For the second year in a row, fewer Cleveland children are showing up with elevated blood lead levels — and early 2026 data suggests the trend is continuing into a potential third year. That’s genuinely encouraging news for a city that has long struggled with one of the worst childhood lead poisoning rates in Ohio.
But the numbers behind the headline tell a more complicated story, and the work is far from done.
What the Data Shows
The Cleveland Department of Public Health released its latest lead poisoning report Monday, covering 2024 and 2025 figures. The results show meaningful improvement across multiple categories:
- Children with blood lead levels between 3.5–5 µg/dL: down from 405 (2024) to 330 (2025)
- Children with levels between 5–10 µg/dL: down from 509 (2024) to 401 (2025)
Those are real kids — real families — spared from the irreversible neurological damage that lead exposure causes, particularly for children under three when brain development is most rapid.
Cleveland Is Still Worse Than Almost Every Comparable Ohio City
Despite the progress, Cleveland’s rate of 13.4% of tested children with elevated blood lead levels (2024 data) dwarfs comparable cities: Akron at 6.5%, Toledo at 6.3%, Cincinnati at 2.9%, and Columbus at just 1.2%.
The one city doing worse? East Cleveland, where 32% of children under six tested positive for elevated lead levels in 2024 — a sobering statistic for a city immediately bordering Cleveland.
The Cleveland Department of Public Health recommends testing all Cleveland children at ages 1 and 2, since every Cleveland child is considered high risk. Yet only about 32% of children in the city are being tested at all — a number that has been slowly declining since a 2018 high of 42%. Of children born in 2024, just 60% received a lead test at age 1, down from 68% the year before.
Where the Problem Concentrates
The report broke down lead poisoning rates by neighborhood. Among the hardest-hit areas in 2025:
- Clark-Fulton, St. Clair-Superior, Glenville, and Mount Pleasant had the highest poisoning rates among children aged 0–5 tested.
- In the Goodrich-Kirtland Park neighborhood, 30% of young children tested showed elevated lead levels.
- Union-Miles (21%), Cudell and Glenville (both 19%) also ranked among the most affected.
Health officials point to the age of the housing stock as the root cause. Homes built before 1978 — the year lead-based paint was banned for residential use — remain the primary source of exposure. Lead paint, when it deteriorates or is disturbed during renovation, creates dust that young children ingest.
Rental properties are disproportionately represented in the data. Many older Cleveland duplexes and single-family rentals are owned by out-of-state investors with little stake in the community — and little urgency to remediate lead hazards.
The City’s Stumbles
The Cleveland Department of Public Health director put it plainly: the work isn’t finished until every home in Cleveland is lead safe or lead free. But recent reporting has exposed serious failures in the city’s own programs designed to get there.
A $4.9 million state lead abatement grant was effectively strangled by City Hall-imposed rules that were never required by the state — including a $15,000 per-home spending cap and a restriction limiting work to windows and doors only. The result: nearly all of the money sat unspent for two years, and the state ultimately reclaimed $3.3 million.
Even more troubling: a memo surfaced in May revealing that 787 voicemails from parents, landlords, and healthcare providers seeking help from city lead-safety programs went unheard for nearly two years because no one at City Hall had the passcode to retrieve them.
What This Means for Property Owners
If you own rental property in Cleveland — or anywhere in Cuyahoga County — the message is clear: the regulatory environment around lead is tightening, public health scrutiny is intensifying, and the expectation that landlords will proactively address lead hazards isn’t going away.
Cleveland’s Lead Safe Certificate requirement already mandates that rental properties pass a lead inspection before tenants can occupy them. With poisoning rates still high in many neighborhoods and the city under pressure to show results, enforcement attention is only going to increase.
PbFree Ohio helps property owners and managers get — and stay — lead safe. Our licensed risk assessors conduct full lead risk assessments and clearance exams across Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, and we handle the Accela filing and LSC application so you don’t have to navigate City Hall alone.
If your property doesn’t have a current Lead Safe Certificate, or if you’re not sure where you stand, contact us to get started.
Source: Cleveland Department of Public Health 2025 Lead Poisoning Report, as reported by Julie Washington, cleveland.com, June 15, 2026.