Pool Fill Cost Calculator
Work out the cost to fill (or top up) your pool from its volume in gallons and your own water rate. Enter the price the way your utility bills it — per gallon, per 1,000 gallons, or per CCF (100 cubic feet ≈ 748 gallons) — and the tool converts for you.
Calculator
Filling 20,000 gallons at $0.0040 per gallon costs about $80.00 (your rate — no tariff is stored).
Filling a swimming pool is one of the few genuinely large water purchases a household makes, and the bill scales directly with two numbers: how many gallons the pool holds and how much your utility charges for water. This calculator keeps those two numbers in your hands. It stores no rate table and chases no local tariff, so it stays correct wherever you live and whenever you use it — you simply read the unit price off your own water bill and type it in.
Water utilities in the United States price water in several ways. Some bill per gallon, many bill per 1,000 gallons, and a large number bill in CCF — hundred-cubic-foot units, where one CCF equals 100 ft³, or about 748 gallons. Pick the matching unit and the tool does the conversion, so you never have to translate your bill into a different unit by hand. Remember that most bills also carry sewer and fixed service charges that this estimate does not include; ask your utility whether pool water can be metered as “fill-and-drain” or sewer-exempt, because that alone can change the true cost.
Formula
The cost is the volume multiplied by the unit price, after converting the volume into the same unit as your rate:
$ = gallons × rate(rate in $/gallon)$ = (gallons ÷ 1,000) × rate(rate in $/1,000 gallons)$ = (gallons ÷ 748) × rate(rate in $/CCF, since 1 CCF ≈ 748 gallons)
All three describe the same purchase; only the unit of the price changes. There is no fixed water price baked into the site — the rate is always yours.
Worked example
Suppose you have a 20,000-gallon pool and your utility charges $0.004 per gallon (that is $4.00 per 1,000 gallons):
20,000 × $0.004 = $80.00
The same pool at a CCF rate of $3.00 per CCF works out to (20,000 ÷ 748) × $3.00 ≈ $80.21 — almost identical, because the rates are equivalent. If your utility also adds a sewer charge on metered water, the real outlay will be higher; a fill-only meter or a sewer credit avoids that.
Reading your water bill
A few practical points keep the estimate honest. First, filling from a garden hose delivers water through your household meter, so it is billed at your normal potable-water rate plus any volumetric sewer charge — the part people forget. Trucked-in “bulk” water is priced differently and usually per load, so this per-volume tool does not model it. Second, evaporation and splash-out during the season mean you rarely fill the whole pool twice; use the water loss tool to size a top-up rather than assuming a full refill.
Third, if you are budgeting for a brand-new pool, remember the first fill is a one-time cost, while the ongoing spend is dominated by pump electricity and heating, not water. Pair this tool with the pump energy and heating-cost calculators to see the whole picture. Finally, because the calculator holds no tariff, it will never go stale: when your water price changes, just type the new number.