Shaping our water future - 2025-2030 Price Proposal

We would like your help to shape our water and wastewater services to the end of the decade, so that we can make sure our services meet your needs and deliver community value.

Most of the prices that we charge are set by the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART) based on the efficient costs of providing essential services. IPART sets our prices every five years, with adjustments for inflation between reviews. We have started a multi-stage engagement program with our customers and stakeholders to get feedback to help inform decision making and shape our proposal.

Hunter Water is required to submit our plan for the services we’ll provide and the prices customers will pay to IPART. This is called our ‘pricing proposal’. We want the activities and investments that we propose to reflect your views and preferences and the prices we charge to be fair. We know that our community is concerned about the cost of living at the moment but we do not want to cut costs in the short-term if it leads to higher costs and prices, or poor services in the future.

We would like your help to get the balance right.

Read about the ways we're engaging with you to inform our 2025-2030 pricing proposal here.

Thank you to everyone who shared their views with us during stage 1 of our engagement. Read the stage 1 engagement summary to find out more.

Thank you to everyone who shared their views with us during stage 2 of our engagement. Read the stage 2 engagement summary to find out more.

Thank you to our Deliberative Forum Community Panel who came together six times over four months to deliberate on the topics that were investigated in Stage 1 and valued in Stage 2. Click on the links to read the Engagement Report and Guidebook participants were provided to assist with their deliberations.

Read about how the Deliberative Forum was conducted and the panel's recommendations here.

Watch our video to understand more about this process.

Stage 4 involved consulting with a subset of our deliberative Forum Community Panel (formed in Stage 3) to refine customer outcomes (expectations for the customer outcomes we will deliver over the price path 2025-2030) and develop associated measures. Effectively, our customers will design the accountability metrics that we will use and report on until 2030. Thank you to those who participated in the workshop. Read more about the outcomes from this workshop here.

Our customers also asked to have input into our pricing structures. We listened to our customers and adapted our program in response. We undertook a price structures survey and a series of focus groups to gain insights into customer and community preferences as part of Stage 4. Read about the outcomes of this research here.

The bill you receive contributes to each step in the chain from harvesting water in catchments to releasing your treated wastewater back into the environment or recycling it for further use. As this diagram shows, when you pay your Hunter Water bill for water and wastewater, you are paying for: