Global Water Tariff Survey 2024: a year of record increases in tariffs

On October 1st, Global Water Intelligence  (GWI) published the 2024 Global Water Tariff Survey 2024 which reports a record increase in global water, wastewater and stormwater bills over the past year. GWI is an intelligence service providing information on the international water market, and it has conducted a global water tariff survey since 2008, when it performed its first survey across 184 utilities. The 2023-2024 survey uses data from 616 cities in 190 countries, based on a monthly consumption of 15m³/month. 

According to the Watermagazine, water tariffs have gone through difficult times in past years, with utilities putting off price increases during the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2022, sometimes even freezing or reducing the tariffs. However, currently, utilities appear to be making up for lost time – and lost revenue - with average increases in many regions beating GWI Water Tariff Survey records. In part, GWI notes, the averages have been influenced by tariff increases by 209% in Argentina. In Turkey, the Assembly of Anatolian Municipalities increased the price of up to 5 cubic meters of water in residential buildings from 1.83 TL to 10 TL. Turkey has registered some of the highest tariff increase in the world over the past years, also linked to spiralling inflation.

However, despite the influence of tariff increase in individual countries, GWI points to a broader trend worldwide of rising water tariffs influenced by a ‘perfect storm’ of rising costs, overdue upgrades, infrastructure expansions and investments in resilience to climate change.

The global average masks some strong regional disparities. Water tariffs in North America and Western Europe are between three to five times higher than tariffs in other world regions. And while Argentina and Turkey have experienced water tariff increases of more than 50% in the past 12 months, increases of between 10% and 50% have been experienced in the Russian Federation, and parts of Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Southern Africa. In large parts of Sus-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, water tariffs have remained largely unchanged.

GWI notes that inflation has played a role in driving up prices: utilities have faced rising costs, and especially the cost of energy. However, the main factor in driving up princes seems to be the need for capital expenditure on infrastructure expansion or upgrades.  Having foregone revenue during the COVID years, utilities are having to pass price increases on to the consumer to enable the funding of infrastructure expansion and upgrades. This is even more so in view of the increased awareness of the need to invest in the climate resilience of infrastructure.