Italy withdraws 8.86 billion cubic meters of fresh water a year to supply aqueducts. No other country in the European Union takes so much. In the capital municipalities, however, 35.2% of the water released into the network is not supplied to users. And in 2025 almost one in three families said they don’t trust drinking from the tap. It is a record that, if followed along the pipes, loses a lot of its luster.
The data comes from the chapter dedicated to water SDGs Report 2026 of the Istat. The withdrawal concerns the entire country, the efficiency of the networks only the provincial capitals and metropolitan cities, while trust was detected among families in 2025. Three different measures, within the same service: we take a lot, we deliver much less and almost three out of ten families continue to look with suspicion at the tap.
We collect 411 liters each day
In 2024, the Italian water system withdrew a total of 8.87 billion cubic meters of water for drinking use. After removing the small share coming from the sea, 8.86 billion cubic meters of fresh water remain, collected through approximately 37,400 active sources.
That’s 411 liters per day for each inhabitant. Before blaming showers that are too long, it is worth clarifying the fact: those 411 liters do not correspond to the domestic consumption of each of us. They measure the water withdrawn to supply the water service, including the quantities that will not reach the users during the journey.
Overall volume declined 3% from 2022 and hit a 25-year low. Even at the minimum, however, Italy remains first in the EU27. A record it has held for over twenty years.
France and Germany, both more populous, stop at around 5.3 billion cubic metres. The comparison considers 2024 or the latest year available for each country, but the distance remains wide. On an individual basis we withdraw 150 cubic meters per year per inhabitant: second only to Ireland, with 240, while twenty European countries rank between 45 and 90.
84.9% of Italian fresh water destined for aqueducts comes from springs and wells. The Po river district alone concentrates 2.73 billion cubic meters, almost a third of the national total. Lombardy withdraws 1.42 billion.
For every hundred litres, 35 are not supplied
Once it enters the network, all this abundance begins to shrink. In 2024, the provincial capitals and metropolitan cities supplied 1.5 billion cubic meters of water, equal to 233 liters per inhabitant per day. That’s 30 liters less than in 2012 and three less than in 2022. The average efficiency of the networks stops at 64.8%. It means that, for every one hundred liters introduced, 35.2 are not delivered to users.
Calling them all “holes in the pipes” would be convenient and imprecise. Istat’s calculation includes unavoidable physiological losses, physical losses caused by failures and deterioration of infrastructure – which remain the most significant – and administrative losses due to measurement errors or unauthorized consumption. The water can disappear under the asphalt, into a meter that measures poorly or out of the registers. For the user the result changes little: it is not delivered.
From the minimum of 61% recorded in 2016, efficiency slowly rose again, before stabilizing in 2022. The word “stable” is comforting up to a certain point. Around one in three capitals remains below 55% and in four out of ten the situation has worsened compared to 2022.
The data, still provisional, changes a lot across Italy. In the Northern capitals the efficiency reaches 74.2%, with the North-West at 79.6%. In the South it drops to 50.9%. In the Islands it reaches just 44.3%: the missing share exceeds that actually provided.
Seventeen capitals have rationed water
In 2024, rationing measures affected 17 of the 109 provincial capitals, three more than the previous year. Over one million people, 5.8% of residents in the provincial capitals, lived in areas where water was limited for part or all of the municipality.
Almost everyone lives in the South, especially in Sicily. The number of cities involved is the second highest recorded since 2010. Then there are the homes. In 2025, 10.2% of families reported irregularities in water distribution, 1.5 percentage points more than in 2024. There are 2.7 million families and over two thirds live in the South.
In Calabria the problem is reported by 37.3% of families, in Abruzzo by 30.3% and in Sicily by 29.5%. In the North the percentage stops at 3%. The distance between the two Italys, at least here, does not need to be looked for between the lines. Rationing and irregularities are two different photographs. The former derive from the measures adopted in the capitals; the latter are reported directly by the families. The geography, however, is quite similar.
One in three families doesn’t trust the tap
In 2025, 29.9% of Italian families declared that they do not trust drinking tap water. The share grew by 1.2 points in just one year and is well over half in the Islands, where it reaches 56.2%. In the North-East it stops at 19.6%.
The data measures trust, not water quality. The questionnaire does not analyze what comes out of the taps and that 29.9% cannot be transformed into a percentage of water outside the drinkability parameters. Furthermore, Istat does not ask families why they stopped trusting. Attributing everything to network losses would be a leap that the numbers do not allow.
At the extremes, however, the data speaks for itself. In the North-East, distrust is at 19.6% and the efficiency of the capital networks is at 66.4%. In the Islands the former rises to 56.2% and the latter collapses to 44.3%. Families and networks in the capital cities are not perfectly superimposable samples. It’s a clue, not a sentence.
The European record measures the quantity of water we withdraw from springs, wells, rivers and lakes. The management can be seen later: in the 35 liters per hundred that are not supplied in the capitals, in the cities forced to ration and in the 2.7 million families who receive an irregular service. The faucet is only the last piece of the network. And that’s what puts our face to it.
