Water Utility Rate Lookup (San Francisco, New York City, Austin)

An independent tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, the New York City Water Board, or the City of Austin Water Utility. All three publish their tariffs as public rate schedules. This Actor reads each utility's own current tariff document and reports what it says, normalized into one schema.

A periodically refreshed snapshot, not a live fetch per run. A water rate typically changes once or twice a year, on a fiscal-year boundary that differs by utility — re-parsing three differently-laid-out government PDFs on every customer request would trade real fragility for no real freshness benefit. SUMMARY.json in the run's key-value store reports the snapshot actually served; each row carries its own effective_date and source_url so you can verify it against the utility's current tariff yourself.

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Why this exists

Water utility rates in the US are not centrally published. Bluefield Research's free index covers only the ~30-50 largest cities and gates utility-level detail behind contact-sales; the AWWA/Raftelis Rate Survey (~500 utilities) is itself a paid subscription report, not a queryable feed. Thousands of small and mid-size municipal and co-op utilities publish only their own PDF ordinance or tariff document, each laid out differently. This Actor reads three of them today — San Francisco, New York City and Austin — and reconciles genuinely different rate-schedule shapes (meter-size-keyed fixed charges, tier-keyed fixed charges, flat no-tier rates) into one row format, instead of leaving you to open three different PDFs by hand.

What you get per row

Field	Meaning
utility	The full utility name
state	Two-letter state code
service_type	single_family_residential, multi_family_residential, commercial_industrial, or all_metered_premises (NYC, which does not split by class in its base metered rate)
rate_component	fixed_monthly_charge, fixed_daily_minimum (NYC only), or usage_rate
meter_size	The meter size this fixed charge applies to (San Francisco only) — null where the source does not key its charge to meter size
tier, tier_label	The usage tier's number and the tariff's own wording for it — null for a flat, untiered rate
tier_min_units, tier_max_units	The tier's usage bounds, in the source's own unit — null where not applicable
usage_unit	ccf (100 cubic feet, San Francisco and NYC) or kgal (1,000 gallons, Austin) — never converted between utilities, so you always know exactly what you are comparing
amount_usd	The dollar amount
effective_date	When this rate took effect
source_url	A direct link to the utility's own tariff document, to verify
charged	Whether this row cost you anything
not_charged_reason	Why it did not, in plain English

The billing rule, stated plainly

One event: rate row delivered, charged once per row in the result. A row that appears again on a later run because the tariff has not changed since your last request is charged again — you are paying for the answer, not for a change having happened, the same convention puc-rate-case-tracker uses for a docket that reappears unchanged.

Coverage — read this before you rely on it

v1 covers three utilities: San Francisco (all three residential/ commercial service classes), New York City (its single flat metered rate), and Austin (single-family residential only — Multifamily, Commercial, Large Volume and the CAP low-income tariff all exist in Austin's own source and are not yet covered). SUMMARY.json reports exactly which utilities were requested and how many rows were found for each.

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Input

{
  "utilities": ["sfpuc_ca", "nyc_ny", "austin_tx"]
}

Leave utilities empty to look up all three. Invalid or unsupported slugs are ignored; if nothing valid is given, all three supported utilities are returned.

Output

{
  "utility": "San Francisco Public Utilities Commission",
  "state": "CA",
  "service_type": "single_family_residential",
  "rate_component": "usage_rate",
  "meter_size": null,
  "tier": 1,
  "tier_label": "First 4 units per month",
  "tier_min_units": 0,
  "tier_max_units": 4,
  "usage_unit": "ccf",
  "amount_usd": 12.2,
  "effective_date": "2026-07-01",
  "source_url": "https://www.sfpuc.gov/sites/default/files/accounts-and-services/Rates_Schedule_Water_Sewer_2026-7.pdf",
  "charged": true,
  "not_charged_reason": ""
}

A SUMMARY.json lands in the key-value store with which utilities were requested, how many rows were found, and a breakdown of charged vs. free rows.