Water balance by country · Updated 2026-09-29
Non-revenue water in the Philippines: water districts, LWUA benchmarks and the Manila concession experience
How Philippine water districts and concessionaires calculate the IWA water balance, LWUA and PAWD NRW benchmarks, and what the Manila Water and Maynilad turnaround shows about the numbers.
Calculator settings for Philippines
- Units
- Metric
- Benchmark category
- Low & middle income (standard for the Metro Manila concessions)
- Meter location
- At the property frontage; short service pipe
- Supply
- Continuous in most districts; some intermittent zones
- Reporting
- LWUA monitoring for water districts; MWSS Regulatory Office for concessionaires; PAWD benchmarking
The Philippines is home to one of the most cited NRW reductions in the world: the Manila concessionaires took non-revenue water from over 60% in the late 1990s to the low teens through DMAs, pressure management and aggressive meter and illegal-connection programmes. Outside Metro Manila, more than 500 water districts supervised by the Local Water Utilities Administration (LWUA) report NRW as a core performance indicator, with a common benchmark of 20–25%.
Building the balance for a water district
- Water districts are almost fully metered, so the balance is stronger than in many neighbouring countries; the weak points are meter age and reading practice. Enter under-registration by meter class if the district has test data, otherwise 4–6% overall.
- Illegal connections and bypasses remain significant in informal settlements; use the district's disconnection and apprehension records to size the estimate.
- Bulk supply from a district to barangay water associations, and purchases from private bulk suppliers, go in the export/import rows respectively.
- Many districts pump from deep wells with chlorination only — 'basic' treatment for carbon. Surface-water plants are 'traditional'.
- Typhoon-season pressure variation is large; use logger data for the balance year rather than a design pressure.
Typical results
Well-run districts sit in ILI band A2 to B; the median is probably B to C, with real losses of 150–400 litres per connection per day. The calculator's NRW-per-connection matrix makes the comparison to LWUA's percentage benchmark more meaningful, because it separates the districts with genuinely tight networks from those that simply have high consumption.