Plumber Cedar Park: The Meter Counts To A Hundredth Of A Gallon, The Bill Counts To Ten
Cedar Park publishes a sentence about its own water meters that almost nobody reads to the end. The digital meter display has nine digits and represents gallons consumed down to one hundredth of a gallon. The last two digits, the City says, can be used as leak indicators. Then comes the part that changes everything: for billing purposes, the meter is read to the tens position.
Read those two facts together. The instrument on your property can resolve a hundredth of a gallon. The invoice built from it resolves ten gallons. Between what the meter can see and what the bill counts there is a factor of one thousand, and a slow fault lives in that gap quite comfortably for as long as you let it. The portal shows it. The statement does not.
That gap is the single most useful thing a Cedar Park household can know, and it decides how the rest of this page is written. Everything below was read on 2 August 2026 from the City of Cedar Park, and every figure we refused to state is named at the foot rather than estimated.
The lead
A gap of one thousand between the instrument and the invoice
Cedar Park replaced its old meters with Advanced Metering Infrastructure, digital units from Sensus, and the City describes the display as looking similar to a car odometer with nine digits. Those digits represent gallons consumed down to one hundredth of a gallon, and the City nominates the last two as leak indicators, there to show flow through the meter.
For billing, the same meter is read to the tens position. That is not a criticism of the City, it is how volumetric billing works everywhere. It is worth stating plainly because of what it implies for a household. A fault that moves less than ten gallons in a read period produces no visible change on the invoice at all, while sitting in plain view on the portal as a baseline that never returns to zero.
The City is explicit that the technology exists because of that problem. After the 2015 drought, customers asked for daily detail, alerts and leak detection so they could manage costs, and in 2016 the City Council directed a vetting process that ended with Sensus. The project was financed through Capital Improvement Project funds and the City states customers incur no additional cost for the meters.
The three alerts worth setting on the day you move in
The portal lets you set thresholds rather than only look at charts, and the three the City names are the three a plumber would pick. A daily usage alert fires when you exceed a given amount in a day. A billing cycle usage alert fires when you exceed a given amount across the cycle. A vacation alert fires when usage occurs at the property while you are away. The third is the one that finds burst supply lines, because an empty house has a known correct answer and it is zero.
- Shut every fixture in the house, including the ice maker and any irrigation controller set to run overnight.
- Write down all nine digits from the meter face, not the billed five. The two you care about are the ones the City calls leak indicators.
- Wait fifteen minutes with nothing running and read all nine again.
- Any movement at all in the last two digits is flow. It may be far too small to show on a statement and it is still flow.
- If it moves, isolate the house at the main shutoff and repeat. Movement with the house isolated puts the fault on the service line rather than inside the building.
That sequence costs nothing and it settles the argument most Cedar Park leak calls start with. Where it points at buried pipe rather than a fixture, our leak detection work starts from your own reading rather than from a guess, and where it points at a fixture the fix is usually the cheapest thing on the property.
Sorted by how finely each one can actually see
Cedar Park points four different measuring instruments at the same property, and they do not agree about how much detail exists. Ranking them by resolution rather than by importance is unusual and it is the most honest way to read a bill here.
One hundredth of a gallon
The meter register itself. Nine digits, the last two nominated by the City as leak indicators. This is the finest thing on the property and it is already installed.
Near real time, by the hour
The digital metering portal. The City calls it more frequent reading as opposed to monthly readings, which is what makes a flat overnight baseline visible as a pattern.
Ten gallons
The billed read. Everything below the tens position is invisible to the invoice, in every month, forever. A fault can be real, measured and unbilled at the same time.
A three month average
The wastewater charge. There is no meter on a sewer line, so the City prices it from winter water use. The resolution here is a season, and it is the one that lasts.
The practical consequence is that the two instruments a household actually looks at, the invoice and the sewer line on it, are the two coarsest of the four. The fine ones are free, already fitted, and require somebody to log in.
The boundary answer
The city is not a customer of its water supply, it is a part owner of it
Most cities on this site either run their own utility or buy from a wholesaler. Cedar Park does something in between and it changes who you are actually dealing with. The Brushy Creek Regional Utility Authority is described by the City as a partnership of the cities of Cedar Park, Leander and Round Rock, with a responsibility to provide reliable, cost effective sources of water for their fast growing jurisdictions.
Cedar Park holds two seats on the authority board. One is a City Council Member, who serves as President. The other is a Citizen Director. That second seat is the detail worth keeping, because it means a resident of this city sits on the board of the body that owns the intake, which is not how a wholesale water contract works anywhere.
The physical arrangement is equally unusual. The City lists a capital project to replace the portion of the underwater pipeline that feeds raw water from Lake Travis to the authority treatment plant, funded at $1,180,000 from the utility fund. Raw water arrives here through a pipe under a lake, owned by three cities at once.
The same three cities, a different answer on the wastewater side
This is where the co-ownership stops being tidy. The water side is the authority above. The wastewater side runs through the Brushy Creek Regional Wastewater System, and our Round Rock page documents that end of it in detail, including the nondomestic surcharge programme Round Rock operates under Chapter 44, Article 6, Section 44-149 of its own code. Two regional arrangements, the same three fast growing cities, and two different sets of rules about what may enter the pipe.
For a household the practical translation is short. Drinking water questions here are authority questions and the City answers them. Wastewater questions are Cedar Park questions up to the point where they become regional ones. If you are comparing this to somewhere thirty minutes down the road, Austin draws surface water from the same Lower Colorado River system through Lake Travis and Lake Austin and treats it at its own plants, with no partnership and no shared board at all. Same water, two completely different ownership structures.
And if you are north of the city line, check which utility actually bills you before assuming any of this applies. Pflugerville is a separate system with separate rules, and the boundary between them is not where most people think it is.
Winter averaging here comes with a door, and almost nowhere else does
There is no meter on a wastewater line, so cities estimate sewer volume from measured water use in a season when nobody irrigates. Cedar Park does this, and by itself that is the least remarkable fact on the page. What is remarkable is a single sentence on the rates page that we have not found anywhere else on this site.
Read that as a plumber reads it. Everywhere else, a leak inside the averaging window sets a number you then pay against for a year, and the only remedy is to have fixed it before the window opened. Here there is a published route to a second average, once a year, on a written request. That converts a closed door into a procedure, and a procedure has a date, a desk and an outcome.
It also changes what your invoice is worth. If a plumber finds and fixes a running toilet or a stuck softener in February, the repair invoice is not only proof of work. It is the evidence attached to a request that the year ahead be priced on your real usage rather than on three months of a fault. Keep the invoice, keep the dates, and keep the meter readings either side of the fix.
Four cities, one question
What recourse exists after the window closes
We have built this mechanism enough times now to line the answers up. In El Cajon the winter average is multiplied by six and lands on an annual property tax bill, so there is not even a monthly statement to query. In Flower Mound the sewer volume is your winter average rather than your current month, and a January fault is priced into every bill until the next window.
In Round Rock, seven miles from here and a partner in the same water authority, the City states that residential wastewater usage is determined following its wastewater averaging method and publishes nothing about revisiting it. Cedar Park publishes the door. That is a small sentence carrying a large amount of weight, and it is the only reason this section exists on a subject we have otherwise covered to exhaustion.
One caution before anyone relies on it. The City describes the averaging window in two places and the two descriptions are not identical in shape, which we set out at the foot of this page. Ask Utility Billing which window governs your own account before you plan around the answer.
Three cities hired the same vendor and each one withheld something different
Cedar Park runs its cross connection programme under section 18.09 of the City Code of Ordinances, which regulates the installation, testing, re-testing and certification of testable backflow prevention assemblies and of certified backflow assembly testers. The administration of the tracking programme is contracted out to Backflow Solutions, Inc., and all annual test reports must be submitted electronically by the testing company through the BSI Online system.
That vendor is not unique to Cedar Park and the comparison is the useful part. Three cities on this site use the same company and each publishes a different piece of the arrangement, which means a homeowner in one of them cannot answer a basic question that a homeowner in another can.
Durham publishes the date
Effective 1 August 2019 the City contracted with the vendor, and from that date it began accepting all containment and isolation assembly reports. Read the Durham page
Flagstaff publishes the phone number
Results do not go to the city directly, and the same number that files a report will also find you a certified tester. Read the Flagstaff page
Cedar Park publishes the price
A filing fee of $12.95 per test report submitted. It is small, it is per report, and it is the only one of the three that tells you what the paperwork costs.
The initial test on a new device is handled differently from the annual one. Cedar Park directs initial reports for new devices, and for temporary construction fire hydrant meters, to a separate Backflow Prevention Assembly Test and Maintenance Form rather than through the online system. Getting that wrong is the most common way a first test on a new assembly ends up unrecorded.
What needs a permit
The published list, and the two appliances on it that surprise people
The City states the general rule in one line. A permit is required for any construction which physically changes or adds structures to the property. Then it publishes a list that is explicitly described as not comprehensive, and the two entries on it worth naming here are the water heater and the water softener. Both appear, both by name, and a great many replacements in this city happen without either.
Also on the list: remodels involving the relocation or removal of interior walls or of electrical, mechanical or plumbing work; irrigation systems; swimming pools and spas; generators; solar panels; electric vehicle supply equipment; heating and air conditioning equipment; accessory buildings; and moving or demolishing a building.
Not on it: house painting, carpet, cabinets, wallpaper and non structural roof covering. Fencing is the interesting exception, because the City says no permit is required and then says the fencing regulations in the ordinance must still be followed. No permit is not the same as no rule, and that distinction catches people out here.
Pulling it yourself, and what the City asks for when you do
Applications run through the MyGovernmentOnline portal, and the City publishes step by step guides for creating an account, submitting an application, searching for a permit, adding one to your account and printing it. A homeowner pulling a permit in their own name has to file a Homeowner Affidavit, and the City attaches a note to the homestead paperwork that heating and air conditioning work is limited by state guidelines.
Two other documents on the residential page are worth knowing about before a job starts rather than after. A Permission to Enter form is the owner authorisation for the City to come onto the property for inspection purposes. And there is a published list of Common Non Compliance Items, described as the items most commonly missed when inspecting residential construction, which is effectively a free copy of the inspector notes before the inspector arrives.
The City is direct about the limits of its own list and gives a number to settle it: call the office to confirm what permits are needed before starting any work. On a straightforward water heater replacement that call takes two minutes and removes the only real risk in the job, which is discovering at resale that the appliance was never recorded.
The restrictions are written around the nozzle, not around the clock alone
Cedar Park publishes its outdoor rules as two lists, allowed and prohibited, and the allowed list is the more instructive of the two because it tells you what equipment buys back your freedom. Irrigation and sprinklers are permitted before 10:00 a.m. or after 7:00 p.m. on your designated days. Watering by hand is permitted at any time provided you use a pistol grip nozzle or an automatic shut-off. A drip or soaker hose may be used at any time.
Residential and charity car washing are both allowed at any time on the same nozzle condition. Commercial car washes are allowed where they meet a minimum fifty per cent water recycling requirement. Pressure washing is allowed where the spray nozzle uses no more than 3.5 gallons of water per minute and has a working trigger shut-off with a protective weep mechanism. Filling of new and existing swimming pools, hot tubs and wading pools is permitted.
New landscape gets a specific and finite allowance. Extended landscape variances must be requested, and the City states that one 21 day variance is granted per installation. One, per installation, which is a sentence worth reading before you plan a phased planting.
- Water waste.
- Off schedule watering.
- Broken or misdirected sprinkler heads.
- Excessive runoff or ponding.
- Controllable leaks.
Three of those five are things a technician fixes rather than things a household decides. A broken head, runoff and a controllable leak are all repair items, which means an irrigation service visit here is compliance work as much as it is maintenance. The City also runs a rain barrel programme offering residential customers up to $100 in utility bill credits, which we mention and do not build on, because rebate mechanics are covered in depth on other pages of this site.
Before the work starts
The clock on getting water to a property in the first place
This matters more than it sounds on a repipe, a remodel or any job where the supply is off and has to come back on. The City requires an application for all water service requests, and for a residential request that means the application plus government issued photo identification. Connections happen Monday to Friday between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. only, with no weekends and no holidays, and requests require 24 hours notice.
The City then adds the sentence that decides your week. If you submit a request on Friday, the connection will occur on the following business day. Read that alongside the no weekends rule and a Friday request is a Monday connection at the earliest, which is a lost weekend on any job planned around a Friday finish.
A minimum deposit of $100 is assessed on the first month bill. It may be waived on an approved letter of credit from a former utility company, water, electric or gas, submitted within 30 days of the service request. The letter has to cover the last 12 consecutive months and the City states that not more than one late payment is acceptable. One late payment is the entire margin.
A four tier residential structure with a steep top step
The residential water base rate is $19.90 and includes the first 2,000 gallons of usage. The residential wastewater base rate is $23.00 and also includes the first 2,000 gallons. Above the base, water is priced in four bands and the spread between the first and the last is the part a plumber points at, because a hidden leak does not stay in the cheap band.
| Residential water, per 1,000 gallons | Rate |
|---|---|
| 0 to 2,000 gallons | $19.90 flat base rate |
| 2,001 to 10,000 gallons | $4.49 |
| 10,001 to 15,000 gallons | $5.40 |
| 15,001 to 20,000 gallons | $6.47 |
| Above 20,000 gallons | $9.71 |
| Residential wastewater, each additional 1,000 gallons | $4.40 |
The top band is more than double the first. A continuously running fault does not add its volume at the bottom of the structure, it adds it at the top, on the last band your household reaches. That is why the arithmetic on a slow leak in this city is worse than people expect and why the portal alert is worth more here than in a flat rate town.
One published oddity we are recording rather than interpreting. On the non residential side the City lists the volume charge twice, at $4.37 per 1,000 gallons and at $4.01 per 1,000 gallons when the temporary water conservation rate adjustment is removed. A temporary adjustment is therefore in force at the time of reading, and the City publishes the number it will revert to. We are not stating when that happens because the City does not.
Cedar Park work, booked against a city that measures more than it bills
A portal baseline that never returns to zero overnight. A sewer charge that did not fall when the leak was fixed. A water heater going in on a Friday against a Monday connection. A backflow assembly whose first test was filed on the wrong form. A sprinkler head on the prohibited list. We will tell you which of those is a repair, which is a paperwork problem and which is both, before anybody quotes a number.
Leak detection
Starting from your own nine digit reading rather than from a guess. Leak detection
Water heaters
Replacement with the permit question settled first, because this city lists the appliance by name. Water heater repair
Sewer lines
Camera survey before excavation, so a belly is not treated as a blockage. Sewer line repair
Drains
Cleaning that distinguishes a recurring cause from a one off. Drain cleaning
Emergencies
Burst supply, no water, or a meter that will not stop moving. Emergency plumbing
Nearby
We publish the same depth on the neighbours. Round Rock
Cedar Park plumbing questions, answered from what the City publishes
Every answer below is drawn from City of Cedar Park pages read on 2 August 2026. Where the City publishes two versions of something, we say so rather than pick one.
The City lists the water heater by name among the projects that require a permit, alongside the water softener, irrigation systems, generators, solar panels and electric vehicle supply equipment. It also states that the list is not comprehensive and gives a number to confirm what is needed before work starts. Applications run through the MyGovernmentOnline portal, and a homeowner pulling the permit in their own name files a Homeowner Affidavit.
Because the two instruments have different resolutions. The City states the digital meter display carries nine digits representing gallons down to one hundredth of a gallon, and nominates the last two digits as leak indicators. It also states that for billing purposes the meter is read to the tens position. Anything below ten gallons in a read period is real, measured, visible on the portal and invisible on the invoice.
From measured water use in winter rather than from a meter on the sewer line, because there is no such meter. The rates page states charges are based on the average metered water usage for the prior year winter months of December, January and February. The Utility Billing FAQ describes the same three months as a three month consumption period that is re-averaged once a year. Ask Utility Billing which of those governs your account.
Not necessarily, and this is where Cedar Park differs from most cities we cover. The rates page states that once per year, customers may request an additional averaging in writing. That is a published route to a second average rather than a closed door. Keep the repair invoice, the dates and meter readings either side of the fix, because those are the evidence a written request rests on.
The Brushy Creek Regional Utility Authority, which the City describes as a partnership of the cities of Cedar Park, Leander and Round Rock. Cedar Park holds two seats on its board, one filled by a City Council Member serving as President and one by a Citizen Director. Raw water reaches the authority treatment plant through an underwater pipeline from Lake Travis, which the City has a capital project to partially replace.
The City has contracted with Backflow Solutions, Inc. to administer the cross connection and backflow tracking programme, and all annual test reports must be submitted electronically by the testing company through BSI Online. There is a filing fee of $12.95 per test report submitted. Initial reports for new devices, and for temporary construction fire hydrant meters, go on a separate Backflow Prevention Assembly Test and Maintenance Form instead.
Only within a finite allowance. The City states that extended landscape variances must be requested and that one 21 day variance is granted per installation. Outside that, irrigation and sprinklers run before 10:00 a.m. or after 7:00 p.m. on your designated days, while hand watering with a pistol grip nozzle or automatic shut-off, and drip or soaker hose use, are allowed at any time.
Longer than most people plan for. Connections happen Monday to Friday between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. only, with no weekends or holidays, and requests require 24 hours notice. The City states that a request submitted on Friday results in a connection on the following business day. A minimum deposit of $100 applies and may be waived on an approved 12 month letter of credit from a former utility with not more than one late payment.
Yes, on an equipment condition. The City permits pressure washing where the spray nozzle uses no more than 3.5 gallons of water per minute and employs a working trigger shut-off with a protective weep mechanism. Commercial car washes are allowed where they meet a minimum fifty per cent water recycling requirement, and residential and charity car washing are allowed at any time using a pistol grip nozzle or automatic shut-off.
On a high bill, a fault that has been running below the billed resolution for weeks. The meter sees it, the statement does not, and the portal is where the two are reconciled. The first thing we ask for is a nine digit reading taken with the house shut down, because that one number decides whether the next step is a fixture, the service line or a conversation with Utility Billing about an average.
Sources. The nine digit meter display, the one hundredth of a gallon resolution, the last two digits as leak indicators, the reading to the tens position for billing, the Sensus selection and the 2016 Council direction after the 2015 drought, the daily, billing cycle and vacation alerts, and the statement that customers incur no additional cost, are from the City AMI Digital Water Meters Information page.
The description of the Brushy Creek Regional Utility Authority as a partnership of Cedar Park, Leander and Round Rock, and the two Cedar Park board seats held by a Council Member serving as President and by a Citizen Director, are from the City Brushy Creek Regional Utility Authority page. The underwater pipeline replacement and its $1,180,000 utility fund figure are from the City Projects Utilities page. The section 18.09 cross connection programme, the Backflow Solutions contract, the BSI Online submittal requirement, the $12.95 filing fee per test report and the separate form for new devices and temporary construction fire hydrant meters are from the City Cross Connection and Backflow Prevention page.
Every water and wastewater rate, the tier boundaries, the winter averaging sentence and the additional averaging on written request are from the City Water Rates page. The permit and no permit lists and the fencing ordinance caveat are from the City Do I Need a Permit page.
The allowed and prohibited watering activities, the 10:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. window, the pistol grip nozzle condition, the 3.5 gallons per minute pressure washing limit with its weep mechanism, the fifty per cent commercial recycling requirement and the one 21 day landscape variance per installation are from the City Watering Schedule page. The service connection hours, the 24 hour notice, the Friday to following business day rule, the $100 deposit and the letter of credit waiver are from the Utility Billing FAQ. The three month consumption period and annual re-average wording is from the same FAQ. The rain barrel credit is from the Water Thrifty Cedar Park page.
A disagreement inside one publisher, printed rather than resolved. The Water Rates page says monthly charges shall be based on the average metered water usage for the prior year winter months of December, January and February. The Utility Billing FAQ says the rate is based on a three month consumption period and that the City re-averages your usage once a year during the winter months of your billed consumption. Same three months, but one says prior year and the other says your billed consumption, and those are not the same window for an account opened part way through a year. We adopt neither and tell you to ask.
Refused and left blank rather than estimated. Anything about grease traps, industrial pretreatment or nondomestic discharge limits in Cedar Park: the City industrial pretreatment link resolves to a document we could not read as text, and a subject that important is not written from a filename.
Also refused. The current drought or conservation stage by name and number: the watering page describes current restrictions without naming the stage on the page we read, so we state the restrictions and not the label. The date the temporary water conservation rate adjustment is removed, which the City prices without scheduling. Water hardness and any recommendation for or against a softener, because no figure was published on the pages read and one is not worth inventing. Permit fee amounts, which sit behind a separate fee schedule we did not open.
And refused last. The capacity or condition of the authority treatment plant. And the designated watering days themselves, which are assigned per address rather than published as one citywide table, so we describe the window and send you to your own schedule for the days.