CCF, HCF, units, and why the bill looks small
One CCF is one hundred cubic feet of water. A cubic foot holds 7.4805 gallons, so a CCF is 748.05 gallons — call it 748. Some utilities print HCF instead, meaning hundred cubic feet, which is the same thing. Others bill in thousands of gallons, and a few bill in raw gallons or cubic feet. The unit is on the bill next to the usage figure, usually in small type, and getting it wrong changes every conclusion you draw by a factor of hundreds.
| Unit | Gallons | Also written |
|---|---|---|
| 1 CCF | 748.05 | HCF, 100 cu ft, unit |
| 1,000 gallons | 1,000 | kgal, TGAL |
| 1 cubic foot | 7.4805 | cu ft, CF |
| 1 cubic metre | 264.17 | m³, on non-US bills |
This is also why a water bill reads as cheap per unit and is not cheap in total. A rate of a few dollars per CCF sounds trivial until you notice the household moved eight of them, and that the sewer charge on the same volume is often the larger number.
Sewer is usually the bigger half
Most systems have no way to meter what leaves the house, so they charge sewer on the volume of water that entered it. That has two consequences worth knowing. Water you use outdoors — irrigation, a pool, washing the car — is billed as sewer even though it never reaches the plant. And a leak on the supply side costs you twice: once for the water and once for treating water that was never dirtied.
Utilities handle the outdoor problem in different ways. Some cap the summer sewer charge at your average winter usage, on the reasoning that winter usage is nearly all indoor. Some sell a second, deduct-only meter for irrigation. Some do nothing. If your bill jumps every June and settles every October, that is the mechanism, and it is worth a call to ask which of the three your utility does.
Rates, and why none are quoted here
Water is priced by thousands of separate systems — municipal departments, special districts, private companies, rural associations — each setting rates through its own governing body against its own costs. A system drawing from an adjacent river charges differently from one pumping deep groundwater or importing across a state. Rates in the same metro area routinely differ by a factor of two or more, and many systems have raised rates repeatedly to fund pipe replacement. Any national average would be a number that applies to nobody.
Take yours off the bill. Water rate per unit, sewer rate per unit, and everything charged flat. Do it once, keep the figures, and this page becomes accurate for your address rather than approximately right for a fictional one.
Reading usage as a diagnostic
Divide gallons by days and by people and you get gallons per person per day, which is the only usage figure comparable across households. Indoor use for a household with efficient fixtures commonly falls well under a hundred gallons per person per day; older fixtures and long showers push it up; irrigation can double the whole-house number in summer without anything indoors changing.
A figure that stays high through winter, when nothing is being watered, points at a leak, and the most common leak by far is a toilet flapper that does not seal. It makes no noise and it can pass thousands of gallons a month. The test costs nothing: put a few drops of food colouring in the tank, wait twenty minutes without flushing, and look in the bowl. Colour in the bowl means the flapper is passing water, and a replacement is a few dollars.
If the numbers still do not add up
Quarterly and bi-monthly billing is common in water, so a bill covering ninety days will not compare to a monthly electricity bill or to last quarter unless you normalise by days. Multi-unit buildings with a single master meter allocate usage by formula rather than by measurement, and the formula, not your household, may explain the number. And estimated reads happen: when a meter cannot be accessed the utility bills an estimate and trues it up later, which produces one low bill followed by one alarming one. The bill states whether a read was actual or estimated, and that single word explains more disputed bills than any calculation on this page.
Questions people ask
How many gallons are in a CCF?
748.05, which is one hundred cubic feet at 7.4805 gallons per cubic foot. Rounding to 748 is fine for any purpose you would use it for. HCF on a bill means the same unit. If your utility bills in CCF and you are trying to apply advice written in gallons — a fixture rated at 1.6 gallons per flush, a shower at 2 gallons per minute — you have to convert one way or the other before the comparison means anything, and the factor of nearly 750 is large enough that skipping it produces nonsense rather than a small error.
Why is the sewer charge higher than the water charge?
Because treating wastewater generally costs more than delivering clean water, and the sewer system carries its own capital burden of collection mains, lift stations and treatment plants under discharge permits. Sewer is charged on metered water volume in most systems because there is no meter on the outflow, so the two charges scale together and the sewer rate per unit is simply larger. When you cut usage you cut both, which is why a reduction in water use is worth roughly twice what the water rate alone suggests.
Should I use my summer or winter usage to judge a leak?
Winter, in almost every climate. Summer usage mixes indoor use with irrigation, pool filling and everything else that goes outside, and the irrigation portion is large enough to hide a substantial leak. Winter usage is nearly all indoor and nearly all repeatable month to month, so a winter figure that is high, or that climbs from one winter month to the next with no change in the household, is the signal worth acting on. This is the same reasoning utilities use when they cap summer sewer charges at a winter average.
Does the calculator handle a quarterly bill?
Yes — enter the actual number of days in the period and the usage for that whole period. The total, the charges and the per-thousand-gallon figure all come out for the period as billed, and the per-day and per-person-per-day lines normalise correctly. One thing to watch: if your utility has a tiered rate, check whether the threshold is stated per month or per billing period. A monthly allowance applied to a quarterly bill is usually multiplied by three, and entering the monthly figure against quarterly usage will overstate the higher tier badly.