Karachi’s informal water economy runs on an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 tankers, making up to 50,000 deliveries a day.

Gallup Pakistan Digital Analytics sized the household-spending side of this using HIES 2024-25 microdata, then cross-checked the supply side against independent field research to understand the scale of what’s actually moving water around the city.

Roughly 1 in 4 Karachi households, an estimated 840,800, rely on a tanker as their main source of water, not a piped connection.

They pay a median of Rs 3,500 a month, about six times what a household on a working pipe connection pays.

Scaled across the city, that adds up to an estimated Rs 33.5 billion spent every year just on tanker water.

Behind that spending is a genuinely large, organized fleet. Independent reporting, including field research from Michigan State University and investigative work by Dawn, puts the number of tankers operating across Karachi at roughly 8,000 to 10,000, making somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 deliveries on a typical day. That is not a handful of informal operators filling a gap. That is the rough size of a parallel utility, one that exists specifically because the formal network doesn’t reach a quarter of the city.

Worth being precise about where the numbers come from here. The household spending figures are ours, computed from PBS survey microdata. The fleet and delivery figures are drawn from independent reporting, not something we measured directly, and we have kept that distinction clear rather than blend two different kinds of evidence into one number.

Put together, the picture is a useful way to frame the case for fixing Karachi’s piped network. It is not just a quality of life question. A fleet this size, moving this much money every day, is effectively the city’s backup water utility, and the households funding it are disproportionately the ones who can least afford to be paying a six times premium for something as basic as water.

Data: Pakistan HIES 2024-25 (Pakistan Bureau of Statistics); Karachi household count from the 2023 Pakistan Digital Census; tanker fleet estimates from independent reporting (Michigan State University, Dawn, The Friday Times).

Analysis by Gallup Pakistan Digital Analytics.