Utility financials: what each utility earns, spends and owns
23 Oct 2026
WIN now shows audited financial figures for more than 1,000 water, wastewater and stormwater utilities. You can see where each utility spends its money, and you can find utilities by their cost profile.
Each year, a public utility publishes an audited financial report. In the United States, this report is usually the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR). It tells you how much money the utility earned, how much it spent and what it owns.
WIN reads these reports and records the figures in its database. We show a figure only after it passes our checks against the source page of the report. Today, WIN has audited figures for more than 1,000 utilities.
The four main figures
Each utility has four main figures for each fiscal year:
- Operating revenue. The money that the utility gets from its service. This is mostly water and sewer charges and connection fees. It does not include grants, interest or money from bonds.
- Operating expenses. The cost to operate the system: staff, energy, chemicals, maintenance and the depreciation of assets. It does not include interest on debt.
- Operating income. Operating revenue minus operating expenses. A negative value means that the charges do not pay for all the operating costs.
- Net position. What the utility owns minus what it owes. Most of it is the value of pipes, plants and other assets, not cash.
On the utility profile
Open a utility. The Financial Performance card shows the four figures for the newest audited year, with the change from the year before. A table below shows the last five years.
Click the PDF link at the top of the card to open the source report on the page that WIN used. If a utility reports its services in separate funds, use the buttons at the top right to see each service. “All services” shows the whole utility.
Where the money goes
The bar below the four figures splits operating expenses into its parts. First, it separates depreciation from cash operating costs. Depreciation is the value that the assets lose in the year. Cash operating costs are the money that the utility spends to operate.
When the report gives the details, the bar also splits the cash operating costs:
- Personnel. Salaries, wages and benefits.
- Energy. Electricity and fuel, mostly for pumps and treatment.
- Purchased water / treatment. Water that the utility buys, and treatment that it pays another agency to do.
- Other cash costs. Chemicals, materials, services, administration and all other costs.
Each part shows its value and its share of operating expenses. Some reports do not give these details. For these utilities, the bar shows cash operating costs as one part.
On the Utilities page
The Utilities page lists the utilities with their latest audited figures. The tiles at the top give the totals for the utilities in your results. Click a column heading to sort the list. By default, the largest utilities by operating revenue are at the top.
The CIP 2026 column is different from the other figures. It comes from the newest capital plan of the utility, so it is a planned value, not an audited value.
The filters on the left include a slider for each of the four figures and for CIP 2026. Each slider tells you how many utilities are in the range that you select.
Find utilities by their cost profile
Open Cost profile in the filters. Its six sliders compare the figures of each utility with each other, so the size of the utility does not matter:
- Energy. Energy as a share of cash operating costs.
- Personnel. Staff costs as a share of cash operating costs.
- Purchased Water. Bought water and treatment as a share of cash operating costs.
- Depreciation. Depreciation as a share of operating expenses. A high share shows a utility with many assets.
- Op. Margin. Operating income as a share of operating revenue. Below 0% means that the utility loses money on its operations.
- Reinvestment. CIP 2026 divided by depreciation. Below 1× means that the utility plans to spend less on its assets than they lose in value each year.
A share filter includes only the utilities whose report gives that detail.
Example: find utilities with high energy costs
- Open the Utilities page.
- In the filters, open Cost profile and then Energy.
- Move the left handle to 15%.
- Read the list. These utilities spend at least 15% of their cash operating costs on energy.
- Click a utility to see its cost breakdown and its source report.
Read the figures with care
- Fiscal years differ. Each utility shows its newest audited year. Most are FY2024 or FY2025. The FY column tells you the year.
- Whole utility. If a utility publishes combined statements, WIN uses them. If not, WIN adds its separate water, wastewater and stormwater funds.
- US dollars. WIN converts the reports of Canadian utilities to US dollars.
- Coverage. The totals include only the utilities with audited figures in WIN. They do not show the spending of all utilities in the country.
Where to find it
All WIN users have access. Open Utilities in the main menu, or open any utility profile. Exports of the Utilities list are available on full WIN accounts.
Open the Utilities page
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