Water hardness in Massachusetts
Massachusetts has a median ambient water hardness of 44 mg/L, which is 2.6 grains per gallon and classes as soft. That is the middle of 10,424 samples across 14 counties.
This is ambient water, not tap water. These figures come from samples taken from wells, streams and springs by USGS, EPA and state agencies. Municipal utilities treat, blend and sometimes soften water before it reaches a tap, so a city supply can be considerably softer than the ground beneath it. Treat this as a good guide for a private well and an approximate one for city water. Your utility's annual water quality report gives the real number for a municipal tap, and a test strip gives it for yours.
Every monitored county in Massachusetts
Ranked hardest first. The middle 50% column shows how much the samples within a county vary, which matters more than the median where a county spans two geologies.
| County | mg/L | gpg | Class | Middle 50% | Samples |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Berkshire County | 120 | 7 | Moderately hard | 83 to 140 | 781 |
| Essex County | 86 | 5 | Moderately hard | 44 to 160 | 683 |
| Suffolk County | 76 | 4.4 | Moderately hard | 57 to 124 | 113 |
| Middlesex County | 64 | 3.7 | Moderately hard | 40 to 95 | 2,728 |
| Norfolk County | 45 | 2.6 | Soft | 32 to 92 | 817 |
| Worcester County | 41 | 2.4 | Soft | 15 to 64 | 1,400 |
| Hampden County | 39 | 2.3 | Soft | 23 to 72 | 225 |
| Bristol County | 28 | 1.6 | Soft | 22 to 39 | 313 |
| Nantucket County | 28 | 1.6 | Soft | 19 to 42 | 24 |
| Plymouth County | 24 | 1.4 | Soft | 14 to 39 | 599 |
| Barnstable County | 22 | 1.3 | Soft | 14 to 45 | 1,525 |
| Dukes County | 19 | 1.1 | Soft | 11 to 44 | 28 |
| Franklin County | 15 | 0.9 | Soft | 8 to 36 | 1,035 |
| Hampshire County | 11 | 0.6 | Soft | 0 to 33 | 153 |
Source: Water Quality Portal (USGS, EPA and state agencies), waterqualitydata.us, retrieved 2026-09-19. 2,904,346 samples across 3,110 counties.
What this means for a household in Massachusetts
At 2.6 grains per gallon, a family of four would need a softener of about 16,000 grains to regenerate roughly weekly, using around 106 lb of salt a year. Size it for your own household.
14 of these counties include well samples, so the figures are a reasonable guide for private well water there. Municipal supplies in the same counties may be softer, because utilities often blend or treat.
Hardness follows geology rather than borders. Where a county sits on limestone or dolomite the water is hard; on granite, basalt or sandstone it is soft. That is why neighbouring counties in this table can differ by a factor of several.