New lead water pipes are not allowed. Old ones were never ordered out of the ground. That split is why a house in the Annex or East York can still be on a lead service in a country that has banned lead plumbing for decades.
Toronto Lead Pipe Solutions replaces the private side of those old services in Toronto. The ban on new pipe did not do that job, and it still will not.
What was actually banned
Toronto stopped installing lead water service connections in the mid-1950s. A house built after that was usually given a copper service from the start. A house built before that often still has the original line, because nothing in the later rules forced a retrofit.
The National Plumbing Code of Canada stopped allowing lead pipe for new drinking-water plumbing in the mid-1970s. People usually date that change to 1975. The code covers new construction and new plumbing work. It does not reach back and declare every existing service illegal, and it does not send an inspector to your lawn.
Solder is a different ban, and it matters in houses that already have copper. Around 1990 the National Plumbing Code required lead-free solder on drinking-water joints. Before that, a copper system could still put lead in the water from the joints, just far less than a full lead service does. If your house is copper from the 1960s or 1970s, solder is worth knowing about. It is not the same problem as a lead pipe from the street.
Fittings and taps got a later rule. Since the mid-2010s, components that touch drinking water have had to meet a low-lead standard: a weighted average of not more than 0.25% lead. That is why new brass is marked lead-free. It stops a new faucet from being a lead source. It does nothing to the pipe that was buried in 1938.
A guideline is not a removal order
Health Canada writes the drinking-water guideline. Since 2019 the maximum acceptable concentration for lead is 5 micrograms per litre, and the advice is to go lower when you can. Provinces and cities decide how to get there. There is no federal deadline that says every owner must dig up a lead service by a set year.
Toronto's approach has been two tracks. The city doses a phosphate so less lead dissolves while the old pipes are still in use, and it replaces the public half of lead services on its own schedule, the piece from the watermain to the property line. The piece from the property line to your meter is private. The city has offered a program to help pay for that private work. The program is assistance. It is not a ticket, and it is not a law that the pipe must be gone before you can live there or sell.
Other GTA municipalities are not on Toronto's program. Peel, York, Durham, and Halton each have their own water department and their own rules. The plumbing-code ban on new lead pipe applies across Canada. The assistance program does not.
Legal to have, and still worth replacing
Owning a house with a lead service is not a bylaw offence. Drinking the water from it is not illegal. The pipe is still a lead source every day it stays in the ground, and the health guidance has only gotten stricter since the pipe was installed. The 1975 code change protected the next house. It left this one alone on purpose, because digging up every pre-war service was left to owners and cities.
If you are buying, ask what the service is made of and look at the pipe on the house side of the meter. A ban on new lead does not mean the listing's 1924 house was upgraded. City records sometimes show the public side and say nothing useful about the private side.
If the private pipe is lead, replacement is a permitted plumbing job, not a code violation you can ignore. Toronto Lead Pipe Solutions will identify the material at the meter and quote the private-side replacement in writing.
Written by Toronto Lead Pipe Solutions Team