Hydrionis Data

France Water Service Performance Dataset

Annual water and sanitation service performance for French departments and France from 2008: all-in price per cubic metre, distribution network efficiency, linear leakage index, drinking-water compliance, unplanned interruption rate and mains renewal rate, from the SISPEA observatory. Reported as the median of what a typical service returns, with the number of services behind every figure published alongside.

v1.0.08,209 observations2008–2019

8,209

Observations

783

Series

102

Subjects

2008–2019

Period covered

Methodology

Aggregated by Hydrionis from the statutory annual returns of individual French water services. Each figure is the median across the services that reported that indicator, computed only where at least three did. A median rather than a mean because these distributions have long tails and a mean would track a handful of outliers rather than the typical service. Unweighted, because the SISPEA served-population field is null on every record the API returns: rather than weight by a proxy and call the result population-weighted, Hydrionis aggregates without a weight and says so. The count of services reporting is published as its own series, so the basis of every median is visible as data rather than asserted in prose.

What this dataset cannot tell you

Read before relying on these figures

A median over the services that made a return, not a population-weighted average and not a census. It answers "what does a typical French water service report", which is not the same question as "what does a typical French household experience": a department of many small rural services and one large urban one is described mostly by the small ones.
SISPEA response is voluntary in practice and varies by year. The services-reporting series must be read alongside the indicators to know how much of a department each figure describes.
These indicators are defined by French regulation and are not interchangeable with the English and Welsh measures of the same concepts. Network efficiency and the linear leakage index in particular are computed under different rules from the Ofwat leakage measures and must never be benchmarked against them.
A service spanning several departments is attributed to the department of its first commune rather than split, because the publisher does not provide a split and inventing one would fabricate a number.
The observatory has not released returns after 2019 through this API, so the series end there.

Coverage

Subjects	French departments and France — 102 held
Period	2008–2019
Units	%, m³/km/day, per 1,000 subscribers/yr, services, €/m³
Update cadence	Annually
Identifier	`france-water-service-performance` v1.0.0

Fields

Data dictionary →

Every metric this dataset carries, with the unit it is stored in and the geography level it is reported at. Full definitions are in the data dictionary.

Identifier	Field	Unit	Reported at
`water-service-price-all-in`	All-in water and sanitation price per cubic metre Total price of water and sanitation service per cubic metre, including all taxes and levies, at a standard reference consumption.	€/m³	utility-area, county, country
`network-efficiency`	Distribution network efficiency Volume billed or otherwise accounted for as a percentage of the volume put into distribution.	%	utility-area, county, country
`linear-leakage-index`	Linear leakage index Volume lost from the distribution network per kilometre of main per day.	m³/km/day	utility-area, county, country
`drinking-water-compliance-micro`	Drinking water microbiological compliance Percentage of regulatory drinking-water samples in a supply that met every microbiological limit.	%	supply-zone, local-authority, county
`drinking-water-compliance-physchem`	Drinking water physico-chemical compliance Percentage of regulatory drinking-water samples in a supply that met every physico-chemical limit.	%	supply-zone, local-authority, county
`mains-renewal-rate`	Mains renewal rate Percentage of the distribution network replaced or renewed in a year, averaged over a rolling five-year window.	%	utility-area, county, country
`supply-interruption-rate`	Unplanned supply interruption rate Number of unplanned interruptions to water supply per thousand connected subscribers in a year.	per 1,000 subscribers/yr	utility-area, county, country
`water-services-reporting`	Water services reporting Number of water services that made a statutory performance return for an area in a given year.	services	county, country

Rights and access

Licence position

Open with attribution. Derivative use true; redistribution true; commercial reuse true.

Attribution required:

Source: Hub’Eau / Système d’information sur l’eau, under Licence Ouverte (Etalab).

Permitted uses

Public display
Derived analysis
API delivery
Bulk download
Commercial use

Available to: Public, Developer, Research, Professional, Enterprise. These follow from the rights of the contributing publishers, not from a Hydrionis pricing decision — no access tier can widen what a publisher withheld.

Contributing sources

Office français de la biodiversité — observatoire SISPEA — Indicateurs des services — service performance (Licence Ouverte / Open Licence v2.0 (Etalab))

Suggested citation

Hydrionis (2026), France Water Service Performance Dataset, version 1.0.0. Retrieved from https://hydrionis.com/data/datasets/france-water-service-performance/

Cite the version. Hydrionis datasets change as publishers release and as methods are revised, and a citation without a version cannot be checked later.

Changelog

Version 1.0.0 — 2026-08-25

First release.

Additions

Population-weighted service performance indicators from 2008.

Getting the data

Machine-readable metadata for this dataset is at /api/v1/datasets/france-water-service-performance.json. For bulk extracts, higher-volume access or commercial licensing, see data enquiries.