Metro Atlanta runs on Chattahoochee surface water; Marietta, the one covered utility that publishes a figure, is soft. The outer suburbs lean more on groundwater (Buford sits on limestone). Coastal Georgia (Savannah, Brunswick) draws on the Floridan aquifer, with chloride influence.
HOW IT BREAKS DOWNsoft (Marietta); 5 of 6 covered cities publish no figure
On the metro Chattahoochee system, Marietta publishes soft water; Atlanta itself publishes no figure the site uses. Outer-ring suburbs that pull from county groundwater publish nothing either, and their lower-sash sprinkler-spotting in places like Forsyth and Cherokee counties is the tell. Coastal water is a different problem: the dissolved iron content stains lower sashes orange on lawn-irrigation overspray.
Georgia sits in one band statewide, so the answer is the same everywhere in it.
Tap water is clean enough to be the last thing that touches the glass. Wash with it, rinse with it, squeegee it off, and nothing measurable is left behind when it dries. No distilled rinse, no deionized final pass, no spot-free rinse aid — the mineral load is too low to precipitate anything you would see. The failure mode at this end of the scale is not water chemistry, it is technique: streaks here come from a worn rubber, a dirty edge, or a pass that dried before it was pulled.
Hardest first — the order that matters, because the hard end is where the method has to change. Each figure is the named utility's own published number; cities whose utility publishes none are listed after them, without a band.
Where Georgia's city pages sit in the national city rankings: hardness rank out of 185 cities whose utility publishes a figure, dissolved-solids rank out of 100, the disinfectant each utility reports, and the months each city's cleaning calendar marks for a wash. Rank 1 is the hardest or most mineral-heavy. 1 of these 6 cities use chloramine.
| CITY | HARDNESS RANK | TDS RANK | DISINFECTANT | WASH IN |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marietta | 161 / 18531.2–33.4 mg/L | not ranked | free chlorine | Apr, Sep, Oct |
| Athens | not ranked | not ranked | free chlorine | Apr, Sep, Oct |
| Atlanta | not ranked | not ranked | free chlorine | Apr, Sep, Oct |
| Augusta | not ranked | not ranked | free chlorine | Apr, Sep, Oct |
| Columbus | not ranked | not ranked | free chlorine | Apr, Sep, Nov |
| Savannah | not ranked | not ranked | chloramine | Mar, Oct, Nov |
This page is about Georgia's water and nothing else. For how cleaning actually works in Georgia across the year — climate, seasonal timing, the local contaminants, the housing stock — see the Georgia cleaning guide.
For a figure at your own address rather than your city, the Hard Water Scorer takes a ZIP code. If you run a pure-water system, the TDS diagnostic reads the other end of the same problem.
Each covered city utility's own published figure, taken from its most recent annual water quality report (Consumer Confidence Report) or its water-quality page, read in 2026. A city figure is the one its utility publishes for the service area, as a single number or the range it reports; it is not a reading from any one tap. A state range runs from the lowest to the highest figure published by the utilities we cover in that state, so it brackets those cities rather than describing an average resident. A state where no covered utility publishes a figure shows a planning estimate, labelled as one.
Private wells are outside all of it. A well is whatever the rock under it says, and the only number that describes one is a test of that tap. Have a reading that disagrees with this table? Send it to us — a number that contradicts the table is worth more than one that confirms it.