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National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES)/State Disposal System (SDS) permits for wastewater treatment require monthly, quarterly, or annual reporting of discharge monitoring results. Submit your data online using MPCA e-Services; the forms will display the limits and monitoring requirements from your permit per monitoring period. The forms are updated within 30 days of a permit action, such as issuing a new permit or modifying or reissuing an existing one.

Before submitting reports in e-Services, all permittees must:

  • create an e-Services account.
  • submit an authorization agreement signed by the responsible official that names the account holder (the person in charge of electronic submittal). The account holder must also sign the agreement (see account management section below).

The MPCA will email the account holder when it has approved the authorization. The account holder does not have to be the wastewater operator responsible for sampling, process operation, and DMR calculations, and permittees may authorize multiple account holders. Sign up at least two to three weeks before your DMR is due. A week before submitting your first DMR, log onto the system to verify the system allows submittal.

DMRs are due by the 21st of the month following the monitoring period (e.g., January's DMR is due February 21).

Sample values

Daily sampling and monitoring data must be submitted on a sample values or operational spreadsheet, which are customized to your facility and available in e-services. At the end of the monitoring period, a feature in e-services can be used to calculate the required limit types for parameters on the DMRs. (Some facilities with special calculation instructions will have to calculate values based on specific permit requirements.) REMEMBER: You must review and confirm the calculated values prior to submittal. You'll receive an email verifying submittal of the DMR.

Quick tips: Filling out sample values and DMRs

No discharge/no flow
  • If you have a discharge, leave the "No Discharge/No Flow" box blank and report values in the parameter fields.
  • If you have no discharge or flow, mark the field with an "X" and leave the parameter fields blank.
Cancel in-progress sample values; or DMR or sample values spreadsheet are listed "in progress"To start over, click "My Workspace Tab" under "My Services in Progress," and click the red X. Make sure you are cancelling the DMR and not your facility!
No chlorine used; or no results for a parameterLeave the boxes blank on the sample values and DMR forms and add a note to the DMR indicating that you did not chlorinate or that monitoring wasn't done. (Do not put "0" or "NA" in the parameter boxes.)
Reporting releasesIn months when there was a release, complete the release sampling report and attach it to the DMR. Find a blank form below in both Excel and Word formats.
Auto-calculation/rounding
  • Double check DMR boxes that are supposed to be automatically calculated, and fill in any missing values.
  • Check that figures are rounded correctly.
  • No more than 9 characters (including numbers, decimals, and < > symbols) in a box.
  • Report groundwater elevations to the nearest hundredths of a foot.

Attachments to DMRs

Account management

DMR submittal guidance

Water quality submittal center

The MPCA is now accepting all water quality (WQ) submittals electronically. All permit-required reports and submittals, including whole effluent toxicity (WET) tests and pretreatment annual reports, should now be submitted electronically to the WQ submittals center at wq.submittals.mpca@state.mn.us.

  1. Fill out the WQ submittals form; the MPCA will not deem the WQ submittal as received unless this submittals form is also attached.
  2. Attach the form and submittal to your email.
  3. Send the email by the due date.

Priority Pollutant monitoring

Priority Pollutant monitoring is required as part of some National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES)/State Disposal System (SDS) permits. These reports have historically been submitted as PDF lab reports, the MPCA is now requiring that this data also be submitted in an electronic data deliverable (EDD) using EQuIS Lab_MN format. Use the following instructions to obtain the EDD in the LAB_MN format from your laboratory for submittal.

Whole effluent toxicity (WET)

Measuring toxicity helps protect surface waters by measuring the toxic effect of an effluent directly for acute and chronic effects.  NPDES permits that require WET monitoring must use the WET test forms when submitting results located under Wastewater permit additional guidance and information. These forms must be submitted electronically to the water quality submittal center at wq.submittals.mpca@state.mn.us

Facility-specific checklists

Create and download facility-specific checklists to assist with required submittals and sampling. Select a specific facility, and follow the 'create PDF' instructions to download checklists customized for your facility's wastewater permit.

Access DMR data

The wastewater data browser tool provides access to wastewater monitoring data from facilities with NPDES and SDS permits, dating back to 1998. The data, which are updated quarterly, are from surface discharge, influent waste, groundwater, surface water, and land application monitoring stations.

The tool does not show status of DMR submittals; contact your compliance staff with DMR reporting questions. Submit an information request for data not found in the data browser.

Note: Selecting more than 50,000 records in the application may cause poor performance. Text files of the source data are available from the MPCA file transfer site.