Price-quality path for Watercare
Watercare will be subject to a price-quality path (PQP28) once the Charter ends in June 2028.
Our role
We are setting the first price-quality path for Watercare (PQP28) under Part 4 of the Commerce Act. It will apply when the Charter ends in mid-2028.
Under a price-quality path we can set the maximum amount of money that Watercare can recover from consumers, and the quality of service they need to provide for that money. We can also set a minimum amount of money they can recover, if we think this helps consumers in the long term.
A price-quality path works with other components of economic regulation, like information disclosure (ID) that requires Watercare to publish information that lets stakeholders understand whether it's delivering the quality of service it must.
Emerging Views Paper on price-quality path
On 25 June 2026 we published our Emerging Views Paper on PQP28 and the Supporting Financial Model. This paper sets out our emerging views on the key decisions needed to establish the price-quality path.
We are seeking feedback on this paper. Submissions are due by 5pm on Thursday 30 July 2026. Please email all submissions to wai@comcom.govt.nz. Further details on how to make a submission are in the Emerging Views Paper. Cross-submissions will be open for two weeks from when we publish the submissions we receive.
Release of additional information and models to support the Emerging Views Paper
We have decided to publish additional information and models to support our analysis presented in the Emerging Views Paper published in June. This includes the models used to estimate components of the cost of capital (beta values, risk-free rate, and a regression model on water production and electricity consumption to Auckland’s gross domestic product). Watercare requested the release of this information and these models.
The information and models are available to access and download in the Documents tab below.
Certain Bloomberg data has been redacted because the terms of our Bloomberg licence do not permit us to publish it.
Input methodologies
Regulatory certainty and predictability are important. As outlined in our Approach Paper and Emerging Views Paper we consider the regulatory regime and long-term benefit of consumers are better served if we defer considering whether to set any input methodologies applying to Watercare until after setting PQP28, as permitted under the Commerce Act.