The dataset / Edition 2026-10-08

The PFAS-Free Claim Audit

“PFAS-free” is now a selling line. We counted how often there is anything behind it. Across 11,386 graded consumer products from 1,701 brands, 337 say they are PFAS-free. Of those, 35 carry verification by anybody other than the maker.

Published October 8, 2026. Frozen at that date and free to cite. Last product graded before the count October 7, 2026.

What is actually behind the claim

Three rungs, and a product sits on exactly one of them. The rubric records the strongest thing found for a product, so a product on the bottom rung is one where neither a verification nor a laboratory result turned up anywhere in its published materials.

The claim is rare, and the evidence is rarer

The audit is small because the claim is small. Only 3.0% of the dataset says anything about PFAS at all in the affirmative, and 94.8% of products carry no PFAS statement of any kind. A further 249 products offer only an unspecific safety line, clean or non-toxic or green, with nothing about PFAS behind it.

The laboratory column is the one worth sitting with. Of the 29 products in the whole set with a published PFAS lab result, 29 report nothing found and 0 report a detection. Nobody publishes the test that goes the other way, so the body of public test data a shopper can read is, by its nature, the half that cleared.

The claim nobody can check

125 of the 337 products that say they are PFAS-free, 37.1% of them, are also products whose coating or repellent finish is never named in their published materials. The claim and the coating are recorded from separate parts of the rubric, so this is two statements sitting side by side rather than one restated. A shopper is asked to accept that a coating contains no PFAS while not being told what the coating is.

Where the claim gets made, and where it gets backed

Every category with five or more products asserting PFAS-free, 22 of them, ordered by how many make the claim. In 15 of these categories not one claim has a third-party verification or a published laboratory result behind it. Only 13 of the 50 brands that make the claim anywhere have been verified by anybody on any product.

How the count was made

Every product in the dataset is scored against one published rubric from its materials, ingredient list, certifications, brand disclosures and any third-party lab result that exists. The rubric assigns each product exactly one brand-transparency tier, the strongest signal found, and third-party verification outranks a claim the maker makes alone. A product recorded as brand-stated PFAS-free is therefore, by construction, a product where no verification was found. The laboratory factors are scored separately, which is why they can act as an independent second check. The script that builds each edition refuses to publish if any product carries two tiers, if nothing in the set is verified, or if nothing in the set carries a laboratory result.

What this does not say

• Grades and classifications are assessments made against a published rubric from materials, ingredient lists, certifications, brand disclosures and third-party lab results where they exist. They are not laboratory tests, and nothing here is a measurement of PFAS in a product.
• Asserted PFAS-free means a PFAS-free statement was found in the published materials read for that product. Unsupported means no third-party verification and no published laboratory result was found alongside it. Neither is evidence that a product contains PFAS, and neither is proof that a maker holds no test it has not published.
• A product can be genuinely PFAS-free and still land in the unsupported count. The finding is about what a shopper can check, not about what is in the product.
• Counts cover active products in categories that have not been merged, one brand-transparency tier per product.
• This audit does not say a single claim is false. It says that for 282 of 337 claims there is nothing published a shopper could use to check one, which is a different and more checkable thing.
• No company is named here, and no brand-level count is published. The field that records a brand position product by product is not reliable enough to carry a company’s name. What named brands have actually published is researched by hand at the brand disclosure page.

Reuse and the machine-readable copy

Free to cite, quote, chart and reprint with attribution to PFAS Authority (pfasauthority.com) and a link to this page. No permission needed and no notice required. Every figure above, plus every category row, is served as JSON at /api/public/pfas-free-claims, CORS open. The companion count of how often a coating chemistry is named at all is the Coating Disclosure Census. A writer who needs a cut we have not published, by brand, retailer or product class, can ask for it.

PFAS Authority, “The PFAS-Free Claim Audit, edition 2026-10-08”, pfasauthority.com/data/pfas-free-claims, accessed [date].