Brabant Water hardness: how hard is your water?

Reading time: ~14 minutes

What is water hardness and how do you read °dH?

Water hardness tells you how much calcium and magnesium is in your tap water. Both come naturally from the ground: rainwater seeps through layers of sand, clay and limestone and picks up minerals along the way. The more limestone in the subsoil, the harder the water. In the Netherlands this is expressed in German degrees of hardness, abbreviated to °dH.

Two things are often confused here. Limescale in your water is not a contaminant: calcium and magnesium are minerals your body needs, and according to Brabant Water, hard water is not harmful to health. What limescale does do is build up on your kettle, your shower screen and the heating element of your washing machine. That is a household problem, not a health problem, and the two call for different solutions. What minerals actually do in your drinking water is set out under minerals in drinking water.

How hard is the water from Brabant Water?

Soft to moderately hard. Brabant Water states itself that the hardness of the drinking water it supplies is at most 11.2 °dH, with an outlier above that in exceptional cases, and that the average hardness supplied varies from 5.0 to 11.2 °dH. For comparison: the boundary between moderate and fairly hard sits at 12 °dH, so with the water it supplies Brabant stays just under it.

That is not how the groundwater comes out of the ground. The natural hardness of the groundwater in Brabant ranges, according to Brabant Water, from 4.8 to 16.7 °dH. The difference between those two ranges is exactly what the softening plants achieve: the top end is flattened, the bottom end stays as it is.

Two figures circulate for the provincial average. Brabant Water does not name a provincial average itself, but the hardness overviews that Google cites in its AI answer arrive at around 7.8 °dH. That fits the figures we find by town. Just do not take that average too seriously: the difference between Eindhoven and Helmond is almost a factor of two, and those two cities are fifteen kilometres apart. To see what that spread looks like nationally, go to water hardness by municipality.

Water hardness by town in Brabant

Below are the hardness and the acidity as Brabant Water publishes them by town, retrieved on 21 September 2026. Where a range is given, the water comes from more than one production site and differs by neighbourhood or by moment.

Three things stand out in this table, and they appear in no summary you will find elsewhere.

• Helmond is the hardest of the eleven at 11.31 °dH. That is almost twice the value for Eindhoven and it sits just above the range of 5.0 to 11.2 °dH that Brabant Water names itself. The company allows for this with the wording that an outlier is possible in exceptional cases.
• The large cities differ from each other more than the province differs from the national average. Eindhoven 5.71 to 6.16, Tilburg 7.78, Breda 7.78 to 10.19, ’s-Hertogenbosch 7.56 to 10.42. A provincial figure therefore does not help you decide whether you need to descale your kettle more often.
• The acidity is fine everywhere. All values sit between 7.44 and 8.37, and therefore within the drinking water standard of 7 to 9.5. Only the upper limit for Bergen op Zoom, at 8.37, comes just above the 7.8 to 8.3 window that Brabant Water marks as most optimal. What the pH value of tap water means is explained under the pH value of tap water.

The figures come from the rolling quarterly report by Brabant Water and are updated every quarter. They can therefore shift; the order from soft to hard stays stable in practice.

Where does the water from Brabant Water come from?

Entirely from groundwater. Brabant Water writes that it currently makes drinking water from groundwater only, and that the subsoil in Brabant holds an old groundwater layer that in some places lies 300 metres deep. No river water, no IJsselmeer, no dune infiltration.

That is not a given in the Netherlands. According to the RIVM (the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment), around 60% of drinking water nationally comes from groundwater; the rest is made from surface water. Brabant therefore sits on the favourable side of that split, and that explains a large part of what follows below on PFAS.

Those 29 sites also explain the ranges in the table above. A city such as ’s-Hertogenbosch or Breda is not served by a single pumping station, and every abstraction has its own soil composition. If you live on one side of the city, your water can be measurably harder than three neighbourhoods away. You see the same logic at other companies, for instance at the water quality of Vitens and at the drinking water from Oasen.

Why Brabant Water softens in some places

Softening is not needed everywhere and therefore does not happen everywhere. Brabant Water puts it this way itself: in many places in Brabant the groundwater is already naturally soft or moderately hard, so softening is not always necessary. Where the groundwater heads towards 16.7 °dH it is treated, and the result is that the water supplied no longer falls into the hard category anywhere.

There is a small guardrail in that policy which you need to know before you consider a softener yourself. Central softening is done to a level that limits limescale but leaves the minerals in the water. A domestic ion exchange softener works differently: it removes calcium and magnesium almost entirely and swaps them for sodium. That is pleasant for your washing machine; for your drinking water it is an impoverishment. Brabant Water also points out that an ion exchange softener requires a type CA backflow preventer, and that a softener with a replaceable filter legally needs a verifiable type EA check valve.

That is also the difference between two devices that are often confused. A softener changes the hardness of all your water, including the water you do not drink. A water filter under the sink treats only the water that comes out of your kitchen tap. The full comparison is set out in water softener or water filter, and which filter type makes the most difference with limescale-rich water can be read on our overview page.

What does drinking water cost at Brabant Water in 2026?

From 1 January 2026 you pay, according to Brabant Water, €1.51 for 1,000 litres, that is per cubic metre, including 9% VAT. In 2025 that was €1.41. On top of that comes €95.75 in standing charge per year, against €89.21 in 2025.

Work it through for a household that uses 100 cubic metres a year: 100 times €1.51 is €151, plus €95.75 standing charge makes roughly €247 a year, or about €20.60 a month. Converted, a litre of tap water then costs you around €0.0025 all in. A litre of bottled water costs €0.40 to €1.00, so the difference is a factor of 160 to 400. How that sum works out in general is covered under what a cubic metre of water costs.

One change taking effect in 2026 that few people know about: the ceiling for the tap water levy rises, according to Brabant Water, from 300 cubic metres to 50,000 cubic metres per WOZ object (the Dutch property valuation unit). For an average household nothing changes; for large users it does.

Is there PFAS in the tap water in Brabant?

Barely, and that has everything to do with those 300 metres of depth. Brabant Water writes: “In the vast majority of the drinking water in Brabant, no PFAS occur at all. The drinking water in Brabant is drawn from deep groundwater, often two football pitches below the ground.” And further: in a few places, very precise instruments detect small traces, which stay below the legal standard and within the health standard set by the RIVM.

Two figures get mixed up, and that is the source of virtually all the confusion about PFAS in drinking water.

The RIVM adds a nuance that works out favourably for Brabant: drinking water made from groundwater contains less PFAS than drinking water made from surface water. The institute also points out that people take in around three times as much PFAS through food as through drinking water, and that drinking water on its own stays below the health-based limit value. Anyone wanting to lower their total intake has more grip on their tap than on their shopping. Background on this group of substances is under PFAS and forever chemicals, and where measurements have been taken in the Netherlands you can see on the PFAS map of the Netherlands.

Nitrate and farming: does that apply to your tap too?

Brabant is a farming province on sandy soil, and that rightly raises the question of whether manure ends up in the tap water. Here the honest answer matters more than the exciting one: no, not in the drinking water supplied.

What is going on sits in the shallow groundwater. According to the RIVM, farming is an important source of nitrogen in groundwater, and the combination of a high nitrogen load and oxygen-rich groundwater leads to high nitrate concentrations in the sandy soils. In the 2015 to 2018 measurement period, shallow groundwater under arable land on sand exceeded the standard of 50 milligrams per litre in 56% of measurements.

Those figures concern groundwater at ten metres depth under farm plots. Brabant Water draws its water from a layer that lies hundreds of metres below that and is decades to centuries old. The nitrate pressure at the surface is a reason to protect the sources, and that is being done: Brabant Water works with the province, the ZLTO (the Dutch agriculture and horticulture organisation) and the water boards in the project Schoon Water voor Brabant (Clean Water for Brabant) to keep pesticides out of ground and surface water. It is not a reason to doubt your own tap. What nitrate is and when it does matter is covered under filtering nitrate from tap water.

What limescale really does around the house

At 5.7 °dH in Eindhoven you notice little of it. At 11.3 °dH in Helmond you do, and that comes down to four things.

• Detergent. Brabant Water advises the normal dose with soft water and slightly more with moderately hard water. You pay that difference with every wash.
• Appliances. Kettle, coffee machine and washing machine get a layer of limescale on the heating element. That costs energy and service life. For coffee it is a matter of flavour as well, see a filter in your coffee machine.
• Bathroom. Shower glass and taps show white marks. A solution at the tap itself is described under a filter for the shower.
• Flavour. Harder water tastes fuller and sometimes slightly bitter; softer water tastes more neutral. Neither is wrong, it is a preference.

What separates a good solution from a poor one is whether the minerals stay in. Removing limescale is easy; the hard part is keeping calcium and magnesium at a level that keeps your water tasting good. How to tackle limescale without stripping your water is covered under filtering limescale from tap water and under hard water in the Netherlands.

What Brabant Water does not control

The responsibility of a drinking water company stops at the water meter. Behind that meter your own installation begins, and there are three things there that no pumping station solves for you.

Lead pipes. In homes built before 1960 they may still be in place, and the old centres of ’s-Hertogenbosch, Breda and Bergen op Zoom still hold plenty of pre-war housing. Replacement by a certified installer is the only real answer; what lead does and how you stop it is covered under filtering lead from tap water.

Standing water. Water that sits in a pipe for a long time picks up flavour and substances from that pipe. After a week away, letting your tap run for a minute is the simplest measure there is. How long water keeps in a jug or bottle is covered under how long you can keep tap water.

Boil water notice. After a burst main or after works, a water company may be temporarily unable to guarantee quality, and a notice to boil water follows. A water filter never replaces such a notice: NSF 42, 53, 61 and 372 cover chemical substances and materials, not microbiological treatment. What you do then is covered under a boil water notice for tap water.

Do you need a water filter in Brabant?

No. And Brabant Water says so itself, without hedging: boiling or using a filter is not necessary, according to the company, because the drinking water is safe and reliable. We would rather write that down ourselves than have you read it somewhere else. A filter shop that tells you the deep groundwater in Brabant is no good deserves your suspicion.

Why people in Brabant filter anyway comes down to three reasons, none of which is about safety.

• Limescale. In Helmond, Roosendaal and parts of Breda and Den Bosch you are in the moderately hard category. That is not unhealthy, but it is noticeable in your kettle and your washing machine.
• Flavour. People switching from bottled water often miss something. The order in which a filter works determines whether that gets better or worse.
• The total. The RIVM advises bringing total PFAS intake down. You have little grip on your food; on your tap you do, even if your starting point is already good.

The filter that purifies and then mineralises removes more than 100 contaminants from the water in five stages, including PFAS, microplastics, heavy metals, fluoride, nitrate and pharmaceutical residues, and then brings calcium, magnesium and potassium back through Swedish Mineral Rock™. It is NSF certified to 42, 53, 61 and 372. A domestic osmosis system usually skips that last step, and then you are left with stripped water; why that matters is covered under osmosis water, healthy or unhealthy.

Comparison: softener, filter jug, osmosis or filter

The PureFilter Mineral+ costs €149.00 including the first filter. A replacement filter costs €65.00 and lasts around twelve months with 1 to 3 people, and around six months with 4 to 6 people. The duo with two cartridges costs €115.00. Converted, that is less than one cent per litre. If you would rather not think about it, the Filter Plan sends the cartridges automatically and on time for €48.00 or €86.00 per delivery. How often replacement is needed is covered under how often you replace a water filter.

At PureFilter we see that customers from Brabant call about limescale more often than customers from Drenthe or Noord-Holland, and that is exactly what you would expect with these figures. They often come from Helmond, the Peel or West-Brabant. Installation takes 5 to 10 minutes: you do not need a plumber, for connecting to the cold water pipe you use one pair of water pump pliers, and you change the cartridge later with the key supplied. Step by step, that is set out in the guide to installing a water filter. The full overview of our solution for drinking water in the kitchen is in the webshop, and how the models compare can be read under the best water filter.

Looking up your own water hardness by postcode

The table above covers eleven places, and Brabant Water serves hundreds. Here is how to find your figure in two minutes.

• Go to the page water hardness by town from Brabant Water and enter your town. You get the hardness, the acidity and a downloadable PDF.
• If you want the full composition, click through to the quarterly report of your water production plant. It is updated every quarter and shows that the water meets all legal requirements.
• Compare your figure with the scale: below 8 °dH is soft, between 8 and 12 is moderate. If you are above 10, descaling appliances is a recurring job.
• If you want to know how Brabant compares with the rest of the country, look at the differences in tap water quality by region.

One step that is often skipped: look not only at the hardness, but also at how much water you drink per day. That determines how heavily each figure in this article weighs for you. Work it out under how much water you need per day.

Frequently asked questions

Conclusion

The Brabant Water hardness lies between 5.0 and a maximum of 11.2 °dH, in other words soft to moderately hard. The groundwater is naturally far more variable, from 4.8 to 16.7 °dH, and is softened where needed. By town the difference is almost a factor of two: Eindhoven sits at 5.71 to 6.16 °dH, Helmond at 11.31 °dH. A provincial average therefore does not help you; your own town does.

The other figures worth remembering: €1.51 per cubic metre in 2026 plus €95.75 standing charge, together roughly €247 a year at 100 cubic metres. The water comes 100% from groundwater, in some places 300 metres deep, via 29 production sites to 2.7 million residents and businesses. PFAS do not occur at all in the vast majority of the drinking water in Brabant, and where traces are measured they stay below both the legal standard of 100 nanograms per litre and the stricter RIVM guideline value of 4.4.

So in Brabant you do not filter because the water is poor. You do it for the limescale in your kettle, for the flavour, or because you want to decide the last few metres from water meter to glass yourself. And if you do, the order that counts is the same one Brabant Water keeps to in its own treatment plants: first take out what does not belong, then give back what you want to keep.