What a water meter costs before you build, town by town

The line item that surprises people on an acreage or infill build is not the house. It is the cost of being connected to water and sewer, which arrives as two separate charges from a body that may not be the city on the mailing address, calculated from a number nobody thinks about until it is quoted: the size of the meter.

Two different fees, and they are not the same thing

Almost everyone conflates them. Benbrook Water Authority's own FAQ separates them explicitly, and the distinction holds generally:

• An impact fee buys capacity in the system — your share of the plant, the mains and the storage that will serve the house.
• A tap fee buys the physical connection and the meter.

The authority's FAQ adds two rules worth knowing before a design is finished: fire lines are exempt from impact fees, and an irrigation meter pays the water impact fee but not the wastewater one.⁴ It also notes that on existing development the impact fee applies "only if an additional demand is being placed on the public system" — the relevant question for a remodel or an addition rather than a new house.⁴

Fort Worth publishes its fees, by meter size and by period

Fort Worth's current-fees page is the model of what you want to find. For the period 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026, a 5/8-inch meter carries a water impact fee of $2,824 and a wastewater impact fee of $2,680.¹ The fees rise with meter size from there.

The city's information page carries the mechanic that matters more than the number: impact fees are assessed based on the date the plat was recorded and the water meter size.² So the fee that attaches to your lot may be the one in force when the plat was recorded, not the one on the page today, and the meter size is a design decision with a price attached.

That second point deserves a sentence of its own. A larger meter is sometimes specified for reasons of irrigation, fire flow or a generously sized mechanical scheme. It is worth asking the plumbing designer, early, what the smallest meter that serves the house actually is, because the difference between meter sizes on an impact-fee schedule is measured in thousands.

Benbrook: the utility is not the city

In Benbrook, water and sewer belong to the Benbrook Water Authority, which the city's own utilities page describes as having its own elected board of directors and being independent from the city.⁶ Gas is Atmos and the electric wires are Oncor's.⁶ So a Benbrook address means the building permit is the city's and the water connection is somebody else's, with a separate schedule and a separate counter.

The authority's schedule, effective 1 October 2025, is published by meter size. Up to a 1-inch meter it is $4,662 for water plus $9,027 for sewer — $13,689 in total. Above that it rises steeply: $30,873 at 1.5 inches, $49,396 at 2 inches, $119,444 at 3 inches and $205,335 at 4 inches.³⁵

Put the Fort Worth and Benbrook numbers beside each other and the point of this note appears. Two adjacent jurisdictions, both publishing honestly, with a total connection charge on a small residential meter that differs by roughly a factor of two and a half. Neither is wrong. They are different systems with different capital programs.

Aledo: the amounts are not published online

Aledo's FY25-26 fee schedule carries tap and meter fees and permit fees, and then, for impact fees, points elsewhere. In the city's own words on that schedule: "For Impact Fees, refer to the Impact Fee Collection Rate Schedule Ordinance Number 2022-154, adopted by the Aledo City Council on March 24, 2022."⁷ The amounts in that rate schedule are not published on the city's website.

That is not an accusation. It is a practical fact with a practical consequence: in Aledo, the number has to be obtained from the city, in writing, for your lot and your meter size. A figure quoted from anywhere else is somebody's recollection.

Willow Park, and a note about how this page works

Willow Park publishes its utility fee schedule as a PDF on the city's website. We could not open that document — so this note states no Willow Park figure, and does not cite the schedule either, because a citation carries the date we opened a page and we did not open this one. Ask the city for the current schedule.

That is the rule this whole page runs on, and it is worth being explicit about it. Every number above is quoted from the schedule we actually opened on the date shown in the source list. Where we could not open a schedule, we say so and give you the link instead of a stale number. Fees change by ordinance on the authority's own calendar, and a repeated figure is worth nothing next to the schedule itself.

What to do

1. Establish who the water and sewer provider actually is. It is not always the city on the address — Benbrook is the local proof.⁶
2. Ask that provider for the current impact fee and the tap fee, separately, for the meter size your plumbing designer intends.⁴
3. Ask on what date the fee is assessed. In Fort Worth it keys to the plat recording date and the meter size.²
4. Ask whether the lot has ever had a meter. On acreage that has never been served, connection is a bigger conversation than a fee schedule — see Tri-County Electric vs Oncor for the same problem on the electrical side.
5. If the house will have irrigation, ask how the irrigation meter is charged.⁴

For the broader budget context, Impact fees: the line item nobody budgets and What drives cost on an acreage lot.

If you are choosing between two lots in two different jurisdictions, this is one of the few cost differences you can settle exactly, in advance, with two phone calls.