Domestic water use

Of course some of the most important uses for water are at our homes. Domestic water use is water used for indoor and outdoor household purposes— all the things you do at home: drinking, preparing food, bathing, washing clothes and dishes, brushing your teeth, watering the yard and garden, and even washing the dog.

Water generally gets to our homes in one of two ways. Either it is delivered by a city/county water department (or maybe from a private company), or people supply their own water, normally from a well. Water delivered to homes is called "public-supplied deliveries" and water that people supply themselves is called "self supplied", and is almost always from groundwater.

The majority of America's population (about 86 percent) gets their water delivered from a public-supply system. This makes sense, as America's population now largely live in urban centers. You might want to check out a bar chart below that shows how the trend over the last 50 years of people moving to urban centers is reflected in the shrinking numbers of self-supplied people in the Nation.

Self-supplied domestic withdrawals for the Nation, 2005

Although the majority of people in the United States used water provided by public suppliers in 2005, about 42.9 million people, or 14 percent of the population, supplied their own water for domestic use in 2005. (All 2005 water use information is from the report Estimated use of water in the United States in 2005.) These self-supplied withdrawals totaled 3,830 million gallons per day (Mgal/d), or about 1 percent of estimated withdrawals for all uses in 2005. Nearly all (98 percent) of these self-supplied withdrawals were from fresh groundwater.

Domestic water use by State, 2005

 Just to clarify, when we talk about total domestic water use below, we are referring to the combination of self-supplied domestic water and water delivered to all homes from public-supply systems.

States with the largest domestic use (public supplied and self supplied) and the largest domestic deliveries from public supply were those with the largest populations: California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Illinois. California, Texas, and Michigan had the largest self-supplied withdrawals. Self-supplied domestic population in each State, in thousands of people and as a percentage of total State population, are shown in the maps below. Self-supplied domestic populations were largest in Michigan, California, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Texas. States with the largest percentages of their population that were self-supplied were Maine, New Hampshire, Alaska, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

 Data table: Domestic water use by state, 2005 (PDF)

Trends in domestic water use, 1955-2005

Since the end of World War II there has been a trend of people moving out of the rural countryside and into the ever-expanding cities. This has important implications for our water resources. Communities have had to start building large water-supply systems to deliver water to new populations and industries.

In times past when most people lived in rural areas, they had to find ways to supply their own water—often by drilling a well and pumping water to their homes. Not many city dwellers have a well in their backyards today. A public-water supply system, such as your local water department, nowadays delivers water to most homes. The bar chart below shows the trend toward urbanization over the last 50 years. Notice how the blue bars (representing the millions of people served by a public water-supply system) keeps going up while the green bars (representing the number of people who supply their own water) has trended downward, with 14 percent of the Nation's population supplying their own water in 2005.

Domestic water use, 2000

• Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2000, USGS Circular 1268:
• Domestic water use, 2000: Summary | Data table, by State | National map