Vermont runs as three working zones. Burlington and the Champlain Valley corridor on Champlain Water District Lake Champlain-source surface supply. Central Vermont and the Connecticut River Valley corridor (Montpelier, Barre, White River Junction, Brattleboro) on mixed municipal supplies. Northern Vermont and the Northeast Kingdom rural corridor on local aquifer and well-water systems. Rural Vermont well-water statewide variable depending on aquifer source and geology.
HOW IT BREAKS DOWNsoft (Colchester, Essex, South Burlington); moderately hard (Burlington); 1 of 5 covered cities publishes no figure
Champlain Water District Lake Champlain-source supply sits on the soft edge: South Burlington, Colchester and Essex publish soft, Burlington moderately hard. Central Vermont municipal supplies publish no figure the site uses. Northeast Kingdom rural well-water publishes no figure; test before choosing a protocol. The Vermont housing stock is among the deepest pre-1880 heritage residential concentrations in New England outside of coastal Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Ice-dam meltwater handling January-March is operationally similar to what Linnea Jorgensen documents for Minnesota. Severe-weather scheduling moderate. Maple-syrup-season residue handling February-April on commercial-and-residential adjacent to sugaring operations. Heavy ski-corridor seasonal commercial in Stowe, Killington, Sugarbush, Stratton, Mount Snow corridors. Foliage-season commercial concentration October. Winter exterior work effectively shuts down December through February statewide.
A blended system means hardness moves with the blend. Two addresses on the same utility can read differently, and the same address can read differently across a year, depending on which source is carrying the load that season.
Vermont spans 2 hardness bands, which means there is no single answer for the whole state — the method changes as you move across it. Both ends are below.
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.
Tap water is still fine for most residential glass, with two exceptions worth knowing. Dark glass shows a faint mineral haze that lighter glass hides, and glass that is hot enough to flash the water off before you pull the squeegee will spot regardless of how soft the supply is. On both, a distilled final rinse costs about a dollar a window and removes the variable entirely. Everywhere else at this level, the water is not what is wrong.
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. Within Vermont the spread runs from Colchester at 60 mg/L to Burlington at 64 mg/L — a difference big enough that the same bottle of cleaner behaves differently in each.
Where Vermont'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. 3 of these 5 cities use chloramine.
| CITY | HARDNESS RANK | TDS RANK | DISINFECTANT | WASH IN |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Burlington | 133 / 18564 mg/L | 89 / 10081 mg/L | free chlorine | Jun |
| Colchester | 136 / 18560 mg/L | not ranked | chloramine | Jun |
| Essex | 136 / 18560 mg/L | not ranked | chloramine | Jun |
| South Burlington | 136 / 18560 mg/L | not ranked | chloramine | Jun |
| Rutland | not ranked | not ranked | free chlorine | Aug |
This page is about Vermont's water and nothing else. For how cleaning actually works in Vermont across the year — climate, seasonal timing, the local contaminants, the housing stock — see the Vermont 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.