When Is the New Industrial General Permit Coming Out? Don't Hold Your Breath.
If you've been asking your consultant (or Google) "when does the new IGP drop," you're not alone. Here's the honest answer: it's on the State Water Board's to-do list, but nothing points to it landing anytime soon.
Wait, We're Still on the 2014 Permit?
Yes. California's Industrial General Permit — Order 2014-0057-DWQ, amended in 2015 and 2018 — technically expired on June 30, 2020. It's been running on autopilot ever since, "administratively continued" under federal law until the State Water Board finalizes something new. Six years and counting.
So Is a New One Actually Coming?
It's on the books — just not on the calendar. The State Water Board's Strategic Work Plan has included the same commitment for three years running:
"Release public review draft of the revised statewide NPDES Industrial Stormwater General Permit."
That line appeared in the 2023 plan. It appeared again in 2024. It's still there in the 2025 plan. Same words, no date attached, and — worth noting — it has never carried the asterisk the Board uses to flag its highest-priority actions for the year. Other stormwater items (cost reporting for municipal permits, copper and zinc objectives) got that priority flag. The IGP rewrite didn't.
What That Actually Means for You
No draft has been released. There's no public comment period open, no staff workshop scheduled, and it hasn't appeared on a recent Board meeting agenda. If a new draft does surface, it'll show up first on the Documents for Public Comment page — before it ever reaches a formal Board vote.
For comparison: Washington State's Department of Ecology has an actual published timeline for their industrial stormwater permit reissuance. California doesn't have anything close to that level of specificity for the IGP.
So You Have IGP Coverage for Your Manufacturing Facility — Are You Affected?
Not by a new permit, no — because there isn't one. If you're currently enrolled under the IGP, nothing changes for you today. Your existing obligations stand: SWPPP, monitoring, sampling, annual reporting through SMARTS, all of it, business as usual under the 2014/2015/2018 permit.
What would change if a new draft ever lands: possible new sector-specific requirements, updated numeric action levels, and — depending on how the Board handles the legal issue below — a rewrite of how "receiving water" violations get defined. None of that is live yet. When a draft does show up, we'll walk clients through exactly what's different and what it means for your facility before anything is final.
What's Actually Holding This Up? A San Francisco Lawsuit.
Here's a piece that doesn't get talked about enough: in March 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on City and County of San Francisco v. EPA — a case about San Francisco's own wastewater permit, not the IGP. But the ruling reaches every NPDES general permit in the state, IGP included.
The Court struck down what are called "end-result" permit provisions — language that holds a permittee responsible for the actual water quality of the water they discharge into, rather than spelling out specific, measurable limits on what they can discharge. San Francisco argued that kind of open-ended language made compliance a moving target they couldn't control. The Court agreed, 5-4.
The problem: those same "end-result" style receiving water limitations show up in California's Industrial General Permit right now. The ruling doesn't erase them automatically — courts are still sorting out what happens to existing permit language — but it means any rewrite of the IGP has to grapple with how to replace that language with something more specific and enforceable. That's not a quick fix, and it's a real reason to expect this to take a while longer, on top of the permit already sitting on the work plan with no target date.
Bottom Line
Don't build your compliance planning around a new IGP arriving this year — or even next. The current permit isn't going anywhere until a replacement is adopted, so your obligations under the 2014/2015/2018 version stand as-is. We're tracking this closely and will flag it the moment anything real moves — a draft, a workshop notice, an agenda item. Until then, it's a permit on a wish list, not a runway.
Questions about your current IGP compliance status? Contact Plaid Safety — we help industrial facilities across Southern California stay ahead of stormwater requirements, whatever permit version is in effect.Start writing here...