Type your suburb to see your local water quality — hardness, what it means for your home, and the full breakdown. Perth figures are taken directly from Water Corporation’s annual report and verified locality by locality. Other cities are compiled from published utility reporting and secondary sources — indicative, pending the same verification.
See all 8 capitals ranked by hardness →
Verified August 2026 · 28 Perth supply localitiesTap any row to see its full breakdown.
| Locality | Hardness | Rating | pH |
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Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane use chloramine across their networks, as do Melbourne’s western and growth suburbs (Greater Western Water). Perth, Canberra, Hobart, Darwin and Melbourne’s eastern and south-eastern suburbs use free chlorine. It matters because chloramine needs catalytic carbon to remove, while free chlorine is handled by any standard carbon filter.
Adelaide and parts of Perth have the hardest mains water — Adelaide around 100–130 mg/L, with some Perth groundwater zones higher still. Brisbane is moderately hard in its inner zones. Melbourne, Sydney, Hobart, Canberra and Darwin are all soft, generally under 50 mg/L.
Yes. Every Australian capital fluoridates within the 0.6–1.1 mg/L range recommended for dental health, well below the 1.5 mg/L ADWG limit. Reverse osmosis is the effective option if you want to reduce fluoride.
Each city’s figures come from the responsible utility’s own annual drinking water quality report — Water Corporation, Sydney Water, Melbourne Water and its retailers, SA Water, Seqwater, Icon Water, TasWater and Power & Water. Where a utility doesn’t publish a figure (such as Darwin’s TDS and pH), it is shown as “not published” rather than estimated.
It depends on your city. In soft, chlorine-treated cities like Melbourne, Hobart and Canberra, filtering is mainly about taste. In hard-water cities like Adelaide and Perth, scale is the bigger concern. In chloramine cities you need catalytic carbon rather than a standard jug filter.
Each zone has its own page with the complete Water Corporation figures, what the hardness means in practice, which zones have similar water, and what is actually worth filtering for there. Sorted hardest to softest (mg/L as CaCO3).
Each state does this differently, and the arrangement affects who to contact and what you can find out. These profiles cover sources, treatment, disinfectant type and what the published data means for filtration.