Water bill checker

Why the rate is something you type in, not a fixed number

NWSC publishes its tariff as a graphic, not a schedule, and the July 2026 version of it does not add up. Every one of the seven customer categories rose by exactly 18% from the 2025 figure, while the “VAT inclusive” column printed right beside it did not move at all. Either the tariff genuinely rose 18% across the board in a year the previous rise was under half a percent, or that left-hand column is now VAT-inclusive and simply still labelled the way it was last year. Both readings are consistent with NWSC’s own artwork, and the difference between them is 18% of a real bill.

Rather than guess which reading is right, we pre-fill the rate from the published figure for your category and ask you to correct it against your own NWSC bill, where the rate actually charged is printed. Whatever number is in that field is treated as the final, all-in rate, and this tool never multiplies it by anything.

Pick the category printed on your bill, not the one that sounds right

A house or flat let to a tenant is normally billed as domestic. But NWSC’s own category definitions put hostels under commercial, and a shared standpipe serving several households can fall under the public standpipe category instead. A compound of single rooms sharing one tap sits close to both lines. Use whatever category NWSC has actually printed on your bill. Defaulting to domestic when you are not sure will understate the real cost by roughly 20% per cubic metre.

There are no consumption bands

Unlike electricity, NWSC does not charge more per unit the further into the month you go. Each category is one flat rate per cubic metre, so the bill really is just consumption times rate. Only the largest commercial and industrial users get a lower per-unit rate above a volume threshold, and that works in the opposite direction: heavier users pay less, not more.

What is deliberately left out

There is no fixed monthly service charge on this tool. NWSC’s tariff graphic, its FAQ page and its terms and conditions are all silent on whether a standing charge exists at all, so nothing has been invented to fill that gap.

There is also no sewerage line. Sewerage is widely quoted online as a percentage of the water bill, but the specific percentages in circulation trace back to Nairobi Water’s tariff, not NWSC’s. If your real bill is higher than this estimate, a service charge, a sewerage charge or a leak past the meter are the likely reasons. A leak past the meter is the landlord’s responsibility to fix under NWSC’s own terms.

NWSC bills on a 30-day cycle, not a calendar month, and its rates are indexed once a year, effective every 1 July, so re-check the rate you have entered each July even if nothing else about your account has changed.

Splitting the bill across tenants, with no markup, on purpose

The Water Act allows a person supplied with water to pass it on to someone else for use on the same premises, without that being an offence. That is a genuinely different position from electricity, where reselling power always requires a licence. A landlord passing a water bill through to tenants in the same building is inside that permission.

But that permission is to supply water at cost, not to trade in it. NWSC, not the landlord, fixes the rate, and where a unit is not separately metered the Landlord and Tenant Act makes the water charge the landlord’s own liability in the first place, so there is nothing to mark up even if the law allowed it. So this tool, like the shared electricity meter calculator, has no markup field anywhere, and the shares it produces are hard-capped in the arithmetic itself to never add up to more than the bill you actually paid.

This is a reading of the Water Act and the Landlord and Tenant Act, not legal advice, and is worth putting to a Ugandan advocate before you rely on it in a tenancy agreement.