The story behind your bill

We think our Hafren Dyfrdwy water is wonderful. It’s the shower that wakes us up and the comforting cuppa that gives us that “ahhh” feeling after a long day. We cook with it… grow our gardens with it… it’s an important part of our everyday lives.

One of the lowest bills in Wales

So every time you pay your water bill, it covers much more than just the cost of cleaning the water you use. It goes towards caring for our water and the environment we take it from.

We want to make sure there’s enough of it for everyone, today, tomorrow and far into the future.

Behind the scenes at Hafren Dyfrdwy we work hard 24 hours a day, 52 weeks a year to ensure that you receive a clean, safe and reliable water supply.

Every day we provide around 61 million litres of clean tap water to 107,000 households and businesses.

Behind the scenes we’re working hard 24 hours a day, on a network of pipes over 3100KM long, with thousands of pumping and treatment stations across your region.

And at the same time, we’re repairing an average of 75 leaks a month and upgrading and investing for the future, to make sure we can keep on doing all of this while protecting the places where we live.

Our average household bill for water and sewerage in 2024-25 will be around £433 per year or just £1.19 a day. That's one of the lowest bills in Wales and England.

Image: Forecast average annual household combined water and sewage bills (£); source: Water UK

So, what makes up that £1.19 per day?

Performance incentives

The way we’re regulated by Ofwat means there’s a ceiling on how much water companies are allowed to charge. We think this is fair as it protects customers from higher bills.

Like all water companies in England and Wales our regulators tell us how much we can charge and this will vary every year depending on our costs and recent performance. What you pay links to the service we deliver and Ofwat holds us to account against the promises that we make and can penalise us if we don’t deliver them.

So how does it all work? We talk to the regulator and customers to understand what is important for us to focus on. The size of the performance incentive is based on how much customers value the improvements we’ve made over the last five years. There is a small reduction in your charges as we didn’t improve our service as much as we wanted and therefore did not meet enough of our commitments to qualify for rewards on all measures.

 

Return on investors

We did not pay a dividend to shareholders for this year, but we did pay interest on our borrowing.

 

Building new assets

New infrastructure to serve you and protect the environment for generations to come.

 

Energy

We need to use energy to clean the water and pump it around our network so you know it’s there when you turn on the tap or flush the loo. Higher energy prices are affecting everyone at the moment and we’re doing what we can to protect you from these rising costs.

Maintaining our equipment

With nearly 2000 miles of pipes to look after, 6 treatment works and 8 reservoirs it’s a big job to keep our existing network in shape it’s a 365-days-a-year task to keep everything ticking over for our customers.

 

People and materials

We believe in looking after the people who look after you. We’re a Real Living Wage employer with around 180 local employees and an expert supply chain looking after everything, including managing our reservoirs, cleaning water or wastewater, fixing pipes and being there when you need us.

 

Taxes, rates and licences

We’re a UK-based company and we think it’s right that we should pay to support our region and society in general. Some of the services we provide have VAT added by the government. We also pay for licences to provide our services to you, for example to our regulators and to the Environment Agency to allow us to extract water from natural sources.

 

Extra ways we can help

Customer Promise

If anything ever impacts your water supply, we will let you know what is happening and what we are doing to fix it. We’ll keep you regularly updated, and if supplies are impacted over a longer period, we’ll also make alternative water supplies available to you.

You can download a simple guide to our scheme of charges.