What is the National Water Safety Action Plan?
Drowning is one of the leading causes of death for young children in the United States, yet for decades the country had no single national strategy to prevent it. Dozens of excellent organizations — the Red Cross, the YMCA, the National Drowning Prevention Alliance, the CDC, and many more — each pushed in the same direction, but without one shared plan tying their work together.
The U.S. National Water Safety Action Plan changed that. Released in 2023 as the nation's first coordinated, ten-year roadmap, it gathered that scattered expertise into a single document: 99 action recommendations, grouped into six focus areas, all aimed at one goal — fewer drownings, especially in the communities where the risk is highest.
For a professional, the plan is a master to-do list for an entire field. For a parent, it is something simpler and more useful: proof of what actually works, organized so you can see exactly where your own family fits. It is the strategic backbone behind the broader question of who sets U.S. water-safety standards.
The plan was modeled in part on a similar national approach pioneered in other countries, where coordinated, decade-long water-safety strategies have helped drive drowning deaths down over time. The idea is straightforward: set a long horizon, agree on shared priorities, measure progress, and keep every organization accountable to the same goals. Ten years is deliberate — cultural change around water safety, like the slow normalizing of seatbelts or bike helmets, does not happen in a single summer.
Is it a law? How the plan actually works
The action plan is a strategy, not legislation. It creates no rules, fines, or mandates. Instead it sets shared goals and recommended actions that governments, schools, aquatics organizations, employers, and families can choose to adopt.
That voluntary design is intentional. Drowning prevention does not live in any one agency — it is spread across pool builders, lifeguard agencies, pediatricians, swim schools, city parks departments, and parents. A coalition convened under the Water Safety USA federation built the plan so all of those players could finally row in the same direction. Some recommendations connect to real laws — like federal anti-entrapment drain rules and state pool-fencing codes — but the plan itself is the map, not the law.
The six focus areas, decoded for parents
The heart of the plan is its six focus areas. Each one is a research-backed pillar of drowning prevention — and each translates into something concrete you can do.
1. Barriers, entrapment & electrical safety
The first line of defense is keeping a child from reaching water unsupervised in the first place. This focus area covers four-sided isolation pool fencing, self-closing and self-latching gates, alarms, compliant drain covers that prevent suction entrapment, and electrical safety around pools and docks. Your move: install or upgrade a proper barrier, reviewed in our guides to backyard pool fence requirements and pool drain safety.
2. Data & surveillance
You cannot prevent what you cannot measure. This area pushes for better, faster, more consistent drowning data so resources go where they are needed most. It is the least visible area to a parent, but it is what tells the whole field where children are drowning and why — and it powers the equity goal woven through the plan. Historically, drowning data in the U.S. has lagged months or years behind, making it hard to respond to spikes in time. Better surveillance means a county can spot a dangerous pattern — a stretch of river, a type of pool, an age group — and act before the next summer. Your move: report near-misses and unsafe conditions to your local parks or health department; that local signal is part of the data, too.
3. Life jackets & personal flotation devices
Most boating-related drownings involve a victim who was not wearing a life jacket. This focus area promotes the correct use of U.S. Coast Guard-approved life jackets — on boats, around open water, and for weak swimmers — and warns against relying on toys like water wings. Your move: use a properly fitted, Coast Guard-approved jacket, not a flotation toy; see our life jacket guide and water wings vs. life jackets.
4. Rescue & CPR
When prevention fails, the minutes before help arrives decide the outcome. A drowning child who receives prompt CPR has a dramatically better chance of surviving without lasting harm than one who waits for paramedics. This area promotes widespread training in CPR — including rescue breaths, which matter especially in drowning because the core problem is lack of oxygen — and safe, non-drowning rescue techniques like "reach or throw, don't go," which keep a would-be rescuer from becoming a second victim. Your move: take a hands-on CPR class, keep your certification current, and learn the basics in our guide to CPR basics for parents and parent water-rescue basics.
5. Lifeguards & supervision
This area covers professional lifeguarding and the everyday supervision that prevents most child drownings: a sober, attentive, undistracted adult assigned to watch the water. The plan promotes the "water watcher" concept and adequate lifeguard staffing at public venues. Your move: assign a designated water watcher at every gathering, and favor lifeguarded water.
6. Water safety, competency & swim lessons
The final area is teaching people to be safe in and around water — swim lessons, water-competency skills, and water-safety education for all ages. This is the layer that builds lasting ability rather than just managing risk. Your move: enroll your child in lessons and work toward the milestones in our water competency skills checklist. When you are ready, you can find swim lessons near you.
The thread running through it all: equity
What sets this plan apart is its honesty about who drowns. Drowning does not fall evenly across the country. Rates are sharply higher among certain racial and ethnic groups and in lower-income communities, often because of unequal access to pools, lessons, and safe water for generations. The action plan makes closing that gap an explicit goal across every focus area — not a footnote. It is why so much of the plan is about access: free and reduced-cost lessons, community programs, and reaching families who have historically been left out. You can read more in our coverage of drowning prevention and find help paying for lessons through our swim lesson scholarships guide.
How the plan connects to everything else
If the six focus areas feel familiar, that is by design. They map almost one-to-one onto the five layers of protection that the National Drowning Prevention Alliance has long taught families: barriers, supervision, water competency, life jackets, and emergency preparation. The action plan is essentially the professional, nationwide version of the same idea — with data and equity added as the connective tissue.
That overlap is the whole point. No single layer, and no single organization, stops drowning alone. The action plan's real message to your family is the same one this entire site is built on: stack several independent protections so that if one fails, another catches your child. You do not need to read all 99 recommendations. You need a fence, a watcher, a life jacket, a CPR card, and a kid who is learning to swim. Do those five things, and you are already living the national plan.
If you want a single takeaway, make it this: the experts behind America's national drowning strategy agree on what protects children, and none of it is exotic or expensive. The plan's power is in coordination and persistence — getting every pool, school, city, and household pointed at the same goal for a full decade. Your household is one of those players. Pick the one focus area where your family is currently weakest — maybe the gate that does not self-latch, maybe the CPR class you keep meaning to take, maybe lessons you have not signed up for — and close that gap this month. That is how a 99-point national plan actually gets done: one family, one layer at a time.