The water tariff in the town of Ungheni has risen to 40.01 lei per cubic metre, and the decision took effect today, 14 July, with its publication in the Official Gazette. A family using 5 cubic metres a month will pay roughly 106 lei more per year.
On 7 July, when we wrote about the regulator’s decision, it was not yet known from what date it applied. Now it is: from today.
How much more you pay
The tariffs approved by the National Agency for Energy Regulation: drinking water 25.17 lei/m³ (up from 23.54) and sewerage 14.84 lei/m³ for household consumers (up from 14.71). Together: 40.01 lei/m³, against 38.25 — an increase of 1.76 lei per cubic metre, or 4.6%.
| Monthly use | Extra per month | Extra per year |
|---|---|---|
| 3 m³ | +5.28 lei | +63 lei |
| 5 m³ | +8.80 lei | +106 lei |
| 8 m³ | +14.08 lei | +169 lei |
| 10 m³ | +17.60 lei | +211 lei |
Not everyone pays the same. Of the water used by Ungheni households, only 62% is also billed for sewerage — the rest goes to consumers who are not connected to the sewer network. For them the increase is on water alone: 1.63 lei per cubic metre. Business tariffs rise too, from 39.86 to 41.49 lei — a cost that can find its way back into prices.
Overall, our calculation — made on the volumes ANRE itself declares, and verified by recomputing the operator’s entire revenue — shows the increase takes about 2.06 million lei a year out of Ungheni pockets.
The explanation that does not hold
Ungheni’s high tariff has been explained in public, by the town hall and by the operator, through the cost of electricity: waste water is pumped some thirteen kilometres to the treatment plant, which drives up the electricity bill.
And we went further and put a figure on that explanation. In a comparison of tariffs across the country, published on 8 July, we wrote that electricity for pumping “accounts for around a fifth of the price”.
The regulator’s documents show that it does not.
| Component | Amount (thousand lei) | Share | Against 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Staff costs | 32,479.1 | 77.2% | +5.6% |
| Electricity | 3,779.5 | 9.0% | −19.4% |
| Material costs | 3,076.6 | 7.3% | +5.6% |
| Royalty | 1,668.2 | 4.0% | +43.6% |
| The rest | 1,583.2 | 2.5% | — |
| Total | 42,083.3 | 100% | +2.3% |
Electricity accounts for 9% of the cost — not a fifth, as we wrote. And far from pushing the tariff up, it fell by 19.4% on the year.
What drives the tariff up is wages: 77.2% of everything you pay per cubic metre of water.
That does not mean the wages are unjustified. A water utility is, by its nature, a business of people: plant operators, fitters, emergency crews who dig at night. It only means that the explanation we have grown used to hearing — and which we repeated — accounts for neither the level of the tariff nor its increase. We apologise for the wrong figure; we have corrected it in that article too.
What the tariff does not show
The documents also bring out figures nobody has communicated.
The treatment plant runs at less than half its capacity. Its design capacity is 12.7 thousand cubic metres a day; it runs at about 6 thousand — “because water consumption across the whole service area is low”, the operator’s own plan says. Here lies the structural cause of a high tariff: fixed costs divided by small volumes. The aqueduct was begun in 1956, the Prut intake dates from 1972, and the network runs to 157 kilometres.
A fifth of the water is lost on the way. In 2025, 1,632,467 m³ were abstracted from the Prut, 1,521,196 were distributed, and 1,202,600 were billed. Network losses: 318,596 m³, or 20.9%. ANRE recognises only 17% in the tariff — the rest is borne by the operator, not the consumer.
The regulator also cut the operator’s request. It excluded 714.6 thousand lei — the 2025 profit, which the operator had “used for purposes other than those provided by the methodology” instead of putting it into the Development Fund. And a further 94.3 thousand lei of working capital, because the operator “did not contract short-term loans”. Of the 46 million lei requested, ANRE recognised 43.
The contradiction in the documents
On 28 May, the operator asked ANRE for an increase of 4.52 lei per cubic metre.
On 26 June, the same operator told the Municipal Council that the current tariffs could be maintained — “without affecting the operator’s economic and financial balance”. The council agreed, found the proposal “substantiated technically and economically”, and asked ANRE to take its position into account.
ANRE did not reject the increase. It cut it — from 4.52 to 1.76 lei.
ANRE’s reasoning note makes no mention at all of the Municipal Council’s decision.
You have 30 days
The decision “may be challenged before the issuing authority within 30 days of publication in the Official Gazette” — that is, until around 13 August.
Ungheni Municipal Council formally argued for keeping the tariff. That route is open to it.
Where you can check the price
Nowhere, for now. On the very day the new tariff became binding, both ANRE’s public tariff registry and the operator’s own website were still displaying the old price — 23.54 lei for water, 14.71 for sewerage. An Ungheni resident wanting to find out today what they pay could not do so on either official channel.
On the operator’s website, the annual-reports page has been brought up to date: on 13 July the reports for 2025 were published, alongside those for 2023 and 2024.
Correction — 17 July 2026
The initial version of this article stated that the most recent annual activity report published on the operator’s website was the one for 2022. The statement was inaccurate at the time of publication: the «Annual reports» page on acu.md included the reports for 2023 and 2024, and on 13 July — one day before the article — the management report and the performance-indicators report for 2025 had also been published. We have corrected the passage. The finding about the tariff page and the ANRE registry, which displayed the old tariff on the day it entered into force, still stands. We correct our mistakes publicly.