EPA UST & LUST Program Statistics

EPA's own national compliance data shows a real gap between paperwork and hardware: for the same 12-month period, facility compliance with financial-responsibility rules runs 90.4%, while the technical compliance rate, the actual leak-detection, corrosion-protection, and spill/overfill equipment requirements, trails well behind at 60.9%. Below are EPA's own published national figures for the Underground Storage Tank (UST) and Leaking UST (LUST) programs: how many tanks are regulated, how compliant they are, and how EPA's leaking-tank cleanup program is tracking against its backlog, every number sourced to EPA's own semiannual performance measures and every figure a NATIONAL total (EPA compiles state, territory, and Indian-country reports into one national number; this page has no state-level breakdown).

The national UST universe

As of March 2026, nationally, EPA's UST program regulates:

Source: U.S. EPA, UST Performance Measures, national figures as of March 2026.

Compliance rates: the gap between paperwork and equipment

EPA tracks four separate national compliance measures for federally-regulated UST facilities, all covering the same April 2025-March 2026 period:

The four rates above cover the same April 2025-March 2026 reporting period, per EPA's own table. Technical compliance measures whether a facility's physical leak-detection, corrosion-protection, and spill/overfill equipment meets requirements, a different, harder bar than administrative measures like carrying insurance or completing operator training. EPA does not state a reason for the gap between the two on this page; this page does not speculate about the cause.

LUST corrective action: releases, cleanups, and the backlog

Separately from the active-tank measures above, EPA's same page tracks corrective action on confirmed leaking underground storage tank (LUST) releases nationally:

As of March 2026, nationally, 52,859 confirmed releases remain to be cleaned up, EPA's backlog figure at the same point in time.

In this same six-month reporting period, EPA's own figures show more cleanups completed (2,947) than newly confirmed releases (1,997), against a 52,859-release backlog still open. This page states only EPA's three published figures side by side; it does not project a clearance timeline or rate from them, since six-month figures move with funding and reporting cycles and EPA does not publish such a projection itself.

What this data does, and doesn't, cover

This is EPA's UST and LUST program: federally- and state-regulated underground petroleum and hazardous-substance storage tanks, and EPA's tracking of confirmed leaking-tank releases and their cleanup. It is a different EPA program from the ones behind our EPA Brownfields statistics page (voluntary grant-funded assessment and cleanup of typically lower-risk sites) and our EPA Superfund statistics page (federally-listed, CERCLA-enforced contaminated sites). None of the three programs counts the broader universe of Phase 1 ESAs performed nationally for ordinary commercial real estate transactions; a Phase 1 ESA on a property with UST history checks for exactly this kind of undisclosed leaking-tank risk, but most Phase 1 ESAs never touch EPA's UST/LUST enforcement or cleanup programs directly. Every figure above is a national total; EPA compiles the underlying data from state, territory, and Indian-country reports, and this page has no state-by-state breakdown.

Sources

Every figure on this page traces to one primary source, fetched and verified on 2026-09-24: U.S. EPA, UST Performance Measures.

How to cite this page

"EPA UST & LUST Program Statistics," Phase 1 ESA Quotes, https://phase1esaquotes.com/ust-lust-statistics/, accessed 2026-09-24.

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