City of San Diego Public Utilities Department – Water/Wastewater Customer Support

Provider briefing

How this utility’s billing works

City of San Diego Public Utilities Department – Water/Wastewater Customer Support operates as a municipal department serving City of San Diego and the City of San Diego Public Utilities water and wastewater 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 Increasing block tiers for single-family domestic water use plus a meter-size monthly base fee. Effective January 1, 2026, a typical 3/4-inch single-family meter has a $35.53 monthly base fee; usage from 0–10 HCF is $8.51/HCF, 11–22 HCF is $9.50/HCF, and usage above 22 HCF is $11.89/HCF. Multi-family, commercial/industrial, irrigation, and temporary-construction accounts use their own class-specific volumetric rates. The City’s current rate-adjustment page says rates are tiered in 2026 and discusses a proposed unitary structure beginning January 1, 2027.. Bills are generated most single-family residential customers are billed every other month (bi-monthly). the city’s bill calculator states that its monthly estimate should generally be doubled for those customers; monthly accounts also exist, and payment-plan rules distinguish monthly from bi-monthly billing., and a typical residential cost reference is Approximately $135–$180 per month for a typical established single-family account using about 5,000–7,000 gallons (roughly 6.7–9.4 HCF) when water and wastewater are combined. The FY2026 water component is about $93–$116 per month using the 3/4-inch base fee and first-tier rate. The typical sewer component adds a two-month base of $22.56 plus $5.92/HCF applied to the individualized sewer-use calculation; actual bills vary with winter sewer history, meter size, billing-cycle length, and any stormwater or other municipal charges.. 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

For single-family residential customers, San Diego monitors water use during the November–April winter period, uses two billing cycles, and selects the cycle with the least usage to calculate an individualized flat sewer rate effective with the bill including July 1 of the following year. The FY2026 sewer schedule lists a $22.56 base sewer fee for two months and $5.92/HCF, with the residential rate based on 95% of total water use and a cap equivalent to 20 HCF per month. A new customer without a winter history is charged the published new-customer fee based on the citywide average until a winter reading is available. Multi-family and commercial customers use different metered-flow and pollutant-loading rules.

Meter and infrastructure notes

The City’s meter system uses field reads with electronic reading technology; the service-request pages specifically refer to an ERT on the meter and allow a customer to submit a photograph when a read is estimated. Most single-family accounts are billed bi-monthly. Public Utilities holds bills showing unusual or exceptionally high usage for staff review, and estimates usage from prior consumption when a meter cannot be read or accessed. MyWaterSD supplies usage history, alerts, and account visibility, but the current official pages do not claim that every meter is a fully two-way AMI endpoint; the 2026 record is best described as mixed ERT/remote-read and field-read infrastructure with estimated-read fallback.