Annually, our charges are set in accordance with regulatory bodies, finalised and published in January. We still provide some miscellaneous services directly to non-household customers and these can be found in our Wholesale Scheme of Charges.
Here you can find this year’s and all previous year's wholesales charges, retailer billing timetable, assurance statement and statement of significant change.
Increase in wholesale charges for 2025-26 and for the period 2026-29
Our charges are subject to a formal system of price regulations and control, monitored and enforced by the Water Services Regulation Authority – better known as Ofwat.
Every five years Ofwat carries out a ‘Periodic Review’ of our costs, charges and future investment requirements. Having considered our performance and efficiency in providing services (relative to the other companies in England and Wales), they set a series of annual price limits for each service for the 5 years covered by the review. This determines how much revenue we are allowed to recover every year from each service. In addition, they set out a series of performance measures that we are required to meet. These performance measures, referred to as ‘Output Delivery Incentives’ or more often ‘ODI’s’, reflect customers priorities e.g., reductions in leakage, sewer flooding etc. and can attract financial rewards and penalties – outperforming against an ODI and providing a higher level of service to customers can generate a financial reward, whilst underperforming can give rise to a financial penalty.
Having rated the quality and ambition of our Business Plan for the 2025-30 period as ‘Outstanding’
We have been allowed funding of £15 billion over the 5-year period – up from £8 billion in 2020-25. This significant increase recognises a step-change in the Water Industry National Environment Programme (WINEP), expenditure on the water supply-demand balance, water quality, increased resilience, improved asset health, investment to facilitate population growth and new houses and improved services to customers. Further details of this overall investment and the performance measures that we have agreed to deliver over the next five years can be found below.
The annual revenue controls set by Ofwat (see below) allow us to recover a fixed amount of revenue from our customers. For most of our charges these are then modified by inflation, adjustments for performance and any over or under-recovery in previous years.
The annual increases set out in Ofwat’s Final Determination i.e. before any of the above adjustments are as follows:
2025-26 % |
2026-27 % |
2027-28 % |
2028-29 % |
2029-30 % |
|
| Water Resources activities | 10.92 | 4.72 | -12.48 | 8.44 | 4.28 |
| Network Plus water activities | 34.51 | 6.58 | 10.14 | 0.58 | -1.03 |
| Network plus wastewater activities | -5.67 | 13.50 | 12.17 | 6.92 | 4.81 |
2025-26 £m |
2026-27 £m |
2027-28 £m |
2028-29 £m |
2029-30 £m |
|
| Bioresources unadjusted revenue | 134.397 | 135.162 | 136.438 | 138.255 | 140.211 |
The above price controls and increases are to fund our investment programme which covers four areas:
To mitigate the impact of the increases referred to above, customers may want to consider whether they can reduce their water usage. Information on water efficiency can be found on our website by following the links below:
2025-26 Charges
Our Wholesale Charges, tariff tables, and our Statement of Significant Changes for the financial year.
Previous charges and publications
We publish indicative wholesale charges for the coming year in October and these are finalised in January each year. We also notify retailers in advance when we are planning to make significant changes to the way we charge (we publish this in July, 9 months before the changes will take effect).
Understanding our tariffs and charges
If you are a non-household customer, we will still supply your water and treat your used water, but your retailer will be your point of contact for meter reading, billing and collection.