One in ten businesses now have smart water metering, according to the latest market data.
Water companies are investing heavily in smart metering to help meet the growing demand for water and achieve the Government’s target to reduce overall business consumption by 9% by 2038.
Water companies across England are investing £1.7 billion to install an additional 10 million smart meters in AMP8 (2025-30), including nearly 800,000 business customers.
Smart water meters promise to transform both customers’ and water companies’ understanding of usage by providing hourly meter reads instead of the monthly or bi-annual reads from traditional meters.
In doing so, smart meters can help quickly identify unusual spikes in consumption or continuously flowing water that could indicate leakage. The data can also be used to help develop water efficient products, services and tariffs.
Using data provided by water companies, MOSL is tracking the rollout of smart water meters, which its visualised using interactive maps to provide insights at a company, regional and national level. A metering dashboard has also been updated to to include retrospective data, showing the progress of companies' smart meter rollouts since the competitive market opened in April 2017.
Customers in England use around 10 billion litres (10,000 megalitres) of water per day, with businesses using around a third of this amount. In June, the Environment Agency warned that England faces a 5 billion litre a day shortfall in public water supplies by 2055 unless urgent action is taken. This includes an additional 1 billion litres needed for further water resources to support energy production, food cultivation, and emerging technologies.
Liz D’Arcy, Head of Data Insight and Analytics at MOSL, commented: “Water companies clearly recognise the critical role smart metering needs to play in helping balancing the supply and demand for water in the years ahead.
“It is very encouraging to see water companies achieve this important milestone, which excludes smart meters that have been installed and are waiting to be connected.
“In its National Metering Strategy, the Strategic Panel recommended MOSL works with water companies to track the rollout of smart meters to businesses and monitor progress from a regional and national perspective.
“Our interactive maps and dashboards show the progress companies are making, helping manage customers’ expectations in terms of when their meter may be upgraded, which is particularly important for retailers communicating effectively with business customers operating in multiple wholesaler areas.
“We look forward to providing future updates as companies work to meet their goal of providing smart metering to two thirds of business customers by the end of this Asset Management Period.”
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Note to editors:
- Live smart metering maps are available on the MOSL website. Maps are updated every month – latest update 4 August 2025
- Businesses with smart meters as at 4 August 2025: 10.36%. At market opening (April 2017): 0.03%. At at Final Determinations (December 2024): 7.5%.
- MOSL is currently working with delivery partners CGI to deliver a Smart Meter Read Hub to help water wholesalers and retailers share meter read data from smart meters consistently and efficiently.
- “Smart metering rollout: our Final Determinations set out allowances for the most ambitious smart metering rollout to date with £1.7 billion of enhancement expenditure to deliver more than 10 million smart meters. This is split into funding of £1.1 billion for 2.8 million new smart meter installations and £624 million for 7.7 million meter upgrades. Meter upgrades refers to replacing existing meters with smart advanced metering infrastructure (AMI).” Source: Ofwat PR24 Final Determinations – Expenditure allowances, Section 3.6.5 December 2024
