Where your money goes

See how every £1 from your bill in 2025-26 was spent and how your money helps pay for the services we provide.

How each £1 is spent

Running our operations

Your bill helps us run the essential services that provide safe, reliable water and remove wastewater every day.

This includes treating and testing drinking water, operating treatment works, reservoirs and pumping stations, and making sure our services meet the standards you expect.

It also funds the skilled people who keep services running, from teams who treat water and respond to emergencies, to those who support customers and plan future improvements.

Maintaining our assets

Your bill helps us look after the pipes, pumps, valves, meters and sites that move water and wastewater around the region.

By maintaining these, we can reduce the risk of disruption and protect service quality.

Investing in long-term improvements

Part of your bill funds essential long-term schemes to upgrade our infrastructure and ensure we can meet future challenges such as climate change and population growth.

This includes:

• improving our water recycling centres to remove nutrients
• tackling storm overflows
• replacing old water mains
• rolling out smart meters across the region.

Energy costs

Moving, treating and supplying water requires significant amounts of energy.

Some of your bill helps cover the electricity needed to pump water through the network, operate treatment facilities and power monitoring systems to keep essential services running around the clock.

We continually work to improve energy efficiency and increase the use of renewable energy to help reduce costs and environmental impact over time.

Business rates, abstraction and licences

Water companies pay a range of charges and fees to operate and protect the environment responsibly.

These include business rates on operational sites, and abstraction charges for taking water from the environment.

Financing our investment

Many of the assets that provide water services last for decades and benefit both current and future customers.

Rather than asking today's customers to pay the full cost upfront, investment is funded through a combination of customer bills, investor funding and borrowing.

This allows major improvements to be delivered when they are needed, while spreading costs fairly across the generations that benefit from them.

To do this, we need to pay interest on the money that is borrowed from investors – much like how homeowners are charged interest payments on a mortgage.

We have also paid dividends to our owner (YTL) in the past, in return for upfront investment – but only when our customer, environmental and financial performance allows.

Under our current business plan, we don't expect to pay our owners a dividend between 2025 and 2030, with any profits being reinvested back into Wessex Water and the services you receive from us.