My apologies for leading with a shameless plug, but I want to be sure you see it!

Sadly, the response to the 2026 Utility Staffing Survey is way behind that of previous years’ Utility Staffing Surveys.

As an incentive to participate in the 2026 Utility Staffing Survey, I will draw for two $50.00 Visa gift cards from all of the responses received when the survey concludes.

Have you completed the 2026 Utility Staffing Survey yet? If you haven’t, will you please take a moment and do it now? You can complete the 2026 Utility Staffing Survey by clicking here. I’ll be wrapping up the survey on May 15.

Rate increase question

Recently, during the Q&A period after a speaking engagement, someone in the audience asked whether I thought it was better to implement small, yearly rate increases or a single large rate increase when needed.

My response

As you might imagine, my response was that I always favor small, annual rate increases over a deferred, much larger increase.

I previously wrote about this topic, using a hypothetical 2% annual increase on an average monthly bill of $50.00. Here is a table from that post showing how this plays out over a ten-year period:

As the original blog post pointed out, if no annual rate increases are adopted, rates must be increased by 21.9% to generate the desired revenue in year 10. The graph below does an even better job of showing the difference (clicking on the image will open a larger graphic in a new window):

Slow and steady

Just like Aesop’s fable, “The Tortoise and the Hare”, slow and steady also wins the race with rate increases. Modest annual rate increases are more easily absorbed by your customers than much larger increases every few years. They also generate far fewer customer complaints than less frequent, larger rate increases.

In rereading the original blog post, I realized I failed to mention one important point. In addition to protecting your customers from a very large rate increase, small annual increases also provide incremental additional revenue for your utility each year.

Are you following best practices?

Is your utility following best practices, such as implementing annual rate increases? If not, or if you’re not sure, please give me a call at 919-673-4050, or email me at gary@utilityinformationpipeline.com to learn more about how a business review could help you find out.

© 2026 Gary Sanders