Shaping our water future - 2025-2030 Price Proposal
Overview
You helped us to shape our water and wastewater services to the end of the decade, so that we can make sure our services meet your needs and deliver community value.
Most of the prices that we charge are set by the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART) based on the efficient costs of providing essential services. IPART sets our prices every five years, with adjustments for inflation between reviews.
Hunter Water is required to submit our plan to IPART for the services we’ll provide, and the prices customers will pay. This is called our ‘pricing proposal’. We have worked hard to ensure that activities and investments we have proposed reflect your views and preferences, and our proposed prices are fair. We know that our community is concerned about the cost of living at the moment, but we do not want to cut costs in the short-term if it leads to higher costs and prices, or poor services in the future.
We undertook an extensive five stage engagement program with our customers and community over a two-year period to ensure that our proposal reflected their values and preferences.
Learn more about what we did and what you told us
We have now submitted our 2025-2030 pricing proposal to IPART.
IPART will review our proposal and determine new prices to apply from 1 July 2025. Our detailed proposal, as well as information about milestones for IPART's review and final determination, is available on IPART’s website.
Summaries
Key dates
1 November 2024
Issues Paper published
IPART will publish their initial response to our proposal on their website (called their Issues Paper).
1 November 2024
Public exhibition period commences
The public exhibition period will run from Friday, 1 November to Friday, 9 November.
18 November 2024
Online public hearing held
The online public hearing held - 1:30 - 4:30pm.
9 December 2024
IPART public exhibition period closes.
Timeline
Stage 1 - Exploring customer and community values and experiences
July - December 2022
Understanding your values and priorities as well as your interest and expectations for participation in decision making.
Stage 2 - Quantifying customer and community values
January - June 2023
Understanding what value you place on the experiences, interests, concerns and priorities identified in stage 1.
Stage 3 - Customer and community deliberation
August 2023 - April 2024
Customer and community deliberation on the topics that have been investigated in phase 1 and valued in stage 2.
Stage 4 - Confirm and validate
April - May 2024
Testing and validating with customers and community what we learned in stage 3.
Stage 5 - Close the loop
June - August 2024
Closing the loop with customers and community about how their feedback has been incorporated in our pricing proposal.
Stage 6 - Submit Price Proposal to IPART
September 2024
Final price proposal to IPART.
Stage 7 - IPART review of Price Submission and determination
October 2024 - June 2025
IPART reviews the pricing submission and makes it's price determination.
New prices comes into effect.
1 July 2025
Explore more in this project
- Project overivew
- Pricing Proposal customer and community engagement program