# The benchmark data

URL: https://municorn.us/data/benchmark-terms/
Updated: 2026-09-10
Tags: data, license, terms, benchmark

> **Cite as:** Municorn.us, "The benchmark data", The 2026 American Water Rate and Finance Benchmark, https://municorn.us/data/benchmark-terms/ (source filings retrieved 2026-09-10).
> **Licence:** CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ — reuse and redistribution are permitted with attribution to Municorn.us and a link to this URL.
> **Caveat that must travel with these figures:** Distributions are one row per system and unweighted, so they are medians across systems rather than across households. Residential bill and affordability figures cover California systems only.

The distributions are open and citable. The figures for a single system are not served from this site. Write to us for them.

## Available here

**The distributions.** Every percentile table behind every chart in the
benchmark, as [CSV](/benchmark/water-rate-distributions.csv) and
[JSON](/benchmark/water-rate-distributions.json). National, by size category,
by region, by state, by rate structure and by type of owner. Cohorts under
thirty systems are not published, which is the rule this site already keeps for
a state median.

**Every distribution covers the whole record**; the sample governs only which
systems are named. Revenue per connection reaches about fourteen thousand
systems, against the 985 named.

Two are Californian. The residential bill and the affordability ratio cover
about eleven hundred systems, all in California, which is the one state
publishing residential tariffs centrally. Every other distribution is national.
The counts here are round on purpose: the study's table carries the exact n, and
a figure typed into a sentence ages.

Use, quote, redistribute and build on them. Attribution is appreciated and is
the only thing asked.

**The method.** [How the benchmark is
built](/methodology/american-water-rate-benchmark/) covers how the figures are
checked, why one is sometimes blank, and what they were checked against.

**The systems that are named.** Every system serving over 100,000 people, and a
stratified random sample of the rest, appear on this site with their figures and
with the reason for each of their blanks.

## Not served here

The full file: a row per community water system, with every published field and
the reason behind every withheld figure.

There is no URL for it, and no form. **Write and ask**: <ammar@municorn.us>.
No paywall, no rate limit, and anyone who asks gets it. We ask because the
per-system rows are usually an input to a specific piece of work, and we would
like to know what that work is.

## Limitations

**A number here describes a filing, not a utility.** Filings are consistent
across thousands of systems, which is what makes them comparable, and they are
not an audit. Two specifics to carry into anything you quote:

- **Water utility revenue and spending come from a government's own statutory
  return, and roughly a quarter of those amounts are the collecting agency's
  estimate rather than the government's own report.** Every figure carries that
  distinction.
- **Household income for a system that is not a municipality is a
  population-weighted mean of small-area medians, which is not a median.** It is
  labelled as derived everywhere it appears.

## Citing it

> Municorn.us, *The 2026 American Water Rate and Finance Benchmark*.
> https://municorn.us/benchmark/

A versioned deposit of the aggregate layer with a DOI is in preparation, and
this page will carry it once it exists.

_Municorn.us · https://municorn.us/data/benchmark-terms/ · CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ · source filings retrieved 2026-09-10_

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