How UK water is priced

What this section covers

How a volume of water becomes a number of pounds, and which parts of that calculation a leak actually changes.

That table is why the calculators on this site apply the volumetric rate and nothing else. Adding a standing charge to the cost of a leak would overstate it, and it is the most common way a leak cost is inflated.

How it works in the UK

Three different systems, and only the first of them charges a household for the water it loses.

• England and Wales. Metered households pay a volumetric rate per cubic metre for water, and usually a second volumetric rate for sewerage. Unmetered households pay a charge based on rateable value, with no volumetric element at all.
• Scotland. Unmetered household charges are set by Council Tax band and collected by the council alongside Council Tax, so an unmetered Scottish household's bill does not move when water is lost. Metered households do pay a volumetric rate.
• Northern Ireland. Domestic water is not charged to households at all, so a domestic customer does not pay for leaked water.

Within England and Wales the list of companies is not the list of prices, and the difference matters for finding your own rate.

Ofwat licences 11 water and sewerage companies and 6 water-only companies, 17 appointees in total. But 20 supply areas publish their own charges, because Bournemouth Water, Bristol Water, Cambridge Water and Essex and Suffolk Water are separate charges-scheme areas inside larger licensed groups. Rates are set at the charges-scheme level, so this site is organised by the 20 areas that set prices rather than by the 17 companies that hold appointments, plus Scottish Water and NI Water.

That is why searching for Bristol Water charges here lands on Bristol Water, and not on the rate of the group that holds the appointment.

The figures that matter

One published figure, one finding, and one honest absence.

The forecast average annual household bill across England and Wales for 2026 to 2027 is £639, made up of £309 for water and £330 for sewerage. That is a BILL and not a rate: it includes standing charges, it averages across all household types, and it mixes metered and unmetered customers. It cannot be divided by anything to recover a rate per cubic metre, and it is England and Wales only.

The finding is that companies do not all apply the non-return-to-sewer allowance in the same place, and that changes what a headline sewerage rate means.

The consequence is the citable part: a published sewerage rate per cubic metre is not comparable between the two groups, because one of them already has the allowance priced in and the other does not. how the sewerage half of the bill is calculated works through what that does to the cost of a leak.

The honest absence: not one supplier rate on this site has been verified. All 22 records show a notice rather than a figure, and they will keep showing it until each rate has been read from the company's own charges scheme.

How this changes your loss figure

The volume of a leak is a physical quantity and it is the same everywhere. The cost of it is not, and four things on this page decide it.

• Whether a volumetric charge applies to you at all. If it does not, the volume is unchanged and the cost is nothing, and the calculators say so rather than showing zero.
• Your own volumetric water rate, which is the only figure the water half of the cost depends on.
• Whether the sewerage rate applies, which depends on where the water went. An underground supply pipe loss never reaches the sewer.
• Which mechanism your sewerage company uses, because applying a 95 per cent factor to a company that has already priced the allowance into its rate counts the same allowance twice and understates the bill.

That fourth point is why this site records the mechanism per company rather than applying one factor to everybody, and why a company whose mechanism has not been read is recorded as unknown rather than given a plausible default. Both 1.0 and 0.95 are correct for real companies, so choosing one for a company nobody has checked would silently take a side.

A leak allowance, where one is granted, comes off afterwards. It reduces the charge rather than the loss, and leak allowances that reduce the volumetric charge covers who grants one and what it covers.

Assumptions and sources

The sewerage mechanisms above were read from each company's own 2026 to 2027 household charges scheme, with the clause or paragraph number recorded against each. Six of the eleven water and sewerage companies have been read directly. Five have not, because their sites refuse automated requests, and those five are recorded as unknown rather than assumed.

The 20-against-17 split between supply areas and licensed appointees is a judgement about which granularity a reader needs, not something either the regulator or the consumer bodies publish as such. The underlying lists are theirs; the decision to organise the site around charges-scheme areas is ours.

What to do next

Three things, in this order, and the first one is on your bill rather than on this site.

• Find your volumetric rate per cubic metre on your own bill or your company's current charges scheme. It is the only number the water half of a leak cost depends on.
• Work out whether the sewerage rate applies to your leak. An internal leak that drains away usually reaches the sewer. An underground supply pipe loss does not.
• Check whether you are metered at all. An unmetered household in England or Wales, and an unmetered household in Scotland, pays no volumetric charge, so a leak costs nothing directly even though the water is still going somewhere.

Common questions