Turn on a faucet in any American city and water comes out. It is so reliable, so unremarkable, that most people never think about what it takes to make it happen. They do not think about the miles of pipe beneath their feet, the treatment plants running around the clock, or the engineers monitoring pressure and chemistry at three in the morning. Clean water, in the American imagination, is simply there.
It will not be there forever. Not at this rate.
The Numbers Beneath the Streets
The United States has more than 2.2 million miles of underground drinking water pipes. Many of them were installed in the early and mid-twentieth century, engineered for a lifespan of 75 to 100 years. Do the math: a pipe laid in 1950 is now 76 years old. A pipe laid in 1940 has exceeded its design life by a decade. Across the country, these aging systems are failing — quietly, underground, out of sight.
The consequences are anything but quiet. According to data compiled by the American Society of Civil Engineers, approximately 240,000 water main breaks occur in the United States every year. Each break means disrupted service, boil-water advisories, torn-up roads, and repair crews working through the night. The annual cost of these emergency repairs is estimated at $2.6 billion. And that number captures only the breaks we find and fix. The slower losses — the seepage, the hairline fractures, the joints that weep water into the surrounding soil — are harder to quantify but far more expensive in aggregate.
The best available estimates suggest that the U.S. loses roughly six billion gallons of treated drinking water every day to leaking infrastructure. That is water that has already been sourced, pumped, filtered, treated, and pressurized — water that cost real money to produce — vanishing into the ground before it ever reaches a tap. The annual financial loss from this leakage has been estimated at $7.6 billion.
A Grade That Should Alarm You
In March 2025, the American Society of Civil Engineers released its quadrennial Report Card for America's Infrastructure. The grades were not encouraging. Drinking water received a C-minus. Wastewater earned a D-plus. Stormwater systems received a D.
These are not abstract letter grades. They represent the professional judgment of engineers who have assessed the physical condition, capacity, funding, and resilience of the systems that deliver water to 330 million Americans. A C-minus for drinking water means the system is functioning, but barely — with significant deficiencies, deferred maintenance, and a growing gap between what is needed and what is being invested.
The EPA's 7th Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey and Assessment, published in 2023, put a dollar figure on that gap. The agency estimated that $625 billion in capital improvements will be needed over the next twenty years just for drinking water systems. Of that total, $422.9 billion is needed for distribution and transmission — replacing and rehabilitating the aging pipelines that carry water from treatment plants to homes and businesses. Another $107 billion is needed for treatment infrastructure, and $56.1 billion for storage.
When you add wastewater and stormwater needs, the total climbs past $1.25 trillion over twenty years. The American Water Works Association's March 2026 report projected even higher figures: $2.1 to $2.4 trillion in total capital required for drinking water infrastructure alone over the next 25 years, once you factor in regulatory compliance, climate resilience, and cybersecurity. Current annual spending by drinking water utilities is approximately $33.6 billion. The AWWA estimates the annual investment needed is closer to $90 billion — leaving an annual funding gap of roughly $56.6 billion.
What Failure Looks Like
For anyone who thinks these numbers are theoretical, consider the cities where the theory has already become reality.
In Flint, Michigan, a decision to switch water sources in 2014 without proper corrosion control treatment caused lead to leach from aging service lines into the drinking water supply. Nearly 100,000 residents were exposed. The health consequences — particularly for children — were devastating and long-lasting. More than 11,000 lead service lines had to be replaced, a project that took nearly a decade and cost over $400 million. Flint completed its required lead line replacements in July 2025. The damage to public trust has not been so easily repaired.
In Jackson, Mississippi, the situation has been even more prolonged. Jackson's water system has suffered from decades of underinvestment. In August 2022, flooding knocked out the city's main water treatment plant, leaving 150,000 people without reliable water for weeks. A federal court placed the system under a third-party manager. As of early 2026, that manager has warned that federal stabilization funds are running out and has proposed rate increases of nearly 12 percent — the second such increase in just over a year. Reports have documented individual pipes in Jackson's system leaking five million gallons per day.
Flint and Jackson are not outliers. They are previews. Every city in America with pre-war infrastructure is on the same trajectory. The only variable is time.
The Affordability Trap
Here is the cruel arithmetic of deferred maintenance: the longer you wait, the more it costs. And the cost does not land on a government ledger somewhere in Washington. It lands on household water bills.
Over the past five years, combined water and sewer bills for typical American households have increased by approximately 24 percent. In 2025 alone, those bills rose 5.1 percent — outpacing the rate of inflation. Since the year 2000, the cost of water, sewer, and trash collection services has surged by 207 percent, more than double the 93 percent increase in overall consumer prices during the same period.
These increases are not arbitrary. They reflect the reality that utilities must replace aging infrastructure, comply with stricter water quality regulations, and absorb higher energy and chemical costs. Somebody has to pay for the pipes. In most American cities, that somebody is the ratepayer.
For middle-income households, rising water bills are an annoyance. For low-income households, they are becoming a crisis. The EPA defines water affordability as spending no more than 3 to 4.5 percent of household income on water services. By that measure, an estimated 12 to 19 million low-income American households are already paying unaffordable water bills. For some, water costs consume more than 40 percent of monthly income.
The consequences of nonpayment are severe: service disconnections, late fees, property liens, and in some jurisdictions, the threat of eviction or foreclosure. The federal Low-Income Household Water Assistance Program, which provided temporary relief from 2021 through 2024, has seen its funding expire. There is currently no permanent federal program to help low-income households afford water.
If the infrastructure funding gap is closed primarily through rate increases — and absent a dramatic change in federal or state policy, that is exactly what will happen — average household water bills could more than double by 2050, according to projections cited in a November 2025 analysis of national water infrastructure needs.
The Federal Response: Necessary but Insufficient
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, enacted in 2021, directed more than $50 billion to the EPA for drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater improvements. That funding included $15 billion specifically for lead service line replacement. In fiscal year 2025, the EPA allocated $6.2 billion for water infrastructure upgrades.
This is real money, and it matters. But it is also temporary. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law's water funding is set to expire after fiscal year 2026. And even at its peak, it covers a fraction of the estimated need. The ASCE projects a $620 billion gap between drinking water needs and planned investments by 2043. For wastewater and stormwater combined, only about 30 percent of the $99 billion needed annually is currently being funded, a shortfall that could exceed $690 billion by 2044.
Federal funding is a down payment on a mortgage that nobody has agreed to take out.
What Honest Accounting Requires
We at the EPR Foundation believe that clean water is not a partisan issue, and the infrastructure crisis is not a problem that can be solved by any single funding mechanism. What it requires is honest accounting — a willingness to look at what these systems actually cost to build, maintain, and operate over their full lifecycle, and to plan accordingly.
That means several things.
First, it means ending the practice of deferred maintenance as fiscal policy. For decades, municipalities have balanced budgets by pushing water infrastructure costs into the future. Every year of deferred maintenance makes the eventual repair more expensive. This is not savings. It is debt — accruing interest in the form of water main breaks, lost water, and degraded service.
Second, it means transparent rate-setting. Ratepayers deserve to understand what their water bills pay for, what infrastructure needs remain, and what the long-term plan looks like. Too many utilities operate with opaque budgets and minimal public engagement. If we are asking people to pay more — and we are — they deserve to know why and for how long.
Third, it means protecting affordability. A permanent, adequately funded water assistance program is not a luxury. It is a prerequisite for raising rates to the levels that infrastructure replacement demands. You cannot close a trillion-dollar funding gap on the backs of people who cannot afford their current bills.
Fourth, it means investing in asset management. Many utilities do not have a complete inventory of their own pipes — their age, material, condition, or remaining useful life. You cannot maintain what you have not mapped. Modern asset management systems, leak detection technology, and predictive analytics can help utilities prioritize spending and extend the life of existing infrastructure. These tools exist. They should be standard practice, not optional upgrades.
The Bill Comes Due
Americans have grown accustomed to clean water as a given — a background condition of modern life, like electricity or paved roads. But electricity and roads have powerful constituencies lobbying for their funding. Water infrastructure, buried underground and invisible until it fails, has no such advocate.
The numbers are clear. The engineering is understood. The solutions are known. What has been missing is the political will to act before the next crisis forces action — and the honesty to tell the public what clean water actually costs.
Six billion gallons a day. That is what we are losing while we deliberate. Every day we wait, the bill gets bigger, the pipes get older, and the options get narrower.
The true cost of clean water is not what we pay on our monthly bills. It is what we will pay when the system finally fails — in emergency repairs, in public health consequences, in economic disruption, and in the slow erosion of public trust that comes when a country as wealthy as this one cannot deliver safe drinking water to its own people.
We can afford to fix this. The question is whether we will choose to, before the choice is made for us.