Our July Utility Bill Was $238.66 for Five People, and Water Was the Real Problem

Our July bill came to $238.66. Five people in the flat, four family plus our helper, one month of electricity, gas, water and refuse collection.

Depending on the exchange rate that's somewhere close to 300,000 won. For utilities. In Korea I don't think I ever paid anywhere near that, even in the worst week of August with the aircon running, and six years in I still pause for a second when the notification comes through.

What's actually inside that number surprised me, though, once I finally sat down and read the breakdown instead of just paying it.

I Was Wrong About Which Line Was Killing Us

Electricity was $104.41 for 332 kWh in July.

Here's the part that stopped me. SP prints a comparison right on the bill, and it showed neighbour average at 491 kWh and national average at 405 kWh for the same month. We used 332.

Five people, aircon running most nights, and we're well under both. I genuinely did not expect that, because electricity is the line I'd spent years assuming we were losing on.

The tariff moved recently too. From 1 July 2026 it's 31.91 cents per kWh, or 34.78 cents including GST. Gas went up in the same round, by 1.56 cents to 23.48 cents per kWh, 25.59 cents with GST. We cook on gas rather than induction, and that came to $33.65 for 144 kWh.

Electricity and gas together, about $138. Not what I'd have guessed, but fine.

How the Readings Actually Work

You can submit your own meter readings each month through the app. If you don't, they estimate based on your previous month and bill you on that. Then the following month an actual meter reader comes round, and the bill gets adjusted against real usage, so if the estimate ran high you'll see it come back down.

I've done it both ways over the years. Submitting it myself takes two minutes and means the number is real rather than a guess, which matters more than I expected in months where usage genuinely changed.

Then there's water.

Water Is Where We Actually Lose

Water was $71.17 for 22.0 cubic metres.

Same comparison, same bill. Neighbour average 13.6, national average 16.4. We're at 22.0. Well above both, and by a margin that having one extra person in the house doesn't really explain away.

The charge stacks in a way I didn't understand for years. Water usage at $1.43 per cubic metre, then waterborne tax at $1.09 per cubic metre on top of that, then a water conservation tax charged at fifty percent of the usage amount. So the actual water was $31.46, and the taxes added $39.71 on top. The taxes cost more than the water.

That's deliberate policy, obviously. Singapore has almost no natural freshwater of its own and pricing is the main lever available. Understanding that has not once made me feel better about the number.

My Shower Experiment Went Nowhere

So I tried to fix it, and it was quietly humbling.

My baseline was a shower before work and another after getting home. Weekends were worse. Morning shower, another after playing with the girls around midday, another if I'd been sweating in the afternoon, one more before bed. Four in a day sometimes.

I cut the weekend ones down to one or two. Held it for weeks. Waited for the next bill.

Barely any difference.

I'm still not sure why. Maybe I'm just quick in there, in and out, so the volume was never coming from me anyway. Meanwhile there are five people here, laundry running constantly, dishes, cooking, two small children who need washing more or less continuously. My showers were never the issue. I just picked the variable that was easiest to blame myself for.

The bill even prints a saving tip at the bottom, something about only boiling as much water as you need and using a thermo-flask if you want hot water through the day. I read it, looked at the $71.17 sitting just above it, and moved on.

Two Years of Bills, Barely Any Swing

I went back through the payment history in the SP app, and the range is narrower than I expected.

Most months land between $220 and $250. The lowest I found was around $144, the highest around $291. There's no dramatic seasonal spike because there aren't really seasons here. It's warm all year, so aircon use doesn't surge and collapse the way heating does back home.

We moved within the same development recently and that showed up in the billing too. The old address closed out with a small credit, minus $2.98, and the new one started fresh. The deposit on an HDB account is $200, and the final usage gets settled against it automatically. I'd braced myself for some kind of admin headache and there wasn't one, which after the whole landlord situation that forced the move was a small relief.

There's also refuse removal, $9.72 that month, on the same statement. And nine percent GST across the whole thing, $19.71 in July.

Why I Never Switched Retailers

Singapore has an open electricity market, so you can leave SP Services for an independent retailer, and people do report saving on the unit rate.

I've stayed with SP for over six years. Partly inertia, I'll admit that. But what I kept hearing from others was that the savings are real while the contract runs, and the friction turns up around service issues and termination, arguments over final bills, that sort of thing.

Six years without a single problem is worth something. I've never had to call them about an error, the app works, moving house happened without a conversation. For the money involved I decided that was a fair trade and stopped thinking about it.

Internet Is the One Thing That Feels Cheap

M1 HomePac, 3Gbps, $29.90 a month on a two-year contract. It's the one utility here that feels genuinely reasonable, roughly comparable to Korea.

Installation was easy because most flats are already wired, so unless something's actually broken it just works. When I renewed, they told me the 500Mbps plan I'd been on was being discontinued, and moving up to 3Gbps came out about a dollar cheaper. They threw in a router too, and sent a technician on a weekend, no charge, to set it up.

One thing worth knowing if you move mid-contract. Apply ahead of time, not on moving day. They'll transfer the connection so it's live when you walk in, but there's a relocation charge, around $60, that lands on the following month's bill. Everything else runs through the app, including booking a technician if something breaks.

Where I've Landed on It

I still do the Korea comparison in my head more often than is useful. Close to 300,000 won a month, for a household that heats nothing and runs nothing unusual, and is actually below the neighbourhood average on electricity.

But I read the bill properly now, which I didn't for the first few years. I know water is where we're genuinely above average and electricity isn't, which is the exact opposite of what I'd assumed. I know the water taxes cost more than the water.

None of that has changed what I pay. It just means I've stopped blaming my own shower schedule for it.

Related reading:

The Honest Breakdown of My Monthly Cost of Living in Singapore as a Family of Four

Why I Finally Dumped StarHub After Six Years of Overpaying for a SIM Card