The same water, yet the price differs fourfold. Why a cubic metre in Karaganda costs as much as four in Kyzylorda

The ZhKH 24 analytics desk compared household cold-water and wastewater tariffs across 20 cities of Kazakhstan. The spread is almost fivefold: for the same 12 cubic metres a month a family pays 1,153 tenge in Kyzylorda and 5,063 in Karaganda. We break down what lies behind these figures and why the water source explains only half the bill.

The key finding

A water bill carries not one price but two: the tariff per cubic metre of water and the tariff per cubic metre of wastewater. These are two independent cost chains. The price of water depends on where it is taken from and how it is treated: a river, a well, or — as in Aktau — desalinating seawater. The price of wastewater does not depend on the water source at all: it is shaped by the length of the sewer network, the number of pumping stations, the operation of treatment plants and how worn they are.

So the familiar logic — "it's expensive where water is carried from afar" — explains only the first line of the bill. The second, wastewater, it does not explain. And it is on that second line that the largest gaps between cities are hidden.

Reduced to a plain sum: a family of three using 12 cubic metres of water a month pays for water and wastewater together from 1,153 tenge in Kyzylorda to 5,063 in Karaganda — a 4.4-fold difference for the same service.

Where it's most expensive, and where it's cheap

Below is the full ranking of 20 cities: the water tariff, the wastewater tariff and the total bill for 12 cubic metres for a family of three. Cities are sorted from cheapest to most expensive.

Cities marked [to verify]: the current tariff is confirmed via secondary sources, because the water utility's official website was unavailable when this material was prepared. Details are in the "Caveats" section.

The same service — delivering 12 cubes to the tap and taking them back into the sewer — costs 5,063 tenge in Karaganda and 1,153 in Kyzylorda. The difference comes not from family behaviour but from how water supply and wastewater treatment are arranged in each particular city.

The most expensive water is where it's hardest to obtain

Each of the three most expensive cities — Karaganda, Aktau and Aktobe — has its own reason, and all three come down to how the water is obtained.

Karaganda is the only large city where cold water is pumped not from a nearby river or a well, but from the Kanysh Satpayev Canal: the water is brought dozens of kilometres away and lifted by pumps. The pumping is paid for in electricity, whose cost is built into the tariff. Hence expensive water — 178.73 tenge per cube.

Aktau is the only city in the country where drinking water is produced by desalinating the seawater of the Caspian (the MAEK plants). This is the most energy-intensive way to obtain drinking water of all those used in Kazakhstan: the sea must first be turned into distillate, then re-mineralised back to drinking quality. Hence water at 177.62 tenge per cube — genuinely expensive.

Water is cheapest in Kyzylorda, Zhezkazgan and Turkistan. And here begins the most important part for the reader: a cheap tariff does not always mean cheap water.

Kyzylorda holds the lowest water tariff in the country — 44.64 tenge. But the order that set it dates back to 2023: the tariff is effectively frozen. Meanwhile water quality in the region — from the Syr Darya — has long been considered problematic, and the networks are worn. A low price on the bill here largely means not efficiency but deferred investment: for today's cheap tariff you pay tomorrow in worn pipes and water quality.

Anuar Kenesbayev, data analyst at the ZhKH 24 desk, explains: "A water tariff is not a market price but a calculation: how much it costs the utility to extract, treat and deliver a cubic metre to the tap, plus an approved markup for repairs and development. So a low tariff can mean two very different things. Either the water really is cheap to obtain — for example, by gravity from a nearby well. Or the tariff simply hasn't been raised for a long time, with no money for pipe replacement built into it. In the second case the saving is illusory: what isn't collected through the tariff will surface anyway — as accidents, shut-offs, murky water from the tap." — Anuar Kenesbayev, data analyst, ZhKH 24 analytics desk

The wastewater paradox: why "dirty" water sometimes costs more than "clean"

Usually wastewater costs less than water. In Almaty a cube of water is 76.56 tenge and wastewater 47.50; in Taraz it's 92.42 against 36.20. The familiar logic: first the water was expensively obtained and treated, then drained — and that's cheaper.

But in several cities it's the other way round. In Karaganda wastewater — 243.18 tenge per cube — costs more than the water itself (178.73). In Kyzylorda, Astana and Oral, sewerage too costs as much as or more than water. How so?

The answer is that wastewater is a separate and often more complex engineering task than supplying water. Water can be led by gravity from a mountain or a reservoir. But wastewater has to be collected from across the whole city, lifted by pumps (sewers more often run uphill, against the terrain), run through treatment plants with energy-hungry aeration stations, and the sludge disposed of. All of this is electricity, equipment and repairs.

Karaganda is a telling case. Its aeration station, with a capacity of 232 thousand cubic metres a day, was built back in the 1970s–80s and needs modernising, the sewer networks stretch for hundreds of kilometres, and wear across the region reaches 90%. The cost of putting this system in order is built into the tariff — and wastewater ends up costing more than water. It becomes "doubly expensive": pricey water from a distant canal plus even pricier treatment of the effluent.

Anuar Kenesbayev explains: "People often think of sewerage as just a 'pipe in the ground' and are surprised it costs more than water. But consider: water can be brought into the home under natural pressure, whereas you can't move wastewater out of a low-lying area up to the treatment plant by gravity — you need pumping stations, and they run around the clock. Then the effluent has to be genuinely treated, not just dumped: that's microbiology, blowers, settling tanks, sludge handling. Where the plants are new and compact, wastewater is cheap. Where they are forty years old and scattered across a huge city, it's expensive." — Anuar Kenesbayev, data analyst, ZhKH 24 analytics desk

"The conditions look the same" — so why do the tariffs still differ

Cities draw water from similar sources, serve similar five-storey blocks, and work under the same regulatory rules. So where does the manyfold spread come from? The ZhKH 24 analytics desk identifies six reasons.

Source energy. Desalination (Aktau) and long-distance pumping (Karaganda) are the most expensive methods. Gravity flow from a nearby reservoir or well is the cheapest. Electricity is one of the main items in the cost of water.

Network wear and the investment programme built into the tariff. This is the key and most underrated factor. When a utility launches large-scale pipe replacement and treatment-plant modernisation, the cost of the works is included in the tariff — and it rises (Karaganda, Aktobe, Shymkent with an EBRD loan). When the investment programme is wound down or the tariff frozen, the price on the bill is lower — but the pipes aren't replaced either. A cheap tariff often means precisely deferred repairs.

Network length and the number of pumping stations. The bigger and more sprawling the city, and the higher water and wastewater must be lifted, the greater the energy costs — especially for wastewater.

Water losses. Some of the extracted water leaks away through leaky networks without reaching the consumer, but it was extracted and treated all the same. These losses are paid for by all subscribers through the tariff. Where networks are old, losses are higher.

Cross-subsidisation and "frozen" tariffs. For households the tariff is often kept below the economically justified level — at the expense of legal entities (whose rates are higher) or by a political decision not to raise the price. In Pavlodar the household tariff was rolled back after the investment programme expired, and the matter reached court; in Oral the price for households was left unchanged while raised for businesses; in Petropavl the retail tariff for residents was held at last year's level. In such cities the figure on the bill reflects not so much the cost as a smoothing policy.

Timing of revision and VAT. Tariffs are revised at different times: some cities have already moved to the new long-term 2026–2030 rates, while others live by orders from 2023–2025. Since 1 January 2026 VAT in the country is 16%, but tariffs set earlier may have been approved at 12% VAT. So a head-to-head comparison sometimes pits prices from different eras against each other.

What this means for the reader

The practical point is simple: a water bill has two lines, and each has its own cause. If the payment seems large, it's worth looking at which of the two lines is driving it — water or wastewater — because these are different stories.

You can check exactly how much you pay for water and wastewater at your consumption level, and how it compares with other cities, in the ZhKH 24 calculator. And if the tariff has risen, the water utility's notice or website always states the number of the order of the Committee for Regulation of Natural Monopolies department by which the tariff was approved; from that order you can see exactly what drove the price up and for what period it was set.

And the main thing the comparison shows: a low tariff is not always cause for joy, and a high one is not always cause for outrage. Sometimes a high price means the city has finally started replacing pipes that are half a century old. And a suspiciously low one means it doesn't intend to replace them yet.

Caveats and the limits of the calculation

The ZhKH 24 analytics desk draws attention to the limits of the material.

All tariffs are given for households, per cubic metre, at the rate including 16% VAT in force as of September 2026. Where the official source publishes a price without VAT, the rate including 16% VAT was calculated by the editors and flagged in the database. Tariffs set by orders from 2023–2025 (Kyzylorda, Konaev, Taraz and others) may have been approved at 12% VAT — for such cities the "including 16% VAT" value is a calculated one and requires reconciliation with the actual bill.

The "for 12 m³" bill is illustrative: it is a family of three consuming about 4 cubic metres of cold water per person per month, where the volume of wastewater is taken as equal to the volume of water consumed (the standard billing approach when there is no separate effluent meter). Your actual consumption may differ.

For a number of cities (marked [to verify] in the table — Oral, Petropavl, Pavlodar, Turkistan, and also Aktau's wastewater) the current tariff or order number is confirmed only via secondary sources, since the water utilities' official websites were unavailable at the time of preparation or do not publish current rates. For Kyzylorda the official website posts the 2023 tariff; a more recent differentiated tariff is mentioned in the media but not confirmed by an order.

For Aktau the drinking-water tariff is given; separate rates also apply to settlements in the region. For cities with a tariff differentiated by volume (Atyrau, Turkistan, partly Pavlodar) the table takes the base rate of the first consumption block.

Sources and methodology

Cold-water and wastewater tariffs — from the official tariff pages of the water utilities (Astana Su Arnasy, Almaty Su, Vodnye Resursy-Marketing LLP, Qaragandy Su LLP, Kaspiy Zhylu Su Arnasy and others) and from the orders of the regional departments of the Committee for Regulation of Natural Monopolies in force as of September 2026; for unavailable sources — from media and industry publications with a note on their secondary nature. Data on water sources, capacities and network wear — from the utilities' official materials, reports and city master plans. Method: the sum of the water and wastewater tariffs multiplied by the monthly volume of 12 m³ (a family of three, 4 m³ per person). The data is for reference; the current rate should be confirmed on your bill or with the supplier. Legislative and tariff references are subject to verification at adilet.zan.kz and on the official resources of the water utilities.

Prepared by the ZhKH 24 analytics desk from open sources. Anuar Kenesbayev is the editorial pen name of the analytics desk; all calculations were made by desk staff and verified by the editors. Calculation date: September 2026.