Water loss for every system in Texas, Massachusetts, California, Georgia, Indiana and Wisconsin

What each system page shows

What is in the corpus

Systems covered

4,950

Across 26,906 filed utility-years. Every one gets a page, a percentile, and a source.

Flagged for review

823

Systems whose filed loss percentage moves, year to year, by more than the movement of three quarters of the systems in their own state. It is a review flag computed from the filed series and nothing else. It does not establish that the figures are wrong, and it does not say whether the movement is in the water or in the measurement.

Filings mostly assumed

1,329

Of 9,744 filed years reporting apparent loss, these are more than half regulator default rather than measurement. The regulator's own data-validity score does not distinguish them.

Why this exists

A percentage on its own tells a utility nothing. Fifteen percent sounds bad and is better than half the state; nine percent sounds fine and is worse than most of its neighbours. Every page here says where a system sits among the ones that filed the same year, and whether its own reported figure is stable enough to act on. Where the state publishes a threshold — MassDEP's 10% unaccounted-for water standard — the pages for that state also say how many of a system's filed years were over it.

And a loss figure is only as good as its inputs. Where a Texas utility does not measure a component, TWDB supplies a default and flags it — so a reported loss can be mostly assumption. That flag is published per filing and nobody reads it back out. These pages do. TWDB is the only regulator here that publishes it, so the defaulted share appears on Texas pages and nowhere else.

Methodology and definitions

• Additional bonds test — The condition a utility has to satisfy before issuing new debt on the same revenue pledge, and the reason a capital plan can be affordable in cash terms and still not be financeable.
• Apparent loss — Water that reached a customer and was never billed. The component of water loss that is recoverable revenue inside a budget year, and not a capital project.
• Cost causation — The principle that a charge should fall on the customer whose demand caused the cost, and the standard courts in several states use when asked whether a utility charge is a fee or an unauthorized tax.
• Cost of service — The step in a rate study that takes the revenue requirement apart into cost pools, assigns each pool a basis for allocation, and distributes it to customer classes according to what each class causes.
• Debt service coverage ratio — Net revenue divided by annual debt service, the figure a rate covenant is written against, and the arithmetic that decides whether a capital plan can be carried by the rate.
• Enterprise fund — The fund type a government uses to account for an activity financed by charges to the people who use it, and the reason a water utility's finances can be read separately from the general fund's.
• Equivalent residential unit (ERU) — A unit of measure that expresses every property's demand as a multiple of one typical single-family home, used where a charge has to be spread across properties that cannot be compared directly.
• Impact fee — A one-time charge on new development for the capacity it will use, distinguished from a rate by what it may fund and by the accounting the enabling statute requires around it.
• Lifeline rate — A reduced charge for a first block of consumption or for a qualifying household, and the structure where the cost-of-service principle and the affordability objective pull hardest against each other.
• Net book value — Original cost less accumulated depreciation, the number on a utility's own balance sheet, and the figure that understates a system whose assets are old and still working.
• Non-revenue water — Water a utility produced and paid to treat but never billed anyone for, split into the part that is a revenue problem and the part that is a cost problem.
• Rate base — The investment on which a regulated utility is allowed to earn a return, and the figure that decides what customers pay after a private company buys a public system.
• Rate covenant — The promise in a bond ordinance that the utility will set rates high enough to produce net revenue at a stated multiple of annual debt service, and the constraint that binds a rate study whether or not anyone mentions it.
• Real loss — Water that escaped the distribution system before reaching a customer, valued at what it cost to produce rather than at what it would have sold for.
• Revenue requirement — The total amount a utility must collect from rates in a year, built up from operating cost, debt service and capital funding rather than from last year's revenue plus a percentage.
• Tiered rate — A volume charge that rises in blocks as consumption increases, and the rate structure most exposed to challenge, because each tier's price has to be tied to a cost and not to a conservation objective.
• Unaccounted-for water (UAW) — The Massachusetts Water Management Act performance metric for distribution loss, and how it differs from the AWWA non-revenue water framework used elsewhere.
• How the American water rate and finance benchmark is built — What the benchmark covers, how its figures are checked, and why a figure is sometimes blank.
• How a public water system is valued — Why the number on the balance sheet is not what the system is worth, what the three standard valuation approaches produce instead, and how a fair market value statute turns a sale price into a rate increase afterwards.
• How a published figure is produced — What is kept, what is checked, what is refused and what is never reported. The general statement of the standard every figure on this site is held to; the water loss index is the worked example of it.
• How the water loss index is built — Every source behind the index, what is computed from it, and where the index declines to publish a number.
• What a comparable water bill is — Why the benchmark prices a year rather than a month, what volume it prices, and why two bills for the same water are not comparable without both.
• What a rate has to be able to show — The evidence a utility charge is measured against when somebody challenges it, read out of the Michigan and California cases that set the standard, and what each one requires a rate study to have written down.
• What we do not publish — Missing filings and unavailable fields are marked in the data. The four cases where this record declines to state a conclusion, and the rule each follows from.
• Why historical records matter — Agencies replace files, utilities resubmit them, and one utility appears under different names at different agencies. What we retain, and why each of these only accumulates if it is in place from the start.

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

The California water loss audit: who files, and when — Water Code 10608.34 requires every urban retail water supplier to file a validated water loss audit with the Department of Water Resources each year. Who that covers, what validation means, and what the state publishes.

Common questions — What is public and what is yours, why you would pay for either, what happens when a figure here is wrong, and what it costs.

The Georgia water loss audit: who files, and when — Georgia's rules for public water systems to improve water supply efficiency put every system serving 3,300 or more people on an annual water loss audit, due to EPD by March 1. Who files, what is certified, and what EPD publishes.

The Indiana water loss audit: who files, and when — Indiana Code 8-1-30.8 requires an annual water loss audit from every metered community water system, validated by a certified third party and filed with the Indiana Finance Authority in even-numbered years.

Lead service line inventories: what the states actually published — Of twenty states, one publishes a service line inventory a reader can download, and two fifths of its lines have no known material.

The AWWA M36 water balance: what this site computes, and what it will not — The balance from a filed water loss audit, the valuation rule that decides whether the money goes to meters or to pipe, and why no leakage index appears here.

The Massachusetts performance standards: what is reported, and against what — Massachusetts does not require a water loss audit. It sets performance standards, unaccounted-for water at 10 percent and residential use at 65 gallons per person per day, reported on the Annual Statistical Report and reviewed by MassDEP.

What we assemble, and where it comes from — The records a utility already produces and the public databases that hold the rest of them, named. Half of this work is a utility's own paperwork, which is usually the harder and more valuable half.

Combined sewer outfalls, and the four answers a blank can mean — EPA's outfall inventory covers 34 states, so a permit missing from it is in one of several positions and none of them is a zero.

Enforcement cases on a sewer permit, and the date that is not in the table — Whether a federal civil enforcement case names a permit, with its case number, and why no compliance date is published beside it.

Sewer overflow reports, by permit — What EPA's republished overflow record supports for one named collection system, and the three figures it does not support.

Using this data — What you may do with the published figures, how to ask for the bulk files, and the one caveat that has to travel with the numbers.

The Texas water loss audit: who files, and when — Texas Water Code 16.0121 puts most retail public utilities on an annual water loss audit and the rest on a five-year cycle. Who is on which duty, what is due, and what the state does with it.