Texas · PWS TX1780005 · NUECES County

Nueces County WCID 3

What Nueces County WCID 3 filed with TWDB about the water it produced and the water it billed for, 2016–2024 — and what the filing does and does not let anyone verify.

Non-revenue water, FY2024: 29.6%
Annual value of the filed loss: $380,000
Apparent loss that is a default: 13.9%

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What the filing says

Nueces County WCID 3 serves 4,375 retail connections and about 16,416 people. Because it reports more than 3,300 connections, it is on an annual water loss audit cycle with TWDB.

What the record shows

29.6% non-revenue water in FY2024, higher than 75% of the 908 Texas systems that filed that year.

The figure is getting worse across the record.

This series is flagged for review. The filed loss percentage has moved an average of 8.8 points a year, against a Texas median of 4.2, including 7% to 31% between FY2022 and FY2023. The flag is that comparison and nothing more: mean absolute change per year, above the seventy-fifth percentile for this state.

It does not establish what moved. A meter replacement program, a main break, a change of billing system, a corrected prior-year filing and an ordinary reporting error all produce a series that looks like this, and a filed water loss audit does not say which happened. What the flag does say is that the years disagree with each other by more than most of the state's do, so a single year of this series is a weak basis for a decision without the records behind it.

Compliance record

29 violations on EPA's record for this system as of 2026Q2, of which 22 are health-based. 24 resolved, 3 archived, and 2 still open.

Maximum Contaminant Level Violation, Average health-based unaddressed, from April 1, 2026
Maximum Contaminant Level Violation, Average health-based unaddressed, from April 1, 2026

Counted as distinct violations, not as rows: EPA's export carries one row per enforcement action taken against a violation, so a row count would multiply this system's record several times over. A violation here is a breach of a reporting, monitoring or contaminant-level rule as reported to EPA — it is not a measurement of the water, and this site has none.

Source: US EPA, Safe Drinking Water Information System, via the ECHO national download, 2026Q2. How we hold it.

Notes on individual filings

TWDB records problems and granted waivers against a filing in its own export. Where we have found something it does not flag, that is stated here too, in full.

FY2024. The filing states an infrastructure leakage index of 353.5: real losses about 354 times the unavoidable annual real loss its own audit computes. It is reproduced as filed, and nothing on this page is computed from it.
FY2019. The filing states a retail price of $44.00 per thousand gallons. Filed retail prices outside $1 to $40 are not published here, so that price and TWDB's cost of apparent losses computed from it are both omitted.

Water balance, FY2024 · 508.8 MG system input

70%

27%

Billed 358 MG Unbilled authorized 0.89 MG Apparent loss 12.9 MG Real loss 137 MG

TWDB derives water losses from system input minus authorized consumption, so these parts sum to the whole on every filing. What a filing can get wrong is which of these numbers were measured.

Where these volumes come from

System input 508.8 MG sheet 2024, cell AP730 · converted to million gallons from the unit the filing states
Billed authorized 358 MG sheet 2024, cell AU730 · converted to million gallons from the unit the filing states
Unbilled authorized 0.89 MG computed here, not read from a cell
Apparent loss 12.9 MG sheet 2024, cell BL730 · converted to million gallons from the unit the filing states
Real loss 137 MG sheet 2024, cell BQ730

From data/archive/twdb/2026-08-11-7270fa7072e5.xlsx (SHA-256 7270fa7072e51e70), retrieved 2026-08-11 from the published source.

Filed history, 2016–2024
Year	NRW	Input (MG)	Recoverable
2024	29.6%	508.8	$380,000
2023	30.6%	538.1	$632,000
2022	7.4%	584.1	$175,000
2021	14.5%	598.3	$328,000
2019	5.0%	597.4	$92,000
2018	22.6%	611.1	$500,000
2017	16.5%	577.4	$620,000
2016	18.9%	662.5	$210,000

Balance closure is inapplicable on every filed year above, so the column that repeated it is not shown. TWDB derives water losses from system input minus authorized consumption, so this decomposition holds by construction. This is neither a pass nor a disclosure gap.

How much of this figure was measured

Apparent loss is three components: customer meter inaccuracy, unauthorized consumption, and data handling error. TWDB supplies a default value for the last two when a utility does not measure them, and records which in its export. Across the published record, unauthorized consumption is a default on 95% of filings, data handling error on 30%. The median filing is 14.4% defaulted, and 1,329 filings are more than half. TWDB's own data-validity score averages 68.4 out of 100 on the 9,315 filings using a default, against 70.0 on the 429 using none — so the score does not tell the two apart.

13.9% of Nueces County WCID 3's reported apparent loss for FY2024 is a default rather than a measurement. How much of a Texas loss figure is measured sets this out across the whole filed record.

How the loss is valued

Apparent loss is water that reached a customer and was never billed: under-registering meters, data-handling errors, unauthorized use. It is valued here at the retail rate, because water that reached a customer would have sold at that rate. Real loss is valued at variable production cost only, since eliminating a leak saves what it cost to treat and pump the water rather than what it would have sold for. Valuing both at the retail rate is how a loss study produces a number nobody in a finance department believes, and that is the mistake this figure is built to avoid.

This is the value of the loss, not an amount anyone has established is recoverable. How much of it a utility can actually collect depends on which meters are under-registering, which accounts are unbilled, and what a replacement or an audit of those accounts would cost. None of that is in a filed water loss audit, and this page does not claim to know it.

Apparent loss is valued at this utility's own reported retail price of water, and real loss at its own reported variable production cost. Not our estimate, and shown to three significant figures.

Comparable systems

In the same county.

System	Basis for comparison	NRW
Nueces County WCID 4	NUECES County	16.2% FY2024
Bishop	NUECES County	52.4% FY2020
Nueces Water Supply Corp	NUECES County	11.8% FY2020
River Acres Water Supply Corp	NUECES County	37.1% FY2024
Corpus Christi	NUECES County	10.0% FY2024
Woodway	3,300–10,000 connections	27.3% FY2023
Zapata County Waterworks Swtp	3,300–10,000 connections	33.0% FY2024
Harris County MUD 55 Heritage Park	3,300–10,000 connections	4.8% FY2023

Where is it going?

This page values the loss at roughly $380,000 a year. It cannot say which accounts, which zones, or which meters, and it cannot say how much of that value is collectable. Answering either takes your billing history, your meter reads, and your production data reconciled against each other.

Our Water Loss Recovery Snapshot is three weeks, one flat fee, and the deliverable is a ranked list of specific accounts and zones with dollars and a confidence on each.

See what the Snapshot delivers Email us about Nueces County WCID 3

Sources and corrections. Every figure above is either filed by the utility or computed from filed figures, and each one says which. If a number here looks wrong, tell us: the error may be in the filing, in our reading of it, or in something the export does not show. Send a correction. We will check it against the source, correct the page where it is wrong, and say what changed.

Texas Water Development Board — historical water loss audit data. Retrieved 2026-08-11 from data/archive/twdb/2026-08-11-7270fa7072e5.xlsx. https://www.twdb.texas.gov/conservation/data/doc/water-loss-data/sources/historical-water-loss-audit-data.xlsx