Water · Free State
Is my water reliable? How much is lost? Is it safe?
48.0%
of the water bought or purified was lost before it was sold in 2024-25. Treasury’s norm is 15% to 30%.
Official: Audited annual financial statements · Data as of 2024-25 financial year (audited statements) · Next update expected Jan 2027 (2025-26 annual reports) · Last updated
Compare all eight metros: Water. An asterisk marks a figure our automated checks found inconsistent with another official figure; it is shown as reported, explained in a footnote and left out of rankings.
Official: Stats SA, General Household Survey 2025 · Data as of General Household Survey 2025
63 000
households in Mangaung told Stats SA their water had been cut for 48 hours or more at a time in the past year, out of about 302 000 households.
Stats SA: “a smaller percentage of households in metropolitan areas reported water interruptions (30,0% compared with 37,6%). Water interruptions were most common in eThekwini (43,9%), which is almost six time more common than in the City of Cape Town (7,8%).”
Cut 2+ days: households that answered yes to a water cut of 48 hours or more at a time, in thousands as Stats SA prints them (Table 2.8: Water and sanitation variables by metro); all households from Table 3.7. A sample survey. Sources: GHS 2025: selected development indicators, metros (P0318.3); the quotation is from the main GHS 2025 release (P0318), section 9.3. For cuts happening now, see the city’s notices and community reports.
Official: audited annual financial statements · Data as of 2024-25 financial year (audited statements) · Next update expected Jan 2027 (2025-26 annual reports) · Last updated
Water a metro buys or purifies but never bills: leaks, burst pipes, illegal connections and faulty meters. Treasury’s norm is 15% to 30%.
Official: Vaal Central Water · 15 Sep 2026 · Data as of see each reading’s date · Updates: daily or weekly, depending on the publisher · Last updated
Vaal Central Water (formerly Bloem Water) supplies most of Mangaung’s water. Shown: Welbedacht, Knellpoort and Rustfontein (Mangaung IDP 2022-27, pp.52-53) and Groothoek, which supplies Thaba Nchu (Vaal Central Water). Mockes and Maselspoort are not listed by Vaal Central Water. It publishes % full only, and updates the figures every few weeks. Vaal Central Water does not publish earlier levels; we keep each update. Our record starts with this one. Source: Vaal Central Water, dam levels.
Official: DWS weekly State of Reservoirs, copied 10 Oct 2026 · Data as of see the copy date · Updates: DWS publishes weekly; we copy by hand
100%
full: the Bloemfontein, Mangaung’s main water supply system. Last week 100%; a year ago 81%.
DWS: these summaries cover only the dams in its State of Reservoirs report. Several metros share a system: Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni all draw mainly on the Integrated Vaal River System. Each metro’s main system is confirmed from its own documents (source). The DWS site refuses automated requests, so these figures are copied by hand from its summary pages each week (copied 10 Oct 2026; the report’s own date was not copied). Source: DWS, weekly summary by water supply system.
Official: the metro · Data as of see each notice’s date · Updates: checked daily · Last updated
Mangaung publishes no water outage notices online that we could find.
Places are matched by their Stats SA Census 2011 names, longest name first, with no guessing; a name we cannot match is listed for checking and not linked to a ward. Notices before 1 Jan 2025 are not included. Mangaung: Mangaung publishes no water outage notices online that we could find. Where a metro publishes no notices, residents can report an outage (community reports, unverified).
