Estimating Levels of PFAS in Your Blood

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) developed the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) Blood Level Estimation Tool for community members with exposure to PFAS through drinking water. This tool allows those who would like more information about levels of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS), perfluorohexanesulfonic acid (PFHxS), and perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA) to estimate levels in their blood. Because blood tests for PFAS are not yet widely available, the estimates from this tool might be helpful when considering ways you might be exposed to PFAS and options for reducing your exposure, or may be helpful when speaking with your healthcare provider. The tool was created to allow community members to obtain an estimate of their PFAS blood levels without having to undergo biological sampling. This tool is not intended to replace actual PFAS blood testing.

This tool is a web-based estimator for public use that provides personalized estimates of PFAS concentrations in blood based on exposure to one or more PFAS in drinking water. To use this tool, you must have information on the concentrations of one or more PFAS in your drinking water.

The tool provides comparisons to the most recent National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data. This allows the user to compare their estimated PFAS blood concentrations to those measured in the general US population. The advanced version of this tool allows the user to estimate PFAS blood concentrations over a lifetime – from the time the user was born until the present day.

It is important for users to understand the limitations of this tool. This tool is not designed to determine connections between PFAS exposure and health effects. Further, the tool provides an estimate using information entered by the user along with some default assumptions that are applicable to many, but not all users. The estimates are based on assumptions about how much a person might have been exposed to PFAS from water and other sources over time. For these reasons, the estimate from this tool does not provide the same level of certainty that an actual blood test would. A person’s measured PFAS blood levels may be higher or lower than the estimates generated by this tool. Finally, blood levels alone – whether measured or estimated – do not tell you if your PFAS exposures will make you sick now or later in life.

PFAS Blood Level Estimation Tool

Launch tool

For more technical information about the models used in this tool, please see the following peer-reviewed publications:

Lynch MT, Lay CR, Sokolinski S, Antezana A, Ghio C, Chiu WA, Rogers R. Community-facing toxicokinetic models to estimate PFAS serum levels based on life history and drinking water exposures. Environ Int. 2023 Jun;176:107974. doi: 10.1016/j.envint.2023.107974. Epub 2023 May 13. PMID: 37245445.
Chiu WA, Lynch MT, Lay CR, Antezana A, Malek P, Sokolinski S, Rogers RD. Bayesian Estimation of Human Population Toxicokinetics of PFOA, PFOS, PFHxS, and PFNA from Studies of Contaminated Drinking Water. Environ Health Perspect. 2022 Dec;130(12):127001. doi: 10.1289/EHP10103. Epub 2022 Dec 1. PMID: 36454223; PMCID: PMC9714558.

For questions about the PFAS Blood Level Estimation Tool, please email PFAS@cdc.gov.