PFAS drinking water rules in Alberta, the agency and citation behind them, how they compare to the Health Canada Objective of 30 nanograms per litre for the sum of 25 PFAS compounds, and the federal sites in Alberta where the Government of Canada has recorded PFAS as a contaminant of concern.
This is the Canada view of the North American PFAS dataset. The complete dataset, including all 3,452 US systems and 97 Canadian sites, lives on the main PFAS contamination map.
Provincial standard
Alberta Tier 1 groundwater guidelines apply the same PFOS and PFOA values across every land use because the potable groundwater pathway governs. These guidelines are the basis for contaminated site remediation and post-remediation certification. A previous version of this tracker listed PFOS at 70 ng/L. The published Table 2 value is 0.0006 mg/L, which is 600 ng/L, and it has been corrected.
Compound
Limit (ng/L)
Note
PFOS (groundwater, all land uses)
600
Alberta Tier 1 Table 2 (0.0006 mg/L)
PFOA (groundwater, all land uses)
200
Alberta Tier 1 Table 2 (0.0002 mg/L)
PFOS + PFOA
Not numeric
Sum of ratios to each guideline should not exceed 1
Alberta Tier 1 Soil and Groundwater Remediation Guidelines (June 2024)
Health Canada Objective for PFAS in Drinking Water (2024)
Last reviewed 2026-08-13. Verify against the agency source before making a compliance or remediation decision.
From the Federal Contaminated Sites Inventory, ordered by federal priority classification. The inventory records which contaminants are present at each federal site, not the measured concentrations, so these entries show where PFAS has been identified rather than how much was found.
Custodian departments in Alberta: Parks Canada Agency (5), National Defence (4), MOT (3).
Site
Municipality
Custodian
Classification
Status
Media affected
4 Wing Cold Lake Site Wide PFAS
Cold Lake
National Defence
High Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater, Soil, Surface water
Jasper
Parks Canada Agency
High Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater, Soil
Administration Area Sewage Lagoon
Improvement District No. 13 Elk Island
Parks Canada Agency
High Priority for Action
Closed
Groundwater, Not Available, Sediment
Sturgeon County
National Defence
High Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater, Soil, Surface water
Recreational Area Sewage Lagoon
Improvement District No. 13 Elk Island
Parks Canada Agency
High Priority for Action
Closed
Groundwater, Not Available, Sediment
Wainwright No. 61
National Defence
High Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater, Soil, Surface water
Jasper
Parks Canada Agency
Medium Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater, Soil
Improvement District No. 9 Banff
Parks Canada Agency
Medium Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater, Sediment, Soil
Former Fire Training Area (PFAS) (Post 1976)
Calgary
MOT
Low Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater
Former Fire Training Area (PFAS) (Pre-1976)
Calgary
MOT
Low Priority for Action
Active
Groundwater
Cypress County
National Defence
Suspected
Not Available
Leduc County
MOT
Active
Soil
Open the full map and filter Alberta pins
The map is built from the US EPA Fifth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule, a United States programme. Canada has no equivalent national monitoring dataset for PFAS in drinking water. Sampling is run by provincial regulators and individual utilities, and results are published in their own reporting. The regulatory detail above is compiled from the Alberta Environment and Protected Areas source listed in the citations.
Every count above is read straight from a published government file. Nothing is modelled, averaged, or estimated. The rules below are the exact rules used to produce the figures for Alberta.
Open the inventory source page
EPA UCMR 5 does not apply. UCMR 5 is a United States drinking water programme, so it produces no results for Alberta. No US figure is reused or scaled to stand in for Canadian data.
Which sites are listed. Inventory records whose province field is AB and that carry the PFAS contaminant code. That gives 12 sites in Alberta.
Site records, not samples. The inventory reports site status, classification, custodian, and affected media. It does not publish drinking water concentrations, so there is no Canadian equivalent of the US nanogram per litre figures.
Reporting lag. Custodian departments update their records on their own schedule, so a site may have progressed since it was last reported.
Limits and rules. The Alberta standard shown above comes from Alberta Environment and Protected Areas, Alberta Tier 1 Soil and Groundwater Remediation Guidelines, June 2024, Table 2, reviewed 2026-08-13.
If any figure on this page does not match its source file, tell Nelson and it will be corrected or removed.
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