The standard argument for privatizing a water system goes something like: municipal utilities are sclerotic, private companies are efficient, shareholders impose discipline, and the price signals will sort it out. This is a good argument, and it appears in many consulting decks. The counterargument has now been reduced to a single number, which is that the private system charges typical households 67 percent more on average than the public one does. Jake Johnson reported for Common Dreams on a report out Tuesday from Food & Water Watch (FWW) making exactly that finding, and it is hard to decide whether the efficiency or the water is the thing being privatized.
The broader numbers are grim in a quieter way. FWW’s research shows household drinking water bills for typical American households rose an average of 62 percent over the past decade — twice the increase in grocery prices and 19 percent faster than median household incomes. Water is, among household expenses, one of the few that simply cannot be substituted away from. You can trade down from steak to beans when food prices spike; there is no off-brand tap. That makes water bills less like a market price and more like a slow-motion fee levied on being alive, which is one reason the advocacy group reaches for policy language rather than shopping tips. “A water affordability crisis is rapidly expanding throughout America,” said Mary Grant, the group’s water policy director. “While struggling to pay for other essentials like food and energy, many households are grappling with water costs that are rising even faster.”
Now, an obvious reply to the 67-percent figure is that it conflates ownership with geography: private water companies are concentrated in expensive, heavily regulated states, so of course their bills are higher. And indeed, more than half of the 25 most expensive water systems in the study were in California, and California and Pennsylvania “stood out with numerous appearances” in the top ten, per FWW — with the single most expensive bills between 2015 and 2025 issued by San Jose Water Company, a private utility. But the geography cuts both ways. In Louisiana, Maryland, New Hampshire and West Virginia, water bills grew about twice as fast as statewide median household incomes. West Virginia — which sits near the bottom of the national income table — had the highest average water cost in the study, at $1,383 a year. And overall, the group found, water bills were unaffordable for low-income households in 93 percent of the systems it surveyed. That is not “affordability challenges persist in pockets.” That is “the product is unaffordable to poor people, almost everywhere, as a default.”
“Rampant corporate control of our water systems and federal disinvestment in aging infrastructure are driving up bills, forcing households to pick up the tab,” Grant said. Note the two-part mechanism in that sentence, because the policy asks follow it exactly. The first part — corporate control — generates FWW’s headline demand: state and local governments should ban water privatization outright and roll back all pro-privatization bills. The second part — federal disinvestment — is the less quotable but arguably more load-bearing claim. Aging pipes need replacing whether the owner is a city or a corporation, and if Washington won’t fund the work, the cost lands on the rate base either way, public or private. The difference being mainly that the private version arrives with a return on equity attached.
So the group’s federal asks, beyond the anti-privatization push, are: hold polluters accountable for drinking water contamination and prevent new contamination “from large corporations, including factory farms, fossil fuel corporations, hyperscale data centers, and the chemicals and plastics industries” — note the data centers making their way into the water-polluter roster, which tells you something about 2026 — reject cuts to safe and clean water funding, and fully fund safe water in every community, via legislation like the WATER Act, which would create a trust fund to support compliance with federal drinking water quality laws.
FWW’s closing warning is the sort of sentence designed to be quoted back at a hearing: “Water bills will continue to increase faster than households can keep up with … unless all levels of government take action to stop corporate abuses and support water affordability.” The group is an advocacy shop and the report is an advocacy document — the 67 percent is their math, on their sampled systems, so the usual caveats about who commissioned the finding apply. But the underlying physics doesn’t care who did the arithmetic. Somebody has to pay for the pipes, the pipes are old, the money isn’t coming from Washington, and the bill goes out monthly. The privatization debate is, at bottom, a debate about which line of the invoice the margin shows up on.
West Virginia, meanwhile, has one of the lowest household incomes in the country and the most expensive water. Efficiency, presumably, is on its way.