Which states report sewage spills to the EPA?

Is a blank state breaking federal law?

Short answer: no — that would overstate it. Three different duties sit with three different parties, and it's easy to conflate them:

• The overflow itself. A sanitary sewer overflow that reaches a waterway is generally an illegal, unpermitted discharge under the Clean Water Act. That part is real.
• Utility → state. A utility must report a health- or environment-endangering overflow to its state permitting authority, typically within 24 hours (40 CFR 122.41). Failing to is a permit violation by the utility — not the state.
• State → EPA. National data only appears when a state electronically transmits it to EPA under the NPDES e-Reporting Rule (40 CFR Part 127). Sewer-overflow reports are the last phase (“Phase 2”), with a compliance deadline around December 2025 and EPA-granted extensions. A blank state is usually still standing up that feed — a phase-in gap, not clear illegality.

So a low ECHO count can mean genuinely fewer spills, a state that doesn't transmit to EPA yet, or utilities not reporting to the state — and ECHO alone can't tell them apart. The GAO has found EPA's national compliance data broadly incomplete, and EPA's own sewer-overflow dataset carries a caveat that it “does not represent all” events.