Guernsey Water has announced price increases for 2026, with a heavy focus on reinvesting into the island’s infrastructure.
Average combined water and wastewater bills for customers will rise by around 9% annually during 2026, with metered customers paying on average £1.79 per day, up from £1.65. Unmetered customers will pay an average of £2.62 per day, up from £2.42.
Standing charges are also rising by 4.5% for water, up to £20.33, and 4.1% for wastewater, up to £34.89.
Cesspit emptying charges will also increase by 4% to £10.89 per collection.
Steve Langois, Guernsey Water’s Managing Director said the increases are necessary as they will help fund investment elsewhere.
“Whether it’s customer homes, public services or business, island life relies on high quality drinking water and effective drainage 24/7.
“If we want to continue to provide that for many generations to come, we’re going to have to invest more in our water and wastewater networks. That’s why Guernsey Water is announcing its plans to invest around £130 million over the next 12 years in those water and wastewater networks to tackle three main challenges.
“The first one is that we have an aging infrastructure that’s evolved over the last 100 years, and we need to increase the renewal of that infrastructure, and the other two twin challenges are population growth and climate change, which we really must start planning for now.”
To protect from those challenges, Guernsey Water is embarking on a wide ranging investment pledge with hundreds of millions going back into the island’s infrastructure.
Total capital investment is increasing from an expected £6.7m in 2025 to £7.8m in 2026, with the utility company expecting to spend nearly £130m on projects between now and 2037.
£72m is allocated to maintaining and replacing the island’s ageing drinking water and wastewater infrastructure, including water mains, sewers, pumping stations, and the Belle Greve wastewater centre.
Around £20m will be spent on upgrading the island’s three water treatment works, and a further £20m is earmarked for a new reservoir at Les Vardes Quarry, which will increase local water storage capacity by a third.
For 2026’s budget, that £7.8m includes £825,000 for the next phase of the new ring main, and £650,000 for the refurbishment of the water storage tank at Kings Mills water treatment works.
Mr Langlois made it clear that without this investment, and with challenges on the horizon, there could be problems if the investments aren’t funded.
“We need to think about the cost of not doing it as well. For example, the refurbishment of the treated water storage tank at Forest road that we completed this year for £1.1 million. That tank supplies 10,000 customers and vital public services,” he said.
“Imagine a world where you wake up one morning and that tank is unable to supply that water because of contamination, or an issue of similar type. No water comes out of the tap when you turn it on.
“There’s no cup of tea in the morning, that’s a minor inconvenience, but when you think about health care for example, and what happens if they have no water, it starts to become really disruptive.
“You think about businesses, if a business has no water it would have a really big impact on the economy of the island, if we’re having to deal with water rationing, for example, because water levels have got so low during a severe drought.
“What I would say is we also need to think about the cost of not investing.”
Much of the network is up to 100-years-old and requires renewal, explained Mr Langlois. The utility warned failure to invest now would lead to more costly problems in the future, such as main bursts, sewer collapses, flooding, and pollution.
“It’s a really complex network that we need to look after, and it has evolved over the last 100 years. At any one point in time, there are parts of that network that require replacement, and we need to increase the amount that we renew year on year within the time frame.”
He also shed light on how much that’s costing: “We have a continuation of our rolling programs of renewing the drinking water pipes, the network beneath our roads and also the sewers, and in combination, we expect that to cost around £1.4m.”
Guernsey Water says upgrading the water treatment works is another necessary step to ensure continued compliance and to enable the capture of water from local streams that currently cannot be used due to contaminants like pesticides and PFAS.
“Another really important investment for our resilience to drought in the future is improvement in our water treatment systems,” said Mr Langlois. “We’ve again allowed around about £20m for that improvement, and that will enable us to collect more water from the island streams.
“At the moment, around 20% of the water catchment in Guernsey is affected by pesticides and PFAS, and that means that we can’t collect it all of the time, and in some cases, we can’t collect from streams at all.
“That investment in improving our water treatment will deliver two main, really important benefits. The first one, it will enable us to continue providing high quality drinking water, and the standards that we will need to meet in the future we expect to be higher.
“The other thing that it will do is it will enable us to collect more water from the island streams, and in combination with Les Vardes Reservoir, will provide us with somewhere to store it that will increase our resilience to droughts in the future.”
Guernsey Water isn’t pinning the financing of the investment run solely on the customer, it also plans to cut its own cloth accordingly, and has managed to chop £355,000 of costs from its 2025 budget.