What does a water filter cost per household?

Reading time: ~8 minutes

1. The one-off costs

The PureFilter Mineral+ costs €149.00 and the first filter is included. If you want a stock straight away, there are two variants: €199.00 with one extra replacement filter and €239.00 with two extra replacement filters.

What is not added is at least as important for the overall picture:

• No plumber: you connect the filter yourself in 5 to 10 minutes to the angle valve under your sink. You need one pair of water pump pliers.
• No shipping costs: shipping within the Netherlands is free, with no minimum order.
• No subscription required: single replacement filters can still be ordered as normal.
• No connection kit: a 3/8 connection is supplied as standard. If your tap has a different size, an adapter is needed.
• No costs for permission: nothing extra applies in an apartment either. What does and does not matter there is covered in a water filter in a VvE (Dutch homeowners’ association) or apartment.

2. The recurring costs

After the first year there is only one item left: the replacement filter. A single cartridge costs €65.00, and the duo with two cartridges €115.00, which works out at €57.50 each.

How often you replace depends on how many people live in the home, not on how hard your water is. A cartridge lasts up to 12 months for 1 to 3 people and up to 6 months for 4 or more people. That is the only figure you need to work out your own annual amount. When exactly the time has come is explained in how often you need to replace a water filter.

If you would rather not have to think about it, you can use the Filter Plan: €48.00 for 1 to 3 people and €86.00 for 4 to 6 people. The filters then arrive on time by themselves. It is a choice, not a condition.

3. Worked example over five years

Five years is a fair period to calculate over, because the filter housing comes with a 5-year warranty. Below we calculate with single replacement filters, so that you see the bare price.

Household of 1 to 3 people

The first filter is included with the purchase and lasts up to 12 months. Over five years you therefore replace it four times: €149.00 plus four times €65.00 comes to €409.00. That is about €82.00 a year, or roughly €6.80 a month.

Household of 4 to 6 people

Here a cartridge lasts up to 6 months, so over five years you replace it nine times: €149.00 plus nine times €65.00 comes to €734.00, about €147.00 a year. If you buy the duo, you pay €57.50 per cartridge and end up at around €674.00, about €135.00 a year.

4. What the water itself costs

The water you filter costs next to nothing. The weighted average drinking water tariff in 2026 is, according to Vewin (the Dutch association of water companies), €2.71 per cubic metre including taxes. Of that, €2.05 is the water company’s tariff and the rest is tax on tap water plus VAT.

If you work on one and a half litres of drinking water per person per day, a two-person household comes to about 1,095 litres a year. That is a little more than one cubic metre, and so costs around €3.00 a year. The Voedingscentrum (the Netherlands Nutrition Centre) incidentally uses a slightly lower lower limit: at least 1.4 litres of fluid a day for women and 1.4 to 1.8 litres for men, with tea and coffee counting towards it.

In other words: the costs lie almost entirely in the filter, not in the water. If you want to check the tariff of your own water company, you will find it in what a cubic metre of water costs.

5. Compared with bottled water and a filter jug

We calculate bottled water at €0.40 to €1.00 per litre. For those same 1,095 litres a year you would then pay €438.00 to €1,095.00. That is, per year, more than the full five-year cost of a fixed filter for a small household.

A filter jug sits in between. The jug itself is cheap, but the cartridges last four to six weeks and you have to keep refilling it. Over five years those cartridges add up considerably, and you are left with the hassle of filling and waiting. What the different types actually do is explained in how a water filter works.

6. Does ordering together change the price?

No, and that is a more honest answer than you might expect. There is no sliding scale and no group discount. Three households ordering together pay three times €149.00, just like three households ordering separately. Shipping is already free in the Netherlands anyway, so there is nothing to split there either.

What ordering together does do is lower the threshold: one person finds it all out, and the installation goes faster in each kitchen once the first one is done. How to go about that in practice is covered in ordering a water filter together with your neighbours.

One thing is genuinely a cost to watch out for together: every address needs its own filter. You cannot connect two households to one, because the filter is fixed to the cold water supply of a single home.

7. Costs per household at a glance

The tap water itself, about €3.00 a year for two people, is left out of this table because the amount is negligible next to the rest.

8. What you get for that amount

The PureFilter Mineral+ has been tested by Equinox Labs, an independent laboratory (2026), and removes all 40 chemical substances tested, from 75% to 99.97%. These include PFAS, microplastics and heavy metals. In the last of the five filter layers, Swedish Mineral Rock™ adds calcium, magnesium and potassium, so that the water does not taste flat.

The price also covers what you do not lose if it disappoints: 40 days to try it at home, and a 5-year warranty on the filter housing. Which variant suits your usage is shown in which filter type gives the lowest annual costs and in which fixed filters are in our webshop. If you are still undecided between types, best water filter can help.

9. Frequently asked questions

10. Conclusion

What a water filter costs per household is easy to oversee: €149.00 to start and after that only the replacement filter. For a small household that comes to €409.00 over five years, about €82.00 a year. For a large family it is around €674.00 to €734.00, because the cartridge is replaced twice as often.

Set that against bottled water and the difference is not subtle: the same amount of water from bottles costs €438.00 a year or more. And ordering together with neighbours changes none of those amounts. If you first want to know what to look for in the choice itself, read what to look for when buying a water filter.