Water/Sewer Rate Calculator

For a customer using exactly the average amount of water, no — the average bill works out to total revenue required divided by customer count regardless of how that revenue is split into fixed and variable pieces. What the fixed cost share actually changes is how that same total bill is divided between a flat monthly charge and a per-gallon usage charge, which matters more for customers whose usage differs from the average.

A meaningful share of a utility's costs — pipes, treatment plants, debt service on infrastructure — doesn't change based on how much water any individual customer uses in a given month, so recovering some of that cost through a fixed charge better matches revenue to the utility's actual cost structure. Billing purely by usage would leave revenue more exposed to swings in consumption, such as a dry summer boosting usage or a wet one suppressing it.

Raising the fixed cost share increases the flat monthly charge every customer pays equally while lowering the per-gallon rate, which benefits high-usage customers relatively more, since their savings on a lower per-gallon rate scale with how much water they use. Low-usage customers, by contrast, end up paying a larger share of their bill through the fixed charge regardless of how little water they actually consume.

This model produces one flat per-gallon rate applied uniformly to all usage, rather than a tiered or increasing-block rate structure that charges progressively more per gallon as usage climbs — a common tool utilities use specifically to encourage water conservation among the highest-usage customers. Utilities pursuing conservation goals often layer that kind of tiered pricing on top of the basic fixed-and-variable framework modeled here.