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Rates & Water Bill Checker

Water left your council rates on 1 July 2026. Upload last year's rates notice and your first Tiaki Wai invoice, and this works out what the split actually cost you — then sets it beside the figures Tiaki Wai published.

1 · Which council area is the property in?

Each council charged for water differently in 2025/26, so this changes which lines to look for on your notice — and whether a clean comparison is even possible.

2 · Upload your documents

2025/26 rates notice
PDF · the last year water was inside your rates
Tiaki Wai water invoice
PDF · include the details page if you have it
PDFs only, up to 20 MB and 20 pages per document. Large scanned files can take a while to read.

3 · Check what was found

2025/26 rates — water lines

    2026/27 water services — annual charge

      Tick charge lines to build the total yourself; untick everything to go back to the figure read off the invoice.

      4 · Your result

      2025/26, inside rates
      —
      2026/27, billed separately
      —
      Change
      —
      —

      Beside the published figures

      —
      Four-city average, 2025/26
      —
      Four-city average, 2026/27
      —
      Published average increase
      —
      Median for your city

      Method & evidence

      How this comparison works

      Sources and figures checked 30 July 2026

      Method

      The checker reads each PDF’s text layer. If a document is a scan, it uses OCR in your browser. It identifies likely water, wastewater and stormwater charge lines, then asks you to check them before calculating.

      The percentage change is the 2026/27 annual charge minus the 2025/26 water charges, divided by the 2025/26 figure. If an invoice has only a period charge, the checker annualises it from the printed dates; if no usable dates are found, it clearly labels a quarterly-billing assumption.

      Limitations

      • OCR and unusual bill layouts can miss or misread charge lines. Your original documents remain authoritative.
      • For Lower Hutt and Porirua, some 2025/26 water costs sat inside general rates, so the old-year total is incomplete and the apparent increase is overstated.
      • Published averages and medians are context, not a prediction for a particular property. Connections, property value, meters and service availability change the bill.
      • This is an independent comparison, not an official bill check. Confirm disputed charges with Tiaki Wai or your council.

      Official sources

      Water Services Strategy 2026/27 Year-one charging methods First bill guide and city figures (PDF)
      Your PDFs are read here in the page and are never uploaded — no document text leaves this device. The page itself does load three libraries (pdf.js, Tesseract.js, Google Fonts) from public CDNs, and scanned PDFs make Tesseract fetch its OCR language data, so those providers see a request from your IP. Save the page and host the libraries locally if you need zero third-party requests.