Who provides Marietta's tap water
Most Marietta homes are served by Marietta Power and Water, the city-owned utility. Marietta Power and Water does not treat its own water. It buys finished, already-treated water wholesale from the Cobb County-Marietta Water Authority and delivers it through the city's own distribution pipes.
The Cobb County-Marietta Water Authority treats surface water from two sources: the Chattahoochee River, at its Quarles treatment plant, and Lake Allatoona, at its Wyckoff treatment plant. That is the same water the Authority supplies to Cobb County and several nearby cities, so your neighbors on other systems often share the same source.
Soft water, and what that means for your home
The Cobb County-Marietta Water Authority reports its finished water as soft, about 38 milligrams per liter as calcium carbonate, which is roughly 2 grains per gallon. Metro Atlanta's surface water is naturally soft, so a whole-home water softener is usually unnecessary in Marietta.
Because hardness is not the local issue, homeowners who want to improve their water tend to focus on taste and chlorine rather than scale. That is a comfort and preference decision, not a safety one, and the section below on filtration options walks through the choices.
How to read the official water report
Every community water system publishes an annual Consumer Confidence Report, or CCR, that lists the contaminants it tested for and whether the system met the federal standards for each one. Meeting a federal standard is a compliance floor set by the EPA, not the lowest level a home can achieve, which is why some homeowners still choose to filter further as a personal preference.
You can read Marietta's most recent report on the city's Water Quality Report page, linked in the sources below. To see the current report for a specific address, along with the provider the system resolves to, you can also use our free water-quality lookup, which pulls the utility's own figures and links straight to the official report.
What the report cannot tell you about your home
A water report describes the water in the system overall, sampled before it reaches your street. It cannot see inside any one house, and the plumbing in an older home can change what actually comes out of the tap.
According to the EPA, lead can enter drinking water inside a home when plumbing materials that contain lead corrode, and lead pipes, lead solder, and some older brass fixtures are more likely in homes built before 1986. You cannot see, taste, or smell lead in water, so testing at the tap is the only sure way to know. A large share of Marietta's housing predates 1990, and some homes fall in the 1978 to 1995 window when polybutylene, a gray plastic supply pipe, was widely installed. None of this means your home has a problem. It means a licensed plumber can identify what your pipes and fixtures are actually made of and, if you want certainty, arrange a tap-water test.
Filtration options, if you want water beyond the standard
If you want to bring detected levels lower than the compliance floor, the common choices are a point-of-use reverse osmosis system under the kitchen sink for drinking and cooking water, a whole-home carbon filter to reduce chlorine taste and odor at every tap, and a softener only in the rare local case where hardness is actually an issue. Equipment that is independently certified, for example to an NSF/ANSI standard, is the reliable way to match a filter to a specific concern.
The right system depends on what you care about and on your home's own plumbing, which is why an in-home visit is where a plumber tests the water, sizes the equipment, and gives an exact quote. We do not promise specific resulting numbers for any one home before that visit.