants, extreme weather, and the age of much of the nation’s drinking water infrastructure. ASCE did also say, though, that water utilities are expanding innovative technologies that allow for better asset failure predictions; however, water utilities are adopting these technologies at too slow of a rate currently.

The report assessed each type of infrastructure’s capacity, condition, funding, future need, operation and maintenance, public safety, resilience, and innovation to assign grades to each type of infrastructure in the report card. You can view the report card summary and additional information here.