Water use per person per day, and what the figure actually counts
Household water use in England averaged 136.5 litres per person per day in 2024 to 2025, down from 137.0 the year before. It is measured plus unmeasured household consumption divided by the total household population, and understanding those words is what makes the figure usable.
Last reviewed 14 August 2026
The short answer
One figure, one definition, and the definition is where everything interesting is.
| Value | 136.5 litres per person per day |
| Year | 2024 to 2025, down from 137.0 the year before |
| Scope | England only |
| Calculated as | Measured plus unmeasured household consumption, divided by total household population |
| Excludes | Water lost from supply pipes |
| Includes | An adjustment upward for meter under-registration |
Every one of the three differences between this and your own bill falls out of those last three rows. They are consequences of one definition rather than three separate caveats.
How this works in practice
Multiply by occupancy and by 365 to get an expected annual volume, then divide by 1,000 for cubic metres, which is what a bill counts in.
| People | Litres a day | Cubic metres a year |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 136.5 | 49.8 |
| 2 | 273.0 | 99.6 |
| 3 | 409.5 | 149.5 |
| 4 | 546.0 | 199.3 |
| 5 | 682.5 | 249.1 |
Then treat the result with appropriate suspicion. Real households scatter widely around an average, and the spread between two ordinary households of the same size is far larger than any of the biases discussed here. A gap of a few per cent is noise.
What the figure is genuinely good for is a large unexplained gap. compare your annual consumption against that figure does the comparison with your own occupancy and billed volume.
What changes the answer
Four things, and the first three are the definition rather than a limitation of it. All three point the same way.
- Supply pipe leakage is excluded here and included on your meter, so a leaking household reads high against this figure by exactly the size of the leak. On this site that is the mechanism rather than an error.
- The meter under-registration adjustment raises the published figure and not your bill.
- The metered and unmetered blend raises it again, because unmetered households typically use more and you are metered.
- Your own household, which is the largest factor of the four. Occupancy, a garden, a pool, working from home, a teenager, and the age of the plumbing all move real use much further than any of the above.
Because all three biases point the same way, a household that reads BELOW this figure is further below it than it looks. That direction is worth knowing and is never mentioned anywhere, because the interesting case is usually the other one.
Assumptions and sources
Water resources 2024 to 2025: analysis of the water industry's annual water resources performance
Environment Agency · primary source
- Household per capita consumption: 136.5 l/person/day
- Household per capita consumption, prior year: 137 l/person/day
- Household per capita consumption, dry-year adjusted: 140.3 l/person/day
- National leakage: 2617 Ml/day
- National leakage as share of water put into supply: 19 %
PR24 common performance commitments: per capita consumption (PCC), version 2.1
Ofwat · primary-standard source
- PCC formula: (measured household consumption + unmeasured household consumption) / total household population l/person/day
Litres in a cubic metre
Exact by definition
SI definition. The litre is defined as one cubic decimetre, so one cubic metre is exactly 1,000 litres.
Days used for an annual figure
Editorial convention
Annual figures on this site are a daily rate multiplied by 365. Leap years are not modelled, so a leap year is understated by one day, which is 0.27 per cent.
The figure is from the Environment Agency's annual analysis of water industry performance, and the definition behind it is the regulator's performance commitment definition rather than the Agency's own. Both documents were read directly rather than through a summary.
England only, and this site states that wherever the figure appears. Household use in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland is broadly comparable, but this number is not theirs, and presenting an England average as a UK one would be a quiet inaccuracy of exactly the kind this site exists to avoid.
The three differences from a meter reading are not reconciled into a single corrected figure anywhere on this site. Three documented directional biases a reader can weigh are worth more than one invented correction nobody can check.
What to do next
Two things.
- Work out your own annual volume in cubic metres from your bill, and compare. Use the table above rather than the daily figure, because a year smooths out the seasonal variation that makes a monthly comparison useless.
- Before concluding anything, subtract the obvious: a garden, a pool, more people at home than the bill assumes. Those are real use and this figure does not know about them.
If a large gap survives that, it is worth measuring rather than estimating. take two readings over a measured interval gives a rate instead of a suspicion.
Common questions
- Is 136.5 litres a lot?
- It is roughly two baths, or a bit over an eighth of a cubic metre, per person per day. Whether that is a lot depends on what you compare it to, which is the problem with the question. Its value here is as a baseline for spotting an unexplained gap, not as a verdict on anybody.
- Why does the figure exclude leakage?
- Because it is measuring what households consume, and water lost from a pipe was never consumed by anyone. Counting it would overstate household use. That accounting choice is precisely what makes the figure useful on a leak site: your meter counts a leak and this figure does not, so a gap between them is where a leak lives.
- What is meter under-registration?
- A meter that reads slightly low, which most do at very low flows. The published figure is adjusted upward to allow for it across the population. Your own bill is not adjusted, so the published figure sits slightly above what a meter would have recorded for the same use.
- Why blend metered and unmetered households?
- Because the figure is describing the whole population rather than the metered part of it. Unmetered households typically use more, so the blended average sits above a metered-only one. Anyone who can read a consumption figure off a bill is metered, and is therefore being compared against a number that includes people who are not.
- What is the dry-year adjusted figure?
- 140.3 litres per person per day for the same year. It estimates what use would have been in a dry year rather than the year that actually happened, which makes it the right figure for planning water resources and the wrong one for comparing against your own bill.