Water for Schools
Menu

Reading passage Grade 6 Social Studies & Civics

Aging Pipes, Rising Bills: Why Water Systems Need Investment

A grade 6 passage on why US water infrastructure needs investment, using real report-card grades, main-break rates, and bill-trend figures.

Objectives

  1. Students will identify reasons the nation's water infrastructure needs new investment.
  2. Students will explain the connection between aging pipes, main breaks, and rising water bills.

Vocabulary

Key words: infrastructure, invest, affordability, utility

Teacher overview

When a resident turns on a tap, water travels to the faucet through a network of underground pipes. This passage explains why many of those pipes, buried for decades, now need to be repaired or replaced, and why that repair work shows up on household bills. It gives students real national figures to reason about a question every community eventually faces: who pays to repair and replace infrastructure that was built generations ago.

Aging Pipes, Rising Bills: Why Water Systems Need Investment — Grade 6 Social Studies & Civics
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Passage

Water pipes do not last forever. Many cities still use pipes that were laid 50 to 100 years ago. Over time, metal pipes rust and crack. Old concrete pipes wear down too. Every four years, a group of engineers checks the nation's water systems and gives them a grade, almost like a report card. In 2025, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation's drinking water systems a grade of C-. It gave wastewater systems, which carry used water away to be cleaned, an even lower grade of D+. These grades do not mean tap water is unsafe right now. They mean the pipes, pumps, and plants that move and clean the water are old and need work soon.

One way to track this problem is to count water main breaks. A water main break happens when an old pipe finally gives out and water bursts into the street. In the United States, a water main breaks roughly every two minutes. Each break must be found, dug up, and fixed. That work costs money. It can also shut off water for nearby homes and businesses while crews make the repair.

Replacing old pipes before they break costs even more than fixing one break at a time. The Environmental Protection Agency says the nation's drinking water systems need about $625 billion in new investment over the next 20 years. About two-thirds of that money would go toward pipes that run under streets to homes and businesses. Utilities pay for this work mainly through customer bills. So when a utility spends more to replace old pipes, monthly bills often go up too. Combined water and sewer bills across the country rose about 24 percent from 2019 to 2024. They rose about 5.1 percent more in 2025 alone. Both increases outpaced the rise in prices for most other goods.

Rising bills raise a fairness question that goes beyond pipes and dollars. A widely used rule of thumb treats a water and sewer bill as a heavy burden once it climbs above about 4.5 percent of a household's income. That number comes from adding two Environmental Protection Agency benchmarks: 2.5 percent for drinking water and 2 percent for wastewater. The agency itself has no single official cutoff. A bill increase might be a small annoyance for one family. That same increase could be a real hardship for a family with less income, even if both families pay the same amount. This is why many towns debate both whether to fix old pipes and how to raise bills in a way that is fair to every household.

Questions

  1. What grade did the American Society of Civil Engineers give the nation's drinking water systems in 2025, and what does that grade tell us?
  2. How often does a water main break somewhere in the United States, according to the passage?
  3. What two costs does the passage name as reasons water and sewer bills have been going up?
  4. Based on the passage, why might the same bill increase affect two different households in very different ways?
  5. The passage describes a rule of thumb that treats a water and sewer bill as a heavy burden once it passes about 4.5 percent of a household's income. Why do you think a percentage of income, rather than a fixed dollar amount, is used to judge whether a bill is a burden?
  6. According to the passage, what share of the $625 billion national investment need is tied specifically to pipes running to homes and businesses?

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- grade, describing the overall condition of the nation's drinking water infrastructure, meaning the pipes, pumps, and treatment plants that deliver water are aging and need attention.
  2. Answer: Roughly every two minutes, as stated directly in the passage's second paragraph.
  3. Answer: The cost of repairing broken water mains after they fail, and the larger cost of replacing old pipes before they break, both of which utilities pay for partly through customer bills.
  4. Answer: Answers will vary but should reference that households have different incomes, so the same dollar increase takes up a larger share of a lower-income household's budget than a higher-income household's budget, as the passage's final paragraph explains.
  5. Answer: Answers will vary but should reflect the idea that a percentage of income better shows how much a bill actually burdens a specific household, since a fixed dollar amount would feel very different to a family with a small income than to a family with a large income.
  6. Answer: About two-thirds of the $625 billion total, according to the passage's third paragraph.

Differentiation

Support

Provide a simple two-column notes page with headers "What's the problem?" and "What does it cost?" for students to fill in while reading, and allow question 4 and question 5 to be answered orally to a partner before writing a final response.

Extension

Ask students to calculate, using only the passage's figures, what a household's estimated monthly water and sewer bill would need to be, at 4.5 percent of a household income, to reach the high-burden line in the passage's rule of thumb. Suppose the household earns $50,000 a year, and have students show their calculation.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "infrastructure," "invest," and "affordability" with simple visuals (a cutaway diagram of a buried pipe for infrastructure, a piggy bank for invest, a scale balancing a bill against a paycheck for affordability). Allow students to answer literal questions (1, 2, 3, 6) with short phrases rather than full sentences.