Can Water Intake Affect hCG Levels?

Are you worried that you are peeing too much on a take home pregnancy test and that it will impact the results? The short answer is yes, though false negatives are rare, if you've consumed too much water it could impact your Human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) levels.

HCG is a hormone that your body only makes during pregnancy. When you take an at-home pregnancy test, that test determines whether your body is producing hCG by detecting it in your urine. If you are, you'll get a positive result.

Urine-based pregnancy tests can't tell exactly how much hCG your body is making—only that it's there. But your body needs to be producing enough hCG in order for the pregnancy test to detect it. While home pregnancy tests are quite sensitive and can detect relatively low amounts of hCG in urine, if you test early and you've consumed a lot of water, your test results may be impacted.

Here's what to know about how your water intake can affect hCG levels in your urine and how that can impact your at-home test results.

How Drinking Water Can Affect Pregnancy Tests

Drinking too much water or other type of fluids can affect the results of an at-home urine pregnancy test, especially when taken very early in the pregnancy. When your urine becomes diluted by drinking lots of fluids, the urine concentration of hCG becomes lower.

If the level of hCG in the urine becomes so diluted that it's no longer detectable by an at-home urine-based pregnancy test, the test may indicate that you're not pregnant when you actually are. This is known as a false-negative test result.

When hCG Levels Are at Their Highest

After you conceive, your hCG levels rise for several weeks, peaking between weeks eight and 11 of pregnancy. It then decreases and levels off for the rest of your pregnancy.

As a result, experiencing the type of "false negative" mix-up caused by diluted urine is likely to happen only very early on in your pregnancy. After that beginning stage, even if your urine is diluted because of your water intake, your hCG level should still be high enough to be detected by an at-home urine-based pregnancy test.

What To Do After a Negative Pregnancy Test

If you take an at-home urine-based pregnancy test very soon after trying to conceive and the result is negative, try waiting a few days—or even another week or two. Home pregnancy tests are most accurate after you miss your expected period. When you re-test, take the test as soon as you wake up in the morning to make sure your urine is at its most concentrated.

If you take a urine pregnancy test after you have missed a period and it is still negative, wait a few days and try again. If a second test still indicates that you are not pregnant, but you have not had a period, contact a health care provider.

Another option is to ask your doctor if a blood pregnancy test is appropriate. These blood tests are called quantitative hCG blood tests because they can measure exactly how much hCG is in your blood. The amount of water that you drink before the test will not affect the results, as it will not alter the level of hCG in your blood, even very early in pregnancy.