About whatwatercosts.org

What this is

whatwatercosts.org is a public database of residential water rates across the United States. We collect, standardize, and publish pricing data from community water systems, making it easy to compare what households pay for water in different cities and regions.

All rates are normalized to a 6,000 gallon per month benchmark, a typical residential usage level, so comparisons are apples-to-apples across utilities with different rate structures.

Why we built it

Water pricing in the US is fragmented across ~50,000 community water systems, each publishing rates in different formats (PDFs, web pages, spreadsheets) with no central repository. Researchers, journalists, policymakers, and curious residents have no easy way to answer basic questions like: Is my water bill high compared to similar cities?

We built whatwatercosts.org to change that. Water affordability is a growing issue, and transparent pricing data is a foundation for better policy.

Funding & access

whatwatercosts.org is self-funded and free to use. There are no paywalls, no API keys required, and no plans to charge for access. We believe public utility pricing data should be publicly available.

This is a civic tech project. Full open source code is coming soon. If you'd like to support the work through funding, data contributions, or partnerships, we'd love to hear from you.

Contact

Found an error? Have data to contribute? Want to collaborate? Send us a note.