How much is 1 m3 of water? 1,000 litres and the price

Reading time: ~11 minutes

What exactly is 1 m³ of water?

A cubic metre is the volume of a cube measuring 1 metre by 1 metre by 1 metre. Fill it with water and you have 1,000 litres. On your water bill, that unit is shown as m³ or as a cubic metre, and both mean the same thing. Evides writes it out literally on its rates page: 1 m³ of drinking water is the same as 1,000 litres.

That equivalence between litres and kilos only holds for water. Sand or concrete weighs much more per cubic metre, which is exactly why building sites often quote different figures. For your water bill, you can keep it simple: every cubic metre on your meter reading stands for 1,000 litres that has flowed through your pipes.

Meter readings, incidentally, are almost always shown in cubic metres, with the last digits in litres. If your meter went from 143 to 152, you used 9 cubic metres, meaning 9,000 litres. If you want to know how fast that counter runs, it helps to know how many litres per hour come out of your tap: with an average kitchen tap, a cubic metre has already flowed through fully within a few hours.

What does 1 m³ of water cost in 2026?

Households pay an average of €2.71 per m³ in 2026, reports the Drinkwaterplatform, the platform of the joint Dutch drinking water companies. In 2025 that was €2.61, so the price rose by 3.7 percent. At a usage of 100 m³ per year, the drinking water bill comes to €271.

That average is higher than the amount your water company charges per cubic metre, and that confuses a lot of people. The explanation lies in the taxes. According to the Vewin 2026 Drinking Water Rates Overview, the bill consists of 24.9 percent taxes and 75.1 percent costs of the water company itself.

What your water bill is made up of

• Usage rate: the amount per m³ your water company charges. In 2026 that ranges between roughly €1.16 and €1.98.
• Standing charge: a fixed amount per year for your connection, regardless of your usage. At Evides that is €101.05 in 2026.
• Tap water tax: an environmental tax levied by the national government. Evides quotes a 2025 rate of €0.463 per m³ including VAT.
• Provincial groundwater levy: differs by province.
• VAT: 9 percent, both on the water rate and on the tap water tax.

One change is particularly worth noting this year. The tap water tax applied for years only to the first 300 m³. From 2026 there is still an upper limit of 50,000 m³, and from 2027 that limit disappears entirely, writes the Drinkwaterplatform. For a household that stays around 100 m³, practically nothing changes, but the trend is clear: water is getting more expensive in the coming years, not cheaper. If you want to see those costs in perspective against the bottles on the shelf, read what we wrote about tap water versus bottled water.

Price per cubic metre per water company

In the Netherlands you have no choice of water company: where you live determines who supplies you. And the difference is big. The most expensive supplier charges almost 71 percent more per cubic metre than the cheapest. Below are the usage rates for 2026, as the companies publish them themselves.

Watch out when comparing: these are the usage rates including VAT but without the standing charge and without the tap water tax. Add those in and you land around the national average of €2.71 per cubic metre. So never compare your own company's usage rate with the average of €2.71: that is comparing apples with an entire fruit bowl.

Groundwater is generally cheaper than surface water, because fewer treatment steps are needed. That explains part of the spread in the table. It says nothing, incidentally, about how hard the water at your address is, since that depends on the source and the treatment. If you want to know that, we have put together water hardness per municipality.

How many cubic metres does a household use per year?

The average Dutch person used 117.3 litres of drinking water per day in 2024, a figure collected by Vewin from all drinking water companies and published by the Drinkwaterplatform. Per year that is roughly 43,070 litres, so 43.07 m³ per person.

The more people living in a house, the lower the usage per person. Waternet measures that difference concretely.

The cubic-metre column is our own calculation based on Waternet's litre figures: litres per person per day, times the number of people, times 365, divided by 1,000. A two-person household comes out close to the 100 m³ that water companies use as a reference example, which according to the Drinkwaterplatform corresponds to an average household of 2.14 people.

What you actually use can easily deviate 30 percent from that average. A garden sprinkled in August, a bath instead of a shower, or a leaking toilet float valve all add up fast. Evides reports that 64 percent of its customers stay under 100 m³ per year, so the average is pulled up by a smaller group of heavy users.

What does 1 litre of tap water cost, then?

Divide the average of €2.71 by 1,000 and you get €0.00271 per litre, so 0.27 cents. A glass of 250 millilitres therefore costs 0.07 cents. You can tap almost 370 litres of tap water for one euro.

Put a litre of bottled water next to that, and the difference is not subtle. Bottled water costs between €0.40 and €1.00 per litre in the supermarket. That is 150 to 370 times the price of tap water. Anyone who wants to go through the cost side of a cubic metre in more detail, annual bill included, can find that in our piece on what a cubic metre of water costs in 2026.

What is that 1,000 litres used for?

This is the figure that surprises most people. Of the 117 litres you send through the meter per day, only 2.7 litres go towards food and drink, according to Waternet. The rest disappears down the shower drain and the toilet.

Waternet measures an average of 141 litres per person per day in its own area, which is higher than the national average, so the shares in the right-hand column are indicative. The ratio still holds: roughly 2 percent of your cubic metres end up in a glass or a pan. For a two-person household that is roughly 1,970 litres per year, so just under 2 cubic metres.

That makes the maths around filtering a lot more manageable than people think. You do not need to purify 100 cubic metres to have clean drinking water. You only need to purify the 2 cubic metres you actually drink, and that is exactly what a filter on the cold water line of your kitchen tap does. We worked out how much that glass should be per day in our piece on how much water you need per day.

What a water filter does with that cubic metre

Dutch tap water meets the legal standards. That is not the same as empty. It can contain traces of PFAS, microplastics, medicine residues and heavy metals, and the Drinkwaterplatform itself cites PFAS and nitrate as reasons why extra investment in treatment will be needed in the coming years. You also notice limescale and a chlorine taste directly in your tea and coffee.

The PureFilter Mineral+ is an under-counter filter connected to the cold water line. Five filter stages remove more than 100 contaminants from the water, including PFAS, microplastics, lead, copper, fluoride, nitrates, medicine residues and chlorine. The filter is NSF-certified to standards 42, 53, 61 and 372. As a final step, Swedish Mineral Rock™ adds calcium, magnesium and potassium back in, so the water does not taste flat or empty. Purify first, then mineralise, in that order.

What it costs per cubic metre

A replacement filter costs €65.00 and lasts 15,000 to 20,000 litres. That is €3.25 to €4.33 per 1,000 litres of filtered water, so less than half a cent per litre. For a household of 1 to 3 people, such a filter lasts about 12 months; for 4 to 6 people, about 6 months. The duo with two cartridges costs €115.00. If you would rather not have to think about it, the Filterplan delivers the filters automatically on time, for €48.00 for 1 to 3 people or €86.00 for 4 to 6 people. Individual filters remain available to order separately.

At PureFilter we see that customers mostly pay attention to that last point: not the purchase price, but what a year of drinking water costs once everything is counted. The filter package you choose with the unit determines how long you are covered. Which technique blocks which substances, and which water filter type suits which usage, is on our overview page. Installing it takes 5 to 10 minutes, with just one water pump pliers and no plumber needed: our guide to installing a water filter walks through the steps. You later swap the cartridge with the key supplied with the unit, so you do not need the pliers for that.

What 1,000 litres of drinking water costs per approach

Now that the unit is clear, comparing becomes easy. Below is what one cubic metre of drinking water costs you, depending on how you draw it. The prices per litre come from the sources above and from our own price list.

The middle row comes out at roughly €6.00 to €7.00 per 1,000 litres, everything included. That is more than twice the price of unfiltered tap water, and still roughly 60 to 160 times cheaper than bottled water. For the 2 cubic metres a two-person household drinks per year, you are talking about roughly €13.00 for water and filter combined.

A filter jug does different work, and that deserves to be said: it mainly improves the taste and requires no installation. Anyone looking at price per litre rarely comes out well with it, though, because the cartridges often need replacing every month and the jug itself has no certification for PFAS or heavy metals. Also good to know: a Quooker controls temperature and convenience, but does not filter these substances. Combining both works fine, since the filter sits ahead of the Quooker system on the cold water supply.

If you are looking for a fixed solution rather than refilling, take a look at the filter we supply for the kitchen. And if you would rather sort out the PFAS side first, you can find the technique per substance on our page about a water filter against PFAS.

Frequently asked questions

Conclusion

1 m³ of water is 1,000 litres, and that is the only conversion you need to remember. The rest of your water bill is an addition sum: a usage rate between €1.16 and €1.98 per cubic metre, plus a standing charge, plus tap water tax, plus 9 percent VAT. Nationally that comes to an average of €2.71 per cubic metre in 2026, so 0.27 cents per litre.

The figure most households do not know is the most interesting one: of all that water, roughly 2 percent goes towards food and drink. So you are not purifying 100 cubic metres, but 1 to 2 cubic metres per person. For that small share, the question how much is 1m3 of water suddenly becomes a pricing question with a clear answer: filtered tap water costs roughly €6.00 to €7.00 per 1,000 litres, against €400 to €1,000 for bottled water.

Anyone who wants to capture that difference without refilling jugs chooses a filter based on certification and capacity, not purchase price. The PureFilter Mineral+ costs €149.00 including the first filter, filters out more than 100 contaminants, is NSF-certified to standards 42, 53, 61 and 372, and adds back calcium, magnesium and potassium via Swedish Mineral Rock™. With 40 days of free returns and a 5-year warranty, you can calmly check the numbers for yourself at home.