Gainesville Regional Utilities (GRU) – Water and Wastewater

Provider briefing

How this utility’s billing works

Gainesville Regional Utilities (GRU) – Water and Wastewater operates as a public water authority serving Gainesville and surrounding unincorporated Alachua County areas served by Gainesville Regional Utilities. 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 residential water charges by domestic meter size plus a fixed customer charge, with separate wastewater customer and metered-water charges. FY2026 5/8-inch water customer charge is $9.60; usage is $2.51 per 1,000 gallons for 1,000–4,000 gallons, $3.94 for 5,000–12,000, and $6.15 at 13,000 or more. Wastewater is $10.65 per month plus $7.42 per 1,000 gallons, based on actual water use rounded to the nearest 1,000 gallons and capped at 12,000 gallons. Customers outside Gainesville can be subject to a 25% water/wastewater surcharge and local utility taxes.. Bills are generated monthly. gru issues monthly statements, supports paperless monthly billing, and the fy2026 rate sheet expresses water and wastewater charges per bill rendered/month., and a typical residential cost reference is For a 5/8-inch Gainesville residential account using 5,000 gallons, the FY2026 base estimate is about $23.58 water ($9.60 customer charge + $10.04 for the first 4,000 gallons + $3.94 for the next 1,000) and $37.10 wastewater ($10.65 + 5×$7.42), or $60.68 before applicable Gainesville water utility tax, county/city surcharge, stormwater, refuse, or other charges. Including the 10% in-city water utility tax shown in the rate notes yields an illustrative total of about $63.04 before other bill components.. 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

Residential wastewater is not independently metered; GRU uses 100% of metered domestic-water usage, rounded to the nearest 1,000 gallons, at $7.42 per 1,000 gallons plus the $10.65 monthly wastewater customer charge. The wastewater usage component is capped at 12,000 gallons. A flat $47.75 monthly single-family usage charge applies to qualifying non-metered private-well customers discharging to the wastewater system.

Meter and infrastructure notes

GRU bills monthly and provides a meter-reading schedule link and tools that let customers read water meters to tenths of a gallon for leak detection. Remote meter-reading installation is an available service, listed at $153 for water on the current special-service schedule. The public pages do not state that every water account has hourly AMI transmission or identify a universal AMI vendor; usage is read on GRU's scheduled monthly cycle.