Leak allowances, and what they actually cover

What this section covers

What a leak allowance is, the five things the policies actually differ on, and where to find your own company's terms.

It is the part of a leak with the most money attached and the worst-organised information anywhere, which is why this page is built around linking the real policies rather than around describing a typical one. There is no typical one.

No amount of money appears on this page. No supplier rate on this site has been verified, so any figure would be invented, and in any case the terms change far more slowly than the rates do. What an allowance covers is the durable part.

How it works in the UK

There is no national leak allowance scheme. Each company sets its own policy, and the five axes below are where they differ.

Before those, one split that decides whether any of this reaches you at all. An allowance is a credit against a volumetric charge, so it needs a volumetric charge to exist. In twenty of the twenty-two supply areas a metered household has one. In Northern Ireland domestic customers are not charged for water separately, and in Scotland an unmetered household pays by Council Tax band rather than by volume. In both of those there is nothing for an allowance to be credited against, so the question does not arise in the same form. A metered Scottish household is the smaller separate case, and the twenty-area picture applies to it.

That reads like good news and it is only half good news. A leak on an unmetered supply costs nothing on the water bill, which is true and worth knowing. But everywhere else on this site the thing that makes somebody suspect a leak is the bill going up, and that signal does not exist here at all. The water still goes somewhere, the damage it does is the same, and nothing is going to tell you about it. The absence of a charge removes the warning, not the problem.

The last of those interacts with something the sewerage page covers, because a supply pipe leak never reaches the sewer in the first place. the volumetric rate an allowance is applied to is where the charge an allowance credits comes from.

The figures that matter

Not amounts, because none is verified here, but the terms. Each company publishes its own policy and this is the current link to each.

Seventeen of the twenty-two links have been checked and resolve to a live page. Five could not be checked, because those domains refuse automated requests, and they are marked as unchecked rather than as broken. A blocked connection is not evidence that a page is missing.

Read your own company's policy rather than a summary of it, including this one. Allowance terms are the kind of thing that changes quietly between charging years, and a page describing what most companies do is wrong for whichever one you are with.

How this changes your loss figure

It does not change the volume at all. The water is gone either way. What it changes is how much of that volume you are charged for.

• An allowance is applied to the volumetric charge, so it reduces the cost output of every calculator on this site and none of the volume outputs.
• It is applied after the fact, on a bill that has already been issued or is about to be, so it does not change what the meter measured.
• It usually covers a stated period rather than the whole life of the leak, so a leak that ran for two years may be credited for part of that.

Which makes the measured rate and the dates you took it the evidence a claim rests on. measure the rate of loss at the meter produces both, and a before-and-after pair of readings also demonstrates that the repair worked.

Assumptions and sources

The policy links are to each company's own published terms, held as data rather than written into this page, with the date each was last checked. Twenty-two hand-written external links would rot silently, and the ones that rot first are the ones nobody rechecks.

The five axes in the table above are a summary of what the policies differ on rather than a claim about what any particular one says. No comparison of all twenty-two policy texts has been made, so this page deliberately describes the shape of the variation and sends you to the source for the substance.

Five of the links are unchecked because those domains block automated requests. That is recorded as unchecked rather than as broken, because a refused connection says nothing about whether the page exists.

What to do next

Four things, and the order matters more than usual here, because two of them have deadlines.

• Read your own company's policy before arranging the repair, not after. If there is a stated window or an application requirement, finding out afterwards is how an otherwise valid claim is lost.
• Establish which pipe leaked. Close the internal stop tap and repeat the meter test: if the meter still moves, it is the underground supply pipe, which is the case the reasoning behind these allowances actually addresses, since a buried leak is not something a household could reasonably have noticed.
• Keep the measured rate, the dates and photographs of both readings. That record is the evidence, and a second pair after the repair shows it worked.
• Ask specifically whether the sewerage element is credited too. If the leak was on the supply pipe, ask on what basis it was charged, given that companies describe that charge as being for water returned to the sewer. Ask it as a question about their scheme rather than as an assertion about your rights, because the scheme terms are what decides it and this site has not read all of them.

That last question is worth asking with the mechanism in hand rather than in general terms. the volumetric rate an allowance is applied to explains how the sewerage volume is calculated in the first place.

Common questions