Study

The 2026 American Water Rate and Finance Benchmark

Every active community water system in the country: what a household pays, what the utility takes in and spends per connection, and the bill as a share of local household income.

Every active community water system in the United States has a row in this study — 49,378 of them, across 66 primacy agencies. 13,667 carry their government's water utility finances, 31,237 carry the household income of the territory they serve, and 1,108 carry a residential bill computed from a filed tariff.

What it found

The median household using 6 hundred cubic feet a month pays $745 a year for water. A tenth pay under $358 and a tenth pay over $1,555, a spread of 4.34 times for the same commodity.

More than one water utility in ten spends more on operations than it bills. The ninetieth percentile of operating cost as a share of revenue is 1.38, against a median of 0.77, over 12,507 utilities. Operating cost here excludes capital and debt service.

Water utility revenue per connection runs from $289 at the tenth percentile to $1,171 at the ninetieth, over 13,658 systems.

The distributions

Each strip is the tenth to ninetieth percentile, with the middle half boxed and the median marked. Cohorts of fewer than 30 systems are not published. Every distribution here is computed over all 49,378 systems, not over the 985 named below.

Annual residential water bill at 72 HCF Annual residential water bill at 72 HCF across 1,108 systems in the national cohort. Tenth percentile $358, median $745, ninetieth percentile $1,555. $0 $745 $1,555
Annual residential water bill at 72 HCF · n = 1,108

Computed from each system's own filed rate structure. Only California publishes a residential tariff centrally, so only California systems have a bill.

Water utility revenue per connection Water utility revenue per connection across 13,658 systems in the national cohort. Tenth percentile $289, median $562, ninetieth percentile $1,171. $0 $562 $1,171
Water utility revenue per connection · n = 13,658

Census of Governments water utility revenue over EPA service connections.

Water utility operating cost per connection Water utility operating cost per connection across 12,748 systems in the national cohort. Tenth percentile $188, median $438, ninetieth percentile $971. $0 $438 $971
Water utility operating cost per connection · n = 12,748

Current operation and maintenance only — no capital, no debt service.

Water utility capital spending per connection Water utility capital spending per connection across 5,888 systems in the national cohort. Tenth percentile $11, median $115, ninetieth percentile $884. $0 $115 $884
Water utility capital spending per connection · n = 5,888

One year of construction spending. Capital spending is uneven year to year.

Operating cost as a share of revenue Operating cost as a share of revenue across 12,507 systems in the national cohort. Tenth percentile 0.38, median 0.77, ninetieth percentile 1.38. 0 0.77 1.38
Operating cost as a share of revenue · n = 12,507

Operating cost over revenue. Above one means the utility spent more on operations than it billed.

Annual water bill as a share of median household income Annual water bill as a share of median household income across 854 systems in the national cohort. Tenth percentile 0.35%, median 0.75%, ninetieth percentile 1.64%. 0.00% 0.75% 1.64%
Annual water bill as a share of median household income · n = 854

The annual bill over the median household income of the territory served — the median for every system here, which is not the denominator affordability turns on. The household that struggles is not the median household, and the figure the sector argues about is the upper limit of the lowest income quintile. The Census Bureau publishes that for a Census place and not at the block-group grain a water district's income is resolved on, and a tract-weighted substitute measures 5.8 per cent high at the median against 2.2 per cent for the median estimator it would replace — so it is not published. Where a system is itself a Census place the exact quintile figure is available and data/findings/acs-quintile-service-area/ holds the measurement for the rest.

By system size

A system serving four hundred people and one serving four hundred thousand are not comparable. The cohorts are EPA's own size categories.

Who is named

985 systems are published in full: every system serving over 100,000 people (485 of them), and a stratified random sample of 500 drawn from the rest with a fixed seed and a committed roster. Every other system has a cohort position on this site and no figure. The roster changed once, deliberately, on 13 September 2026. Until then the draw shuffled each stratum and took a prefix, so a shuffle depends on how many systems are in the stratum — which meant one system joining or leaving the corpus re-drew the whole sample, and 484 of these 500 names would change on a rebuild that changed nothing else. A system is now selected on a hash of its own identifier, so it is in this sample or out of it for a reason that does not depend on anybody else. The seed did not change and the strata did not change; the published names did, once. The benchmark data covers how to request the system-level rows.

The 985 published systems, sortable by any column.

Water utility revenue and spending are from the 2022 Census of Governments. Bills and household income are from the most recent published reporting year of their own sources.

How it was built