US households are paying 62% more for drinking water than they did a decade ago – outpacing inflation, grocery prices and household incomes, according to a new study.

Food & Water Watch, a Washington DC-based non-profit, analyzed 2025 billing data from the 500 largest community water systems in the US, which together serve about 155 million people, or 45% of the country’s population. The analysis compared current rates with data from a similar Food & Water Watch survey conducted in 2015. The study does not include wastewater or storm water charges, which are often billed separately from drinking water service.

In 2025, the average household using 60,000 gallons of water paid $531 for drinking water service, according to the study. However, costs varied widely, with annual bills ranging from $133 at the cheapest system to $1,416 at the most expensive.

Water prices rose 1.6 times faster than overall inflation between 2015 and 2025. Consumer prices increased 39% during that period, compared with a 62% jump in water bills, according to the study. Water costs also rose more than twice as fast as groceries, which increased 30%, and eggs, which rose 28%.

Water bills also rose faster than household incomes, increasing 19% more than the national median household income between 2014 and 2024, the study found.

Mary Grant, Food & Water Watch’s water program director and a co-author of the study, said: “Water bills are increasing much faster than many households can keep up with and these escalating water costs impact every corner of the country. Low-income households are being hit the hardest.

“Corporate water abuses, federal disinvestment and climate change are supercharging water rate hikes across the country.”

The increases were particularly severe in some states. Water bills in New Hampshire jumped 177% over the decade, followed by Oregon at 114% and West Virginia at 95%. In Louisiana, Maryland and West Virginia, water bills grew at roughly twice the rate of state median household incomes, while in New Hampshire water bills increased nearly five times faster.

The study also found a major disparity between publicly owned and for-profit water systems.

Corporate-owned utilities charged the average household $823 a year, compared with $494 for publicly owned systems – a difference of $329, or 67%. Corporate systems accounted for just 11% of the 500 systems the study analyzed but represented 44% of the 25 most expensive systems. The study added that 70% of the top 10 were owned by for-profit corporations.

California accounted for 52% of the 25 most expensive water systems. By contrast, all 25 of the least expensive systems were publicly owned. About 60% of the least expensive systems were in the south, including many in Florida and Georgia, the study found.

Water was even less affordable for low-income households, according to the study. Water bills exceeded the study’s affordability threshold in 93% of systems, costing more than 1.5% of income for the poorest fifth of households. Only Idaho and Utah stayed below the threshold.

West Virginia and Puerto Rico faced the heaviest financial burdens, the study found. Water bills consumed about 11% of income for low-income households in West Virginia and roughly 20% in Puerto Rico, which the study described as “simply unaffordable by any metric”.

Grant of Food & Water Watch said water systems must make updates to repair “ageing water lines and help clean up toxic contamination from lead pipes, Pfas forever chemicals, nitrate pollution from industrial agriculture, the list goes on”. She added: “Corporate control of water systems exacerbates this affordability crisis, as big water monopolies take away local control, prioritize profit and hike water prices even higher.”

Grant said communities could face increasingly difficult choices as they struggle to secure additional public investment. “Without real solutions to hold polluters accountable, establish local affordability programs and expand federal support, systems serving vulnerable communities could face the impossible choice: forgo an urgent water safety project or price many out of water service,” she said.

In a separate statement, the American Water Works Association (AWWA), a non-profit whose membership includes more than 4,300 utilities supplying roughly 80% of North America’s drinking water and treating nearly half its wastewater, pointed to infrastructure renewal, resilience and regulatory requirements as key cost drivers threatening drinking water affordability.

“If communities rely exclusively on revenue from water bills to address these needs, average annual household drinking water bills would rise from $429 in 2025 to $969 by 2050 (2025 dollars) – more than doubling in real terms,” AWWA spokesperson Greg Kail said.

“That would mean an estimated 30.4m households – or 21.5% – would spend more than 2.5% of their income on drinking water, and 53.5m households – 37.8% – would exceed a 1.5% income threshold. An estimated $13.6bn per year in assistance would be needed by 2050 to keep water bills below commonly understood affordability benchmarks,” Kail added.

Meanwhile, the National Association of Water Companies (NAWC), a trade association representing privately owned water and wastewater utilities, said it had not reviewed the Food & Water Watch study but emphasized the growing costs of maintaining water systems.

“Affordability is a legitimate challenge for many households and one that NAWC and its members take seriously,” NAWC spokesperson Jenn Kocher said, citing costs tied to ageing infrastructure, Pfasand lead regulations, cybersecurity and severe weather.

Kocher also highlighted customer-assistance programs offered by private water companies, saying: “Many regulated, private water companies offer robust assistance programs that help low-income customers maintain service and manage bills. These programs are often overlooked in rate comparisons.

“By comparison, many government-owned utilities face legal or other restrictions on cross-subsidizing customers, which can limit the types of assistance programs they are able to provide,” she added.

“Evaluating affordability based solely on published rate schedules can produce a misleading picture of what many customers actually pay after assistance and conservation programs are taken into account,” Kocher continued.

Read full story here…

Recently unredacted legal documents and depositions in the New York Times‘ lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI revealed something extraordinary: executives knew full well of the destructive powers of AI when they rushed to launch products featuring the tech in the wake of the explosive success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Internal Microsoft documents quoted by the newspaper’s lawyers warned of an ugly reality now playing out across the entire economy: “doom loops,” in which AI monetizes the work of human creatives while undermining the economic systems that funded their work in the first place.

“Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time,” one internal Microsoft document reads. “It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain.’”

The closer you look, the more you see doom loops everywhere. Journalists, for example, used to publish work under the assumption that online platforms would drive readership to them. But now, tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini simply summarize their articles without sending readers to their sites, sparking a crisis that seems poised to wipe out the independent media.

Similar stories are playing out across other industries, from music to filmmaking. Writ large, many are concerned that AI will eventually be strong enough to wipe out huge numbers of jobs, creating a situation in which unemployed consumers won’t have the funds to support the economy.

The irony, as the Microsoft document pointed out, is that the AI industry is a snake eating its own tail: the very products that it’s pushing on users rely on fresh cultural content even as they destroy the economic incentives to create it.

It’s also a dire situation for the open web, which recently celebrated the macabre turning point of being dominated by more AI slop than human-authored content. As companies — most notably Google — are fundamentally changing the way users interact with the web, more and more newspapers, media outlets, and local news stations are seriously struggling to make ends meet.

Worse yet, as the legal documents in the NYT‘s copyright lawsuit showed, insiders admitted that the entire operation is built on theft.

“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” an internal Microsoft document admitted.

Plenty of other creative industries are also feeling the pressure as AI-related doom loops continue to undermine livelihoods. According to the latest data from the US Bureau of Labor statistics, it’s a bloodbath — with more than 200,000 jobs in “creative” industries having been lost over the last four years alone, roughly the time since OpenAI launched ChatGPT.

AI-generated music is rapidly crowding out human-produced tracks on streaming services, forcing platforms to figure out where to draw the line. Some have implemented hard and fast rules, while others continue to allow users to exploit algorithms with slop.

Hollywood studios are also doubling down on AI while protesting actors struggle to have their voices heard. Many of them fear that their likeness or voice could soon be rendered worthless, representing an existential threat to their livelihoods.

Even the job market is embroiled in its own doom loop. More and more desperate job seekers are turning to AI to brush up their resumes and manipulate AI-powered job portals, while recruiters are drowning in a wall of almost identical applications.

“We’ve got this tragic situation where each side has a problem,” applicant tracking system company Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait told Wired. “They’re using AI to solve their own problem, but in ways that make the problem worse.”

“And so more AI use begets more AI use, to no one’s benefit,” he added. “The more it’s happening, the worse it gets.”

Similarly, the use of AI in the classroom has skyrocketed, with students using the tech to complete their homework, offloading their cognitive faculties to the machine. Meanwhile, their teachers are using AI to come up with assignments, slowly effacing the human in the loop. Educators who bristle at the idea of using the tech are finding themselves at odds with school administrators.

The effects AI has had on education has been nothing short of a disaster. A recent study by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education concluded that the risks of using generative AI in education massively outweighed the benefits. The associated dangers have never been more apparent, with educators warning that college students are rapidly losing the ability to read.

Proponents of AI, including OpenAI and Microsoft’s lawyers in the ongoing New York Times lawsuit, argue that AI brings something new to the table. They argue that the output of AI models is sufficiently differentiated from the original content it draws on, falling under “fair use,” a longstanding doctrine in US copyright law.

Whether this argument will hold up in court remains to be seen. Besides, we’ve already seen companies, like Anthropic, settle for billions of dollars after being found to have violated copyright laws.

But considering how the tech is simultaneously undermining the very economic systems that produced the data they need to exist in the first place, that may not be a winning strategy in the long run.

By ripping out the carpet from underneath many parts of the economy — and reaping all the financial gains from it — the AI industry is trapping itself in a doom loop of its own creation, a cynical strategy that won’t benefit anybody but those at the very top who kicked the ladder down behind them.

Read full story here…