The health risks of drinking water contaminants and the economic benefits of drinking water standards are typically assessed one chemical at a time, an approach that misses the health impacts of co-occurring contaminants in drinking water. In contrast, a cumulative risk framework has become common in air quality evaluations such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's National Air Toxics Assessment. We posit that the drinking water field would benefit from making the transition to a unified assessment framework for multiple contaminants. Here we present a cumulative risk methodology that combines a risk-based cancer metric with a weighted health indicator index for non-cancer contaminants and incorporates disability weights from the Global Burden of Disease study. As this cumulative risk model goes through future refinements, we anticipate that it would provide information that can help communities and policymakers evaluate different options for drinking water treatment (Abstract).