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EPA Finalizes Action to Strengthen Water Quality in the Delaware River, Protecting Fish and Bolstering Economic Opportunity
September 22, 2025
Contact Information
EPA Press Office (press@epa.gov)
WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a final rule establishing federal water quality standards for 38 miles of the Delaware River between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington, Delaware. This final rule will improve water quality and support locally and regionally significant fish populations—including Striped Bass, American Shad, and endangered Atlantic Sturgeon and Shortnose Sturgeon—to benefit Americans who commercially or recreationally fish the Delaware River and Delaware Bay.
“Clean and safe water is a key component of Powering the Great American Comeback. It supports healthy children and adults, and it powers American manufacturing and commerce, including commercial fishing and recreation economies,” said EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. “By improving water quality in the Delaware River, EPA’s final rule will help protect this vital water resource while supporting fish populations and strengthening economic opportunity for Americans living and working in the mid-Atlantic.”
Several commercially and recreationally important fish species live and spawn in the Delaware River between Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware. Ensuring that these oxygen-sensitive fish have adequate water quality to support their reproduction and growth will protect and increase their populations. In turn, a more productive fishery will bolster commercial and recreational fishing and associated industries, supporting job growth and ecotourism.
This final rule will help protect sensitive aquatic species in the Delaware River, including the federally endangered Atlantic Sturgeon and Shortnose Sturgeon. In these federal water quality standards, EPA has established aquatic life protection and propagation as an achievable “designated use” with corresponding dissolved oxygen water quality criteria to protect this use in the Delaware River.
“EPA’s final water quality standards will provide a significant ecological boost to this section of the Delaware River,” said Delaware River Basic Commission (DRBC) Director Kristen Bowman Kavanagh, P.E. “The DRBC will continue delivering scientific and modeling expertise to EPA, our member states, and stakeholders to aid in implementing the new rule and improving dissolved oxygen in our shared Delaware River.”
EPA’s rule better aligns water quality standards in this urbanized portion of the Delaware River with Clean Water Act standards that already exist upstream and downstream to support more cohesive water quality management. Consistent with the tenet of cooperative federalism, the rule does not preclude the Delaware River Basin Commission or the states from revising their aquatic life designated uses or dissolved oxygen criteria in the future.
Water quality standards describe the desired condition (i.e., use) of a water body and the means by which that condition will be protected or achieved. Water bodies can be designated for people-centered uses such as fishing, recreation (e.g., swimming and boating) and scenic enjoyment, as well as for aquatic and wildlife uses. Water quality standards provide a regulatory basis for many actions under the Clean Water Act, including the development of water quality-based effluent limits in National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits for point source dischargers.
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