City of Statesboro Making Changes to Utility Billing Schedule

City of Statesboro utility customers will soon see a change in their utility bills starting in April. Currently, when a customer receives their utility bill, the total amount due is for services rendered almost two months ago. The current service schedule is a holdover from a time when meter readers had to physically go out to each customer’s meter, take a reading, then submit those readings to the finance department to be keyed for billing. With the advent of digital meter monitoring, the city can now receive readings in real-time from a computer which makes billing turnaround a lot quicker.

To get to a point where customers’ bills will reflect the past 30 days of service, the city will have to essentially “catch up” on their billing to bring it into compliance with the new schedule. The new schedule change will see customers being charged for 35 days of service instead of the usual 30 days of service in their monthly bills. Because the bill will include an additional five days of service, customers’ bills will be slightly higher than usual.

Residential customers with average water and sewer usage could see an increase of roughly $6 to their monthly bill during the transitional period. In comparison, a residential customer that utilized average amounts of water, sewer, and natural gas could see an increase of around $23 a month. It’s important to note that this is not a rate increase but a change in the number of service days billed. This is a temporary change and will take around 10 months to complete the billing schedule transition. After 10 months, the city’s utility billing cycles will be fully caught up and when a customer receives a bill, it will be for the previous month of service.

Under the current service schedule, a customer could receive a higher-than-usual monthly bill only to discover that they had a water leak for almost two months and were unaware. This new schedule will help customers to have more active management of their utility usage and will help city staff to identify unusual usage readings more quickly. Being able to bill customers for the previous month will make for a better customer experience and will ultimately help the city’s Public Utilities department with diagnosing unusual meter readings.

For questions regarding the service date change, customers can contact the City of Statesboro Utility Billing Department at 912-764-5468.