Cubic metres on your bill to litres per day
One cubic metre a year is 2.74 litres a day. So multiply the annual volume on your bill by 2.74 to get litres a day, which is the unit every other figure on this site is in.
Last reviewed 14 August 2026
The short answer
One multiplier, and it is exact.
| Cubic metres a year | Litres a day | Roughly |
|---|---|---|
| 50 | 137 | One person at the England average. |
| 100 | 274 | Two people. |
| 150 | 411 | Three people. |
| 200 | 548 | Four people. |
| 300 | 822 | Four people plus about a hundred cubic metres unaccounted for. |
Every row is the annual figure multiplied by 1,000 and divided by 365. Nothing in the table is an estimate, and the descriptions in the last column are the England average scaled to occupancy rather than a claim about your household.
How this works in practice
The conversion exists because a bill and a leak are described in different units, and comparing them means putting both in one.
- A bill counts cubic metres over a billing period, because that is how charging works.
- A leak is described in litres per hour, because that is what a meter test measures.
- Household use is published in litres per person per day, because that is how consumption is reported.
Litres a day sits in the middle of those three and is the easiest to hold in your head, which is why this site converts to it for comparisons and keeps litres per hour for measured rates.
Once the billed volume is in litres a day, compare your annual consumption against that figure does the comparison against expected use.
What changes the answer
The conversion never changes. What changes is whether the number it produces means what you want it to mean, and there is one significant trap.
Converting an annual total into litres per hour looks like it gives you a leak rate. It does not. It gives you the rate at which that volume WOULD have flowed if it had flowed perfectly evenly for a year, and no household uses water that way. A summer of garden watering and a continuous leak produce the same annual total and behave completely differently.
- Use the hourly conversion to picture the size of a gap. A gap of 100 cubic metres a year is about 11 litres an hour, which tells you it is a large continuous loss if it is a loss at all.
- Do not use it as a measured rate. It is arithmetic on a total rather than a measurement of a flow.
- For a real rate, measure one. measure the current rate of loss at the meter divides a measured volume by a measured interval.
The distinction between a total and a rate is the same one that catches people reading a meter, and it is the reason this site keeps the two in different units throughout.
Assumptions and sources
Water resources 2024 to 2025: analysis of the water industry's annual water resources performance
Environment Agency · primary source
- Household per capita consumption: 136.5 l/person/day
- Household per capita consumption, prior year: 137 l/person/day
- Household per capita consumption, dry-year adjusted: 140.3 l/person/day
- National leakage: 2617 Ml/day
- National leakage as share of water put into supply: 19 %
PR24 common performance commitments: per capita consumption (PCC), version 2.1
Ofwat · primary-standard source
- PCC formula: (measured household consumption + unmeasured household consumption) / total household population l/person/day
Litres in a cubic metre
Exact by definition
SI definition. The litre is defined as one cubic decimetre, so one cubic metre is exactly 1,000 litres.
Hours in a day
Exact by definition
Definition of the day as 24 hours.
Days used for an annual figure
Editorial convention
Annual figures on this site are a daily rate multiplied by 365. Leap years are not modelled, so a leap year is understated by one day, which is 0.27 per cent.
The conversion carries no assumption and needs no source: a thousand litres to a cubic metre by definition, three hundred and sixty five days to a year, twenty four hours to a day.
The occupancy descriptions in the table are the published England average scaled by the number of people, and that figure is England only with three definitional differences from a meter reading. It is a reference point rather than a statement about any household.
What to do next
Two things.
- Convert a full year of billed volume rather than one quarter, so no single season dominates.
- Use the daily figure for comparisons and the meter for rates. They answer different questions and neither substitutes for the other.
Common questions
- Where does 2.74 come from?
- 1,000 litres in a cubic metre, divided by 365 days. There is no assumption in it.
- How do I get litres per hour?
- Divide the daily figure by 24. But read the caveat below before using it, because an annual total converted to an hourly rate assumes the water flowed evenly all year, and no household does that.
- Why does the benchmark not report a rate of loss?
- For exactly that reason. A bill covers a billing period and says nothing about when the water moved, so an hourly rate derived from it would be inventing precision the bill never contained. The meter test reports a rate because it measures one over an interval you chose.
- What does the average household look like in these units?
- A household of four in England at the published average uses about 199.3 cubic metres a year, which is 546 litres a day. That is the figure a billed volume gets compared against.