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Reading passage Grade 9 Health & Consumer Science

Why Water Bills Keep Rising: Aging Pipes and a Family Budget

A grade 9 consumer-science reading passage on how aging water pipes, main breaks, and deferred repairs push household water bills up faster than inflation.

Objectives

  1. Students will identify stated facts about the condition and cost of US water infrastructure.
  2. Students will infer why an aging system raises household bills even when water use stays the same.

Vocabulary

Deferred maintenance
Repair work that keeps getting put off to save money now. The longer it waits, the worse and more expensive the problems become.
Water main
A big underground pipe that carries drinking water beneath the streets to a neighborhood. Smaller service lines branch off it to reach each building.

Also: aging infrastructure, affordability

Teacher overview

Water bills have climbed for many families, and the reasons often sit underground. This passage explains, through the fictional Quillen household, how aging pipes and delayed repairs push bills up over time. It gives students a consumer's view of infrastructure spending and asks them to reason about the trade-offs a community faces. Assign it to connect a monthly bill to the larger system that produces it.

Why Water Bills Keep Rising: Aging Pipes and a Family Budget — Grade 9 Health & Consumer Science
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Passage

The Quillen family opened their water bill and saw it had gone up again. They had not watered a lawn or filled a pool. Their water use was about the same as last year. Yet the amount owed kept rising. To understand why, it helps to look at the pipes beneath the street.

Most of the water system in the United States is old. Many pipes were laid decades ago, and some are more than a century old. Engineers grade the country's infrastructure every few years. In 2025, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation's drinking water a C- and its wastewater systems a D+. Those grades are a warning that the system needs a lot of repair.

Old pipes are more likely to fail. A water main breaks somewhere in the country about every two minutes. Each break spills treated water, cuts off service, and costs money to fix. A broken main under a busy road can also damage the road and nearby property. These repairs are expensive, and they often happen with no warning.

Fixing the whole system is a large job. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that about $625 billion is needed for drinking-water infrastructure over the next twenty years. About two-thirds of that need is for the pipes that carry water to homes. That is a huge sum, and someone has to pay it.

Most of the money comes from the people who use the water. A water utility is usually run by a city or a public district. It pays for repairs mainly through the rates it charges customers. When a utility must replace old pipes, it often has to raise its rates to cover the work. That is one reason the Quillens' bill went up even though they used the same amount of water.

Rates have been climbing faster than most prices. Combined water and sewer bills rose about 24 percent from 2019 to 2024. They rose about another 5.1 percent in 2025. That is faster than inflation over the same years. For a family on a tight budget, those increases add up.

There is a hard choice behind these numbers. A utility can keep rates low for a while by putting off repairs. This is called deferred maintenance. It feels cheaper in the short run. But putting off repairs lets more pipes fail, and emergency fixes cost more than planned ones. So keeping rates low today can lead to bigger bills and more broken mains later.

Rising bills hit some households harder than others. A widely used rule of thumb, built from two EPA benchmarks, treats combined water and sewer bills above about 4.5 percent of household income as a high burden. The same bill is a larger share of a small income than of a large one. So when rates climb, lower-income families feel it first. Many utilities now offer assistance programs to help those customers.

The Quillens cannot fix the pipes under their street, but they can understand their bill. They can read the rate structure, look for an assistance program if they qualify, and use water carefully. And as voters, they have a say in how their community pays for the water system it depends on.

Questions

  1. What grades did the American Society of Civil Engineers give US drinking water and wastewater in 2025?
  2. According to the passage, about how often does a water main break in the United States?
  3. How much does the EPA estimate is needed for drinking-water infrastructure over the next twenty years, and what share is for distribution pipes?
  4. The Quillens used about the same amount of water as last year, yet their bill rose. Using the passage, explain how that can happen.
  5. What does "deferred maintenance" mean in the passage, and why can it lead to higher costs later?
  6. The passage describes a trade-off between replacing pipes now and paying for breaks later. Explain that trade-off in your own words.
  7. Why does the passage say that rising bills are a bigger problem for lower-income families? Use a detail from the text.

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Answer Key
  1. Answer: A C- for drinking water and a D+ for wastewater. The passage states these were the 2025 grades from the American Society of Civil Engineers.
  2. Answer: About every two minutes. The passage says a water main breaks somewhere in the country roughly that often.
  3. Answer: About $625 billion over twenty years, with about two-thirds of that need for the pipes that carry water to homes, as the passage states when it describes the EPA estimate.
  4. Answer: Their utility likely raised rates to pay for replacing old pipes, so the bill can rise even when water use stays the same, as the paragraph on how utilities pay for repairs explains.
  5. Answer: Deferred maintenance means putting off repairs to keep rates low now. The passage says it lets more pipes fail, and emergency fixes cost more than planned ones, so costs rise later.
  6. Answer: Answers will vary but should capture that spending to replace pipes now costs money up front, while delaying saves money now but risks more breaks and pricier emergency repairs, so paying sooner can cost less overall.
  7. Answer: Because the same bill is a larger share of a small income, and the passage notes the 4.5 percent affordability benchmark and says lower-income families feel rate increases first.

Differentiation

Support

Give students a short glossary card for "water main," "deferred maintenance," and "affordability" before reading, and let them answer the literal questions (1, 2, 3) by underlining the sentence in the passage that holds each answer.

Extension

Ask students to write a short letter to a city council that argues either for raising rates now to replace pipes or for keeping rates low this year, using at least two facts from the passage to support the position.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "bill," "rate," and "repair" with simple examples, and pair the passage with a labeled drawing of a street, a water main, and a house. Allow students to answer questions 1 through 3 with short phrases rather than full sentences.