Americans spent the last few years screaming about the price of eggs, and eggs rose 28% over the past decade. Meanwhile, the stuff that comes out of your tap climbed 62%, and almost nobody was yelling. A new study of the 500 largest water systems in the country says we've been getting quietly fleeced for ten years by the one product you cannot live without.
The Number That Should Be on Every Front Page
The Guardian reports that Food & Water Watch, a Washington DC non-profit, analyzed 2025 billing data from the 500 largest community water systems in the US, which together serve about 155 million people. That is 45% of the country. They compared the numbers to a similar survey from 2015.
The result: US households pay 62% more for drinking water than they did a decade ago. Consumer prices overall rose 39% in the same period. Water bills rose 1.6 times faster than inflation, and more than twice as fast as groceries, which went up 30%.
The average household using 60,000 gallons paid $531 last year. That's the average. The cheapest system in the study charged $133 a year. The most expensive charged $1,416. Same wet stuff, more than tenfold price difference, depending on where your pipe happens to be.
Wages Didn't Get the Memo
Here's the part that makes it worse. According to the study, water bills increased 19% more than the national median household income between 2014 and 2024. So you're paying more for something you need, out of paychecks that grew slower than the bill.
Some states got hammered. Water bills in New Hampshire jumped 177% over the decade, followed by Oregon at 114% and West Virginia at 95%. In Louisiana, Maryland and West Virginia, bills grew at roughly twice the rate of state median household incomes. In New Hampshire, they grew nearly five times faster.
Five times. For water. In a state whose motto is literally "Live Free or Die." Turns out you can do both, as long as you keep paying the utility.
The Profit Motive Goes Swimming
The study found a gap between publicly owned and for-profit water systems that deserves its own cable news chyron. Corporate-owned utilities charged the average household $823 a year. Publicly owned systems charged $494. That's a difference of $329, or 67%.
Corporate systems made up just 11% of the 500 systems studied, but they accounted for 44% of the 25 most expensive. Seventy percent of the top 10 priciest systems were owned by for-profit corporations. Meanwhile, all 25 of the least expensive systems were publicly owned.
Mary Grant, Food & Water Watch's water program director and a study co-author, put it plainly. Corporate control "exacerbates this affordability crisis, as big water monopolies take away local control, prioritize profit and hike water prices even higher." And a water monopoly is the purest monopoly there is. You can't switch providers. You can't comparison shop. You can't boycott hydration.
The Poorest Households Get Drowned First
The study used an affordability threshold of 1.5% of income for the poorest fifth of households. Water bills blew past it in 93% of systems. Only Idaho and Utah stayed under.
In West Virginia, water consumed about 11% of income for low-income households. In Puerto Rico, it was roughly 20%, which the study called "simply unaffordable by any metric." One fifth of a poor family's income, spent on the basic act of existing.
Grant warned that communities could face an ugly choice: "forgo an urgent water safety project or price many out of water service." That is the whole trap in one sentence. Either the lead pipes stay in the ground, or the people who live above them get priced out of the tap.
Everyone Agrees on the Problem and Blames Someone Else
Grant points to corporate abuses, federal disinvestment and climate change, plus the mountain of work needed to fix ageing lines, lead pipes, Pfas forever chemicals and nitrate pollution from industrial agriculture.
The industry has its own account. The American Water Works Association, which represents utilities supplying roughly 80% of North America's drinking water, pointed to infrastructure renewal, resilience and regulatory requirements. Spokesperson Greg Kail said that if communities rely only on water bills, the average annual household bill would rise from $429 in 2025 to $969 by 2050 in 2025 dollars. That would put an estimated 30.4 million households above 2.5% of income spent on water, and AWWA estimates $13.6 billion a year in assistance would be needed by 2050.
The National Association of Water Companies, which represents private utilities, said it had not reviewed the study. Spokesperson Jenn Kocher said affordability is "a legitimate challenge" and cited ageing infrastructure, Pfas and lead rules, cybersecurity and severe weather. She also pointed to customer-assistance programs offered by private water companies.
The Dingo Take
The water industry says it takes affordability seriously, and the facts in this study show the most expensive systems in America are disproportionately the ones run for profit. Private utilities hold 11% of the systems and 44% of the priciest ones. Somebody call it a coincidence, because I'm sure that's what it is.
To be fair, the pipes are old, the contamination is real, and fixing it costs money. Nobody serious disputes that. But the AWWA's own math says that leaning on ratepayers alone doubles bills by 2050, and the people who bear that are the ones already spending 11% to 20% of their income on a glass of water. When the public side of the ledger charges $494 and the corporate side charges $823 for the same service, the infrastructure excuse only explains so much.
Here's the real scandal. Federal disinvestment is how we got here, and the fix everyone keeps pointing to is a bigger bill for the person at the tap. Water is the one utility where there is no alternative and no exit. If we can find money for everything else, we can find it for the thing that keeps people alive. Until then, enjoy your 62% increase. It's the one thing in this economy that actually runs.
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