Legislation the state Senate passed Wednesday would end Pennsylvania’s vehicle emissions testing program — saving motorists money but potentially undermining decades of work to reduce air pollution.

“People are being squeezed from every direction, and the last thing they should be forced to bankroll are outdated mandates that do nothing but drain their wallets,” Sen. Wayne Langerholc, R-Cambria, said in a statement after Senate Bill 1298 passed the chamber on Wednesday. “If a mandate doesn’t serve the public anymore, it has no business siphoning money from working families.”

Emissions testing is currently required in Philadelphia, Allegheny County and 23 other counties around the state.

While emissions testing is required in less than one-third of the state’s 67 counties, because the impact counties are the most populous, roughly 75% of the state’s residents live in areas with emissions testing.

A 2018 legislative study estimated there are more than 4 million vehicles registered in the counties covered by the emissions testing mandate. An emissions test typically costs about $40, meaning eliminating the tests would save motorists in the state $160 million a year.

Pennsylvania is one of just eight states that mandate annual emissions testing for vehicles. The others are: Arizona, Georgia, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, New York, North Carolina. Texas and New Hampshire previously had annual emissions testing but rolled back their mandates in 2023 and 2025, respectively. Fifteen other states require emissions testing every other year.

Proponents of eliminating the mandate say the tests are no longer necessary because vehicles are being designed to emit less pollution and, as a result, hardly any vehicles fail the emissions tests. The 2018 study found that on average about 98% of vehicles pass the emissions tests each year.

But environmental groups warn that eliminating the emission tests ignore the fact that air pollution remains a serious problem that sickens people and aggravates the symptoms of people dealing with chronic medical conditions.

“There’s tens of thousands of children with asthma. There’s 460,000 adults living with asthma in these communities that have unhealthy levels of air pollution. And what that says to us is that it’s not the time to end successful clean air programs like emissions testing,” said William Barrett, assistant vice president for clean air policy at the American Lung Association.

SB 1298 requires the Department of Environmental Protection to seek EPA approval before removing any county from the testing program, and emissions testing could continue in counties where the federal agency objects. But given the Trump administration’s push to roll back environmental protections, federal interference appears unlikely.

“There’s a growing concern here that, you know, people are saying, the air is clean enough, we’ve done it, mission accomplished. This is far from the case,” Barrett said.

The American Lung Association releases an annual State of the Air report. Eight of the counties in which emissions testing is currently required received “F” grades and nine received “D” grades due to particle pollution in the 2026 report. Two of the counties where emissions testing is mandated, Washington and Westmoreland, received “A” grades.

The Lung Association report gave Philadelphia, Allegheny, Berks, Bucks and Dauphin counties “F” grades for the number of high ozone days. Delaware County received a “D” grade due to the number of high ozone days there. Every other county with emissions testing had a grade of “C” or better on the high ozone days metric.

Smell Pittsburgh

Air quality in Pittsburgh is so infamously bad that researchers at Carnegie Mellon University launched Smell Pittsburgh, a website allowing community members to report stinky conditions.

Smell Pittsburgh, created by Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab, lets residents report bad air in real time. In the past month alone, the site logged 827 reports — about a third of them from people who said the smell was making them sick, with complaints ranging from headaches and sore throats to chest tightness and difficulty breathing.

Some people said the air in their neighborhood smelled so bad they couldn’t sleep.