City of Phoenix Water Services Department – City Services Bill

Provider briefing

How this utility’s billing works

City of Phoenix Water Services Department – City Services Bill operates as a municipal department serving Phoenix and the City of Phoenix Water Services service territory. Customers should use the provider’s current account-specific bill and official customer-service instructions as the final authority for deadlines, balances, and service requests.

The published water-rate framework is described as Seasonal metered rates with a fixed meter-size service charge, an included monthly water allowance, excess-use volume charges, and a per-unit environmental charge. Effective March 1, 2025 and still shown as current in 2026 materials, a 5/8-inch inside-city residential account has a $4.64 monthly service charge including 5 units/3,740 gallons October–May and 8 units/5,984 gallons June–September; excess volume is $4.93 per unit in the low season, $5.65 in spring/fall, and $6.13 in the high season, while the environmental charge is $0.62 per unit. Outside-city rates are generally 150% of the applicable inside-city rate, subject to the City’s exceptions and taxes.. Bills are generated monthly. phoenix’s current official financing disclosure says all accounts are billed monthly and regular bills are due 21 days after the bill issuance date., and a typical residential cost reference is Approximately $45–$75 per month for combined water and sewer for a typical single-family customer using about 5,000–7,000 gallons, before any solid-waste charges and depending on the customer’s meter size, season, taxes, and sewer average. The water-only component can be materially lower in a summer month because the 5/8-inch base charge includes 5,984 gallons in June–September; the City separately applies environmental charges to all metered units and computes sewer from the winter average.. These descriptions are useful planning benchmarks; actual charges can change with meter size, usage, sewer averaging, local taxes, drought stages, or account-specific fees.

Wastewater and sewer calculation

Phoenix calculates a residential sewer charge from a percentage of the customer’s average monthly water use during the January–March billing cycle, normally the lowest-use months. The City’s sewer schedule lists a one-family residence at 80% adjusted sewer flow and then applies the applicable sewer rate to that flow; the resulting sewer charge is carried into later monthly City Services Bills. A high winter reading caused by a repaired leak, pool refill, or broken irrigation system can raise the following sewer charge, which is why the City offers a separate Sewer Fee Review. The calculation is not a simple fixed percentage of the current month’s water bill; it is tied to measured winter usage and the published residential sewer schedule.

Meter and infrastructure notes

Phoenix bills approximately 465,000 accounts monthly. The current customer guidance says meters use electronic devices and are read by handheld computers or mobile collectors inside meter-reading vehicles, which is Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) and has largely eliminated manual reads. A May 2026 City Council update says Phoenix is transitioning from drive-by AMR to two-way cellular Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), replacing roughly 77,000–93,000 cellular endpoints per year over a transition expected to take up to six years; AMI is intended to provide near-real-time data, leak/abnormal-use detection, and a future daily-use customer portal. Therefore, the 2026 system is mixed and transitional rather than uniformly AMI: monthly billing continues, with AMR readings for much of the inventory while AMI deployment proceeds.