from rscottjones

Over the years, I’ve gotten a bunch of questions from non-Arizonans about the water situation here in Phoenix. Some people assume that water is so scarce here that it must cost an absolute fortune. Others predict that the city will need to be completely abandoned in the near future. A few of the questions even seem like cloaked moral attacks on the practice of even attempting to live in the desert—an arrogance of modern man—conveniently forgetting that this river valley has been inhabited for a very long time (here’s an excellent rebuttal on the future of Phoenix in the age of climate change, btw, that’s well worth your time).

Anyway, in the interest of providing some additional information for people asking such questions, I thought I’d share a real life example—using our actual water usage bill from August 2025.

How water rates work in Phoenix

I’m simplifying this to make it more readable, but feel free to peruse the city webpage, which describes everything in more detail.

For residential users, Phoenix charges a base water rate—meaning a fixed monthly service charge—which shifts between summer and winter (ok, hot and not as hot) water allocations, plus higher rates for additional water use. The water bill is paired with sewer and trash service, and there are a number of other related and unrelated taxes and fees included, too (which I’ll generally ignore below to keep things simple).

Phoenix calculates water usage based on a broad measurement referred to as a “unit.” One unit of water equals 748 gallons (which is one hundred cubic feet of water, often abbreviated as HCF or CCF in other cities; just for funsies, many midwestern cities charge by 1000 gallon increments instead). Because the water gauges only count in units, they slowly turn over one digit after 748 gallons have passed through. As a result, you only get charged when the counter increases its unit count, so some months might show higher or lower meter readings even when actual water use was generally steady, simply based on when the counter switched over.

During the hot summer months of June-Sep, the base fee includes 8 units of water (5984 gallons). During the remainder of the year, the base fee includes only 5 units of water (3740 gallons). When you add it all up, that’s a total of 72 units for the year, or 53,856 total gallons. The rates for extra water beyond what’s included in the base fee vary by season (aka, summer is higher, winter is lower, spring/fall are in between).

Our household profile

Before we look at the bill, here’s what our household looks like. First, it’s just my wife and I, no kids and no pets. Our house is a modest single family house, about 1400 sq ft with 2 baths, on a smallish 5200 sq ft lot. We have a hot tub, but not a swimming pool. Our yards are a mix of landscaping rocks, concrete pads and driveway, and artificial turf, with three mature non-native trees and one non-native bush (we keep it things minimal because we hate yard work). We don’t have any fancy water saving or water collecting devices, and none of our toilets, faucets, or shower heads are what you’d consider low flow. Our dishwasher and laundry are middle-of-the-road appliances; I have no idea where they rate in terms of water use, but probably somewhere in the middle of what’s available at your local Home Depot. All in all, it’s a pretty unremarkable and average house.

And in terms of daily behavior at home, we don’t intentionally try to save or otherwise ration water. It’s just not something we ever think about. I (somewhat infamously) take very long showers, for instance, enjoying an extended massage on my neck while the steam builds up and helps with my omnipresent allergies; I often lose myself in my thoughts, writing blog posts in my mind or working through a pending decision. We don’t wash our cars in the driveway, not because we’re worried about water use, but because we rarely wash our cars, period (we live in the desert and road trip often; they’ll be dirty in a day or two anyway, so what’s the use?). We cook at home regularly, so I run the dishwasher whenever it’s close to full, and do a load of laundry when we need clean clothes, without regard to that frequency. I’d say that at least half of our at-home liquid consumption involves tap water, generally filtered through our fridge or coffeemaker. We make our own ice for our coolers, which we use frequently on the weekends. We flush toilets after each use¹ and wash our hands thoroughly afterwards. We don’t have any obvious leaks, at least that we’re aware of, and no leaky water faucets or toilets, either. Anyway, that’s what water use is like in our house. Nothing out of the norm, imo. Not wasteful, but not water conscious either.

In terms of how much time we spend at home, well…that’s a more complicated answer. These days, Jen spends her work week in the office, while I spend it at home. We certainly travel as often as we possibly can, though as you’ll eventually see further below, that doesn’t make a lick of difference in our actual water bill. But yeah, this is the one area where we’re quite a bit different than our neighbors.

Finally, let’s talk about the weather in August 2025. Overall, it was the 4th hottest August on record for Phoenix, and featured the highest ever recorded temperature in the month—118º. The average high was 109º, with an average low of 88º, resulting in a mean temperature of about 98º. But higher temps doesn’t really affect our water use much at all, as we don’t increase landscaping water to compensate for the heat, or deal with additional evaporation from a pool.

Our actual water bill for (roughly) August 2025.

Ok, let’s get to the actual bill. Here it is, encompassing our usage for the billing period of 8/8/2025 to 9/8/2025.

You can see that our water meter clicked ahead two units during the billing period, which means our bill is for 1496 gallons. But that’s far below what we’re allocated under the base rate (which you’ll recall is 8 units during August). So no extra water charges for us, we pay just the base rate…which is a whopping $4.64 (plus a $1.24 fee for “environmental mandates”²). You can see there are a number of other taxes and fees, including a buck for state mandated jail costs (um, ok…that seems a bit weird), plus the other fees for sewer and trash service.

Wait…$4.64?? Yes, you read that right: $4.64. Oh, and we could have used 300% more water in August than we actually did and still only paid $4.64!

Now, we were gone for two weekends during this period: a 3 day weekend in LA and a 4 day trip to central Nebraska (hahaha), plus a ten day trip to Ohio and Pennsylvania. A substantial amount of time away, so you’d expect a lower level of water use.

But even so, you can see that our water use hasn’t ever spiked above 3 units, even in months in which we spent every day at home (like March & July). That’s still well below the 5 base units we get in the cooler months, and far below the 8 units we get in the summer. Over the last year, we used a total of 25 units of our allotted 72 units, which translates to only 18,700 gallons of the 53,856 gallons allotted. That’s only 35% of what we get for that $4.64 each month ($55.69 for the year).

Keen observers will notice that we managed to go all of January without that gauge counter clicking over a single digit, but managed two clicks in December and three in February—all during the period we were traveling overseas during our 100 Day Adventure. Weird, right? Well, we had housesitting guests for significant chunks of those months (though not in January), so they served as substitute water users in our absence.

Even so, this is generally how our water bill looks every month—well below the base service allocation, which seems super fucking cheap to me. Again, a five dollar bill buys you somewhere between 3740 and 5984 gallons of water—waaay more than you need to support two adults in a house, even one that’s unconcerned with their water use. Or at least it’s more than plenty for us.

But what if we went over the allotted amount? Well, the price goes up quite a bit from there—anywhere between $4.93 to $6.13 per additional unit, depending on the month. Well, let’s say that you used 12 total units—6 times what my wife and I did during the same month. Well, that would still only run you $30 in water costs: $4.64 for the base rate of 8 units, plus 4 additional units at $6.13 each (not including fees/taxes/etc).

Ok, so what’s the point?

I’m not sure I have a specific point here, except to share our own water use and how much it costs. In short, we unintentionally don’t use that much, and it costs us virtually nothing.

Is every family like ours? No, of course not. First, many families are larger than 2 people—I’m told the average household size in Phoenix is 0.66 more persons than our own. And lots of people have very water intensive landscaping, and lots of people have swimming pools, and some people even waste water they could easily save—like by spending 4 minutes and $5 to replace the toilet tank flapper when the old one starts leaking. For comparison, in our neighborhood it looks like about 40% of homes have a pool and about 10% have grass lawns (the vast majority have converted to artificial turf, which my grass allergies appreciate). But I don’t think we’re especially unusual, and it sure seems like plenty of people could live within the base rate without any sacrifice.

While I’m not especially worried about the future water supply for the City of Phoenix residents, it’s clear that we’ll have less water overall to work with in the future here in the Southwest, and that we’ll therefore need to do a better job managing the water we do have.

But that doesn’t seem like an impossible task, at least from an actual water use standpoint (no comment on the political cooperation required). There’s plenty of supply in the current system if we are smart about how we use it. We need to make better industrial and commercial water decisions—whether that’s agricultural use or data centers or new housing subdivisions or unnecessary decorative landscaping. And I think you’d see plenty of people reduce their residential usage³ when water costs more than $5, too⁴.

Anyway, there you go. A little bit of real life data for you to mull over when you think about Phoenix and its water supply.