The price of a glass of water

The carafe d'eau has been a fixture of French restaurant tables since 1967, when an administrative decree (Arrêté n°25-268) required all restaurants to provide tap water free of charge as part of the standard table service. In Germany, no equivalent obligation exists, and bottled sparkling mineral water is the near-universal default.

Anglophone tourists visiting Europe may therefore often be surprised to find that they cannot get free tap water at a restaurant, but instead will have to pay for bottled.

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To get a sense of how this varies across countries, we broadly estimate the share of revenue that food service establishments make off bottled water sales in 53 countries over 2011–2019, using Euromonitor Passport data.

France records a ratio of 1.8%. Germany's is 17.0%. Both countries have comparable incomes, comparable restaurant cultures, and major domestic bottled water industries. France is home to Evian, Volvic, and Perrier; Germany is Europe's largest per-capita sparkling water market by volume.

The chart above ranks all 53 countries in the dataset by this measure. At the high end, Egypt (22%) and the UAE (18%) sit alongside Germany (17%) and Belgium (15%). The first two reflect genuine constraints on tap water access — but Germany and Belgium are less easily explained: both have excellent municipal water systems, and both lack any legal requirement for restaurants to offer free tap water.

At the low end, France sits at 1.8% and the United Kingdom at 0.9%.

The regulatory landscape around these rules is generally unclear, partly due to slight variations in application across jurisdictions, and misleading websites. A 2017 poll by Keep Britain Tidy found that only 25% of the public knew when they could ask for water for free.

Across the world, 24 jurisdictions have free tap water rules for at least some types of restaurants. The logics behind these laws vary from consumer protection, to environmentalism, to public health.

In France, the obligation fits broadly within consumer protection: tap water became part of a mandatory and standardized table service bundle that also includes bread and cutlery. Water is a component of the meal price rather than a separately priced item.

In a number of countries, the focus has been more squarely on environmental sustainability. Spain introduced a national requirement in April 2022 through its Circular Economy Law. Romania followed in March 2024 under Government Ordinance 7/2023. Life-cycle assessments find that producing a litre of bottled water requires between 11 and 2,000 times the energy of delivering an equivalent litre through a tap system, depending on methodology and product (Bouhlel et al., Sustainability, 2023; Dettore, University of Michigan, 2009). The European Commission has estimated that universal restaurant tap water provision could save EU households over €600 million annually on bottled water costs. The Right2Water European Citizens' Initiative — which gathered 1.86 million signatures between 2012 and 2013, making it the first initiative to surpass the threshold — cited these figures in its demands, and contributed to the revised EU Drinking Water Directive (2020/2184), which encourages but does not require member states to mandate free tap water in food service.

Other countries have focused on public health reasoning. Israel is notable as the only country requiring water to be brought to the table proactively, without being requested, broadly as part of a concern for hydration of customers. The United Kingdom and New Zealand anchor their requirements in alcohol licensing law rather than consumer protection. The UK's Mandatory Licensing Conditions Order (2010) requires any premises licensed to sell alcohol to provide free tap water on request — a rationale grounded in reducing alcohol-related harm rather than protecting consumers from overcharging.

All Australian states replicate this model through their respective liquor licensing acts. Enforcement is variable: a 2017 survey by Keep Britain Tidy found only 25% of the UK public were aware of the right. Mexico City mandated water filters in all restaurants in 2014–15, framed as a public health intervention in a country that leads the world in per-capita bottled water consumption, in part because of deep-seated distrust of municipal water following the 1985 earthquake.

In Argentina, a "Derecho de Jarras" movement has built a patchwork of provincial and municipal laws since 2009, covering Buenos Aires Province, the city of Buenos Aires, Rosario, Córdoba, Neuquén, La Pampa, and Santa Fe. In Brazil, Rio de Janeiro state has had a law since 1995 and the Distrito Federal since 1998, while São Paulo's 2023 state-level law was declared unconstitutional by the court of justice within 24 hours of coming into force — with the Supreme Court upholding that ruling in September 2025 on the grounds that it violated free enterprise principles.

Several further countries have legislation in progress. Chile's "Ley del Vaso de Agua" passed the Chamber of Deputies in December 2025. Peru's Health Committee approved a bill unanimously in September 2025. Poland has a pending proposal with 77.8% public support in March 2026 polling.

While legislation can help, it is not necessary to shift consumers away from bottled water. A number of countries — including the US, Canada, South Korea and Japan — have free tap water as a norm rather than a legal requirement. Chelcea's "Hydraulic Hospitality and the Waters of New York City Restaurants" (Current Anthropology, 2024) constitutes an ethnographic study of free water norms in American restaurants, and introduces the concept of "hydraulic hospitality" — the practice of providing abundant free water as what Chelcea calls "an almost costless loss leader, a lubricating gift that facilitates marketplace transactions." Chelcea traces the American norm to the temperance movement and early twentieth-century hospitality culture, and shows how servers simultaneously maintain the free water norm while also promoting bottled alternatives.

Norm-based priming can reinforce this message. Dorigoni and Bonini's field experiment in the Journal of Environmental Psychology (2023) tested whether a social-norm message — informing diners that two in three people in the area drink tap water — could shift ordering behaviour in an Italian restaurant where bottled water was the default. Bottled water orders fell by 12 percentage points, from 96% to 84% of water requests. The finding suggests that norm-based interventions can move behaviour even in contexts where bottled water is deeply embedded as the expected choice.

Beverage companies have been vociferous in protesting potential legislation. In 2010, Coca-Cola's "Cap the Tap" campaign framed the issue in starkly commercial terms:

The campaign was eventually retired, but it highlights the ways in which customers' need for drinking water is viewed as a potential commodity, even where safe and freely available tap water exists. The cross-country pattern in this data is consistent with tap water mandates having a real effect on restaurant behaviour over the long run. Whether that effect runs through legal enforcement, norm change, or some combination is harder to say. The French case has now been running for long enough that it deserves a proper look.