The Australian Drinking Water Guidelines are NHMRC-endorsed national guidance for drinking-water quality management in Australia. Version 4.0 was updated in June 2025 and includes health-based guideline values for antimony, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, nickel, and uranium, plus an aesthetic guideline for acid-soluble aluminium. Chromium is recorded as Cr-VI because the fact sheet states the guideline for hexavalent chromium, with total chromium used as a trigger for separate speciation analysis. Uranium is documented on the regulation page but gap-logged rather than loaded because U is outside the current regulatory_limits.csv metal-species vocabulary. Controlled-vocabulary values from this source are captured in data/evidence/regulatory_limits.csv and documented at Australia NHMRC Drinking Water Guidelines - heavy-metal values.
Update history
The five most recent substantive edits to this page, classified major (evidence or structure moved), correction (a published value or statement was wrong and has been fixed), or minor (narrative rewritten without changing the underlying evidence). Each description is derived from what the edit did to this page; the linked commit is the authoritative record, routine regeneration passes are excluded, and the full version history lives in git. When DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.
| Commit | Date | Change | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| a8052bb | 2026-08-09 | major | 1 section added; narrative text revised |