New milestone: Drop in recorded leaks across Wellington city

Increased investment in leaks from Wellington City Council has enabled Wellington Water to ramp up their leak repairs across the metropolitan region, going from 1720 leaks in January 2024, to just under 400 leaks in January 2025, which is a reduction of over 75 percent. 

Wellington Water is focused on getting leaks down to a sustainable level to keep water loss to a minimum and enable efficient leak repairs. This is each Council’s target backlog.  

For Wellington city, our current backlog target is 133. Last month, there were 220 leaks in the backlog in comparison to 936 in 2024. 

Not only has this reduced the risk of a water shortage during the summer months, it means that lower priority leaks are getting repaired faster, allowing Wellington Water crews to get to issues before they become bigger.

The drop in the backlog matches the steady reduction in response and repair times in the past 12 months, with lower priority jobs being resolved much faster. 

Response time is from when the Council receives the job notification to when a serviceperson arrives on site, while the repair time refers to the time from when the Council receives the job notification to when the fault or issue is resolved.

In Wellington city, these times are:

Urgent jobs: 

• Response time – dropping from 2.5 hours to 1.2 hours
• Repair time – dropping from 13.56 hours to 3.63 hours 

Non-urgent job:

• Repair time – dropping from 45 days to 13 days

Due to the number of leaks, the team prioritises where crews go to make the best use of resources and focus on fixing the biggest leaks that have the most impact on water supply. Many of which are underground and not easy to spot.

Not many people are aware that Wellington Water, on behalf of the Council, has dedicated teams out finding and fixing leaks every day.

We’re now seeing the real-life impacts of the additional funding from the Council to tackle the leaks backlog and the hard work of the frontline crews. 

The improved response and repair times are some of the best the Wellington region has seen over the past five years. 

You can keep track of the leaks backlog on the Wellington Water website.