New tool, for anyone who has stared at a municipal statement trying to work out why the sewerage line never seems to move.
Pick your metro, type in the kilolitres off your meter, and it shows your water charge block by block and your sanitation charge the way your metro actually bills it. Six metros so far: Johannesburg (both conventional and prepaid meters), Cape Town, Tshwane, eThekwini, Ekurhuleni and Buffalo City.
The finding that made me build this rather than just answer it once in a reply. Take the same Joburg household, same 500 square metre erf, same 20 kilolitres a month. On a conventional meter that comes to about R1,437. On a prepaid meter it is about R837. Same city, same tariff schedule, same water use, a R600 gap, and it gets worse the less water you use, because conventional-meter sanitation in Joburg is a flat monthly charge banded by your stand size rather than your usage. At 10 kilolitres the conventional bill barely moves while the prepaid one falls with it, and the gap widens to over R700.
That flat-versus-volumetric split turned out to be the real story of the whole tool, not just a Joburg quirk. Johannesburg’s conventional meter and Buffalo City both charge sanitation as a flat amount by erf size, so using less water saves nothing on that line. Cape Town, Tshwane, eThekwini, Ekurhuleni and Joburg’s prepaid meter all tie sanitation to your metered water instead, but three of those, Tshwane, eThekwini and Ekurhuleni, assume a shrinking share of your water actually reaches the sewer as usage climbs, so a heavy user’s saving on sanitation is smaller than their saving on water. Only Joburg prepaid scales sanitation the same way water scales.
Block tariffs are not shaped the same either. Every metro charges more per kilolitre the more you use, but the width and steepness of those blocks differs enough that the same 30 kilolitres a month costs about R1,547 in Tshwane, the cheapest of the six, and about R2,263 in eThekwini and Cape Town, the priciest, a gap of roughly R715, with Joburg’s conventional meter and Ekurhuleni landing in between at around R2,100. There is no single “average South African water rate” that means anything once you pick a metro.
Two metros are deliberately left out rather than guessed. Nelson Mandela Bay bills by average daily consumption, and how a month’s usage actually prices under that method is not confirmed from the municipality’s own tariff book, so a number could be wrong by close to a third. Mangaung’s water tariff is sourced but no sanitation figure could be found to the same standard as the other six. Both stay off the page until that changes, not filled in with a guess.
Every metro’s water and sanitation figures were read directly from that council’s own approved tariff book for the current financial year, the same primary-sourcing standard as the Rainwater Tank and Garden Watering Calculators, which share this page’s tariff data. Ekurhuleni’s was additionally cross-checked against two independent press reports on the year’s increase. The exact source is named once you pick your metro.
It deliberately does not do property rates or refuse removal. Rates need your municipal valuation, which most people do not have on hand, plus a rebate ladder that differs by metro, and refuse is billed by bin count or erf size rather than water use. Both are different enough that folding them in would make a wrong line harder to spot in a total you can no longer check against your own statement.
If your metro’s tariff has moved since this was built, or Nelson Mandela Bay or Mangaung’s billing mechanic is something you actually know from a real bill, I would like to hear it.