Where the data comes from, and what a "signal" means.

Sources

• Minnesota Public Facilities Authority — Drinking Water & Clean Water SRF Intended Use Plans (IUP) and Project Priority Lists (PPL).
• Wisconsin DNR — Clean Water Fund Program (CWFP) & Safe Drinking Water Loan Program (SDWLP) priority lists and funding lists.
• North Dakota DEQ — Drinking Water & Clean Water SRF Intended Use Plans (IUP) and annual reports.
• Illinois EPA — Public Water Supply Loan Program (PWSLP) & Water Pollution Control Loan Program (WPCLP) Intended Use Plans (IUP).
• Iowa DNR & Iowa Finance Authority — Drinking Water & Clean Water SRF Project Priority Lists (Intended Use Plan Attachment 1), updated quarterly, including each project's loan-signed date.
• South Dakota DANR — Drinking Water & Clean Water SRF Intended Use Plans, re-issued at each Board of Water and Natural Resources meeting that amends them: Attachment I (the project priority list) and Attachment II (projects to be funded this federal fiscal year, including the Board's loan awards).
• Michigan EGLE — Drinking Water & Clean Water SRF Intended Use Plans, draft and final: the project priority list, with the dollars EGLE has allocated to each project inside the fundable range. From fiscal year 2026 the Drinking Water plan carries a separate list for lead service line replacement. Awards come from EGLE's annual reports from fiscal year 2023 on, matched to each project by its project number.
• 3M settlement award announcements.

Every source document is captured as a snapshot; each week's new snapshot is diffed against the prior one for that same program and document type to compute movement.

Signal types

A "signal" is a detected change for a project between two consecutive snapshots. These are the ones the brief and pipeline lead with:

The homepage's "Time to funding" figure is the median time from a project's first listing to the earlier of Entered the fundable range or Advanced to the funding list — median rather than average, since a small number of slow-moving projects would otherwise pull the number higher than what most experience.

What "on the funding plan" means

A project counts as on the funding plan only where the state's own document marks it fundable: on a separate funding list (Wisconsin, South Dakota), in an intended use plan's fundable part (Minnesota's Parts A and B, North Dakota Drinking Water's shaded rows, Illinois's "Funding Reserved" sections, Michigan's projects with an allocation), or marked fundable on Iowa's list. Projects an intended use plan prints outside its fundable part, or that we couldn't read a fundable marking for, are not counted. North Dakota Clean Water projects are never counted: the state funds them first-come, first-served, regardless of rank, and publishes no list of the projects it expects to fund.

From October 2026. Earlier editions counted every project in an intended use plan as on the funding plan, which overstated it in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Illinois. Past brief editions are left as published.

The forecast's estimated tranche

The equipment-category forecast's "Tranche 1–4" isn't a scheduled date — no source document gives us one. It's a priority-order estimate: for each category, we take every currently-fundable project, rank them by priority (lowest rank number first in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Illinois, highest score first in Wisconsin and Michigan), and split that ordered list into four even groups. Tranche 1 is the top of that priority order, Tranche 4 is the bottom — a read on where a project stands in line, not a prediction of when it gets funded. Iowa projects get no tranche. Iowa funds every eligible project as it becomes ready, so there is no line to stand in. South Dakota projects get no tranche either: South Dakota's funding list already gives the state's own expected funding month for each project, and we don't put a modeled estimate next to the state's published one.