The Best Water Submetering Companies in the US
You’re probably searching for a water submetering company, but are you looking for the right one? Did you know that there are three distinct types of water submetering companies, based on the services they provide? These companies are grouped by whether they focus more on the meters themselves (hardware vendors and manufacturers), billing/admin (submetering service & billing providers), or both (submetering system providers).
If it’s still not entirely clear, fear not, because in this article, we will give you an in-depth explanation of each type and provide you with easy-to-read top 3 lists of the best water submetering companies in the U.S., depending on what you need.
Top 3 Best Water Submetering Hardware Vendors & Manufacturers
When you’re evaluating hardware vendors, keep in mind that you are choosing a manufacturer whose primary responsibility is to build accurate, durable, and compliant water meters that can perform reliably for 10–20 years.
This category is fundamentally about engineering quality. If you’re buying from a hardware manufacturer, you’re investing in infrastructure. In other words, you are showing that you know and care about the specific meters used in your property.
How does one choose the best meter provider? Your attention should be focused on measurement accuracy, long-term durability, and proven lifecycle performance in the U.S.
With that in mind, let’s look at the 3 best water submetering hardware vendors and manufacturers operating in the U.S. market in more detail.
1. Badger Meter
Founded in 1905 in Milwaukee, Badger Meter is a U.S.-based manufacturer of water and flow measurement devices. It has over a century of history and is considered an industry-leading innovator in water metering technology. The company designs and manufactures flow measurement technologies for water utilities, municipalities, and commercial applications. In the U.S. water metering industry, it is widely regarded as a top-tier, utility-grade manufacturer with strong AMI integration capabilities and is known for durable designs, as its early frost‑proof meters set a reliability benchmark for water metering in tough environments.
Badger’s product range spans both mechanical and electronic meters. For example, its Recordall™ series is a nutating-disc positive-displacement meter, most commonly adopted for residential use, and its E‑Series® solid-state ultrasonic meters with no moving parts, which are also used for smart residential applications. The manufacturer also offers TRU/FLO™ compound, Preso, Dynasonics turbine, vortex, and electromagnetic meters for larger commercial/industrial flows, along with the necessary encoders, AMR/AMI communication modules, and software.
Badger primarily serves water and gas utilities, municipal water districts, and commercial/industrial facilities. Its meters are also sold through distributors to property managers and submetering installers for multi-family and commercial buildings, but its core business is utility-grade metering.
The main strengths of Badger Meter are, firstly, its long track record and focus on quality, building reliable meters well-suited for harsh conditions. A broad product portfolio that covers virtually all water-metering technologies is notable too, giving customers flexibility across applications. Finally, its high market adoption with a significant share of the large global water‑meter market, with customer references praising its accuracy and durability.
2. Neptune Technology Group
Neptune, established in 1892, is another major water-meter manufacturer focused on utility-scale solutions. The company’s motto is that it is built “for water”. It has traditionally served municipal water utilities with over 4,000 water systems in North America, according to the company, with meters and end-to-end metering systems. Neptune is well-known in the U.S. market as a full-service metering provider, including AMR/AMI network hardware and software, specifically for water and wastewater utilities.
Neptune’s meter lineup includes lead-free mechanical meters (e.g., T-10® positive-displacement meters for residential and light commercial use) and a family of advanced meters like the MACH-10® ultrasonic smart meter series for both large residential and C&I applications. They also make high-precision turbine and compound meters (e.g., TRU/FLO® compound meters, high-performance turbines, and fire-service meters). Neptune provides registers/encoders and endpoints, such as the R900® AMR radios and data collectors, to complete its AMR/AMI systems. For submetering, Neptune offers the Aquity® nutating-disc meter with its shorter layout, certified for tenant billing and related metering hardware through distributors.
Neptune Technology Group’s primary customers are municipal and investor-owned water utilities and municipalities. Neptune meters are also purchased by plumbing contractors and submetering integrators working for property owners. Essentially, any large water provider or property manager in the U.S. market might specify Neptune for its proven reliability and utility-oriented systems.
Neptune meters are engineered for precision and durability. Industry sources note Neptune’s focus on accuracy and robustness (built in tough, lead-free materials, often in their own U.S. foundries). The company’s deep experience of over 130 years and vertical integration (the company has its own foundry in Alabama) yield long-lasting meters with consistent performance. Neptune also emphasizes integrated AMR/AMI solutions. Its R900 endpoints and Neptune One data platform allow customers to receive a cohesive system from a single provider. In short, Neptune’s strengths are its reputation for reliability in demanding utility contexts and its comprehensive meter/network offerings tailored to water providers.
3. Axioma Metering
Axioma Metering is a Lithuanian company founded in 1992 that develops smart ultrasonic water and heat meters. It pioneered ultrasonic heat meters in Lithuania and has since expanded globally. In recent years, Axioma has targeted the U.S. submetering market via partners, positioning itself as a modern, cost-effective alternative. Their solutions are used by utilities, submetering companies, and property managers worldwide.
Axioma specializes in compact ultrasonic water meters for residential and multi-family use. Its flagship Qalcosonic® W1 meter is offered in ¾″, 1″, and 1½″ sizes and measures both cold and hot water with a solid-state (no moving parts) ultrasonic sensor. Key features include a 16+ year battery, integrated LoRaWAN radio, IP68 waterproof housing, and leak/burst detection alarms. Axioma also sells ultrasonic heat/cooling meters and a limited range of electromagnetic/mechanical devices, but its focus is on the aforementioned ultrasonic water meters.
Axioma’s meters are intended for utilities, submetering providers, and property owners/operators. In the U.S., they are primarily acquired by utility submetering companies and distributors serving apartment complexes and multi-tenant buildings. Some North American distributors (e.g., Mainlink LLC in Florida) import and resell Axioma meters as part of turnkey water submetering solutions.
Axioma’s main strengths are its advanced ultrasonic technology and modern design. The W1 meter’s lack of mechanical parts gives it very long-term accuracy and low maintenance. Its long battery life (16+ years) and built-in LoRa connectivity simplify remote reading. Axioma also runs a large, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility to ensure quality and competitiveness. Industry recognition and the W1 meter’s global adoption for large metering projects testify to its credibility. In practice, landlords highlight Axioma’s reliable accuracy and leak detection as major benefits, making it one of the top-ranked submetering companies for apartments.
Axioma is primarily a hardware vendor, similar to the two companies mentioned earlier. They sell meters and matching communication modules but do not provide an end-to-end submetering solution. Their meters are typically paired with third-party data platforms.For example, Mainlink offers an advanced all-in-one metering solution that includes a data management platform and a mobile app alongside the meter. If you choose a water meter provider that does not offer a network and data management platform, you will need to select additional providers who can integrate and install the complete metering solution. Alternatively, as mentioned above, you can choose a single solution provider that delivers the entire infrastructure as an integrated system.
Top 3 Best Water Submetering Service & Billing Providers
Submeter service companies buy submeters from manufacturers and install them in each unit within a multi-unit property, so owners can track individual usage and bill residents fairly. The firms also collect periodic readings (sometimes via wireless data), generate monthly bills, and provide tenant support; effectively acting as an outsourced utility department for property owners. By outsourcing these tasks, owners recover water costs and encourage conservation without managing billing in-house. Let’s look at the 3 leading US firms in this space, each specializing in submeter installation, billing, and service.
1. National Exemption Service (NES)
National Exemption Service (NES) is one of the longest-standing utility billing and submetering service providers in the United States. The company focuses on helping multifamily property owners recover utility costs by outsourcing installation, meter management, and resident billing.
Its core services include submeter installation and system setup, meter reading, and usage data collection, together with resident billing and payment processing. In addition, the company also offers customer service, billing dispute support, and regulatory compliance and reporting.
NES primarily serves multifamily housing operators, apartment portfolios, student housing properties, and large property management companies.
Its strengths are over 50 years of experience in utility billing, strong compliance expertise across multiple states, and a full-service operational model that minimizes owner involvement.
2. Guardian Water & Power
Guardian Water & Power is a well-established U.S. submetering service provider that focuses on helping property owners implement water and utility cost recovery programs.
Core services include submeter system design and installation, remote meter reading and consumption tracking, monthly resident billing and collections, customer support and billing inquiries, together with utility compliance and reporting.
Guardian works primarily with multifamily housing communities, condominium associations, marinas, and commercial properties that want to allocate water usage costs more accurately.
Its benefits feature nearly four decades of experience in submetering services, strong national presence with thousands of managed properties and an end-to-end service model that covers everything from installation to billing.
3. Conservice
Conservice is the largest utility management and billing company in the United States. The company provides comprehensive utility expense management and submetering services to millions of residential units.
The company offers submeter installation and infrastructure setup, automated meter reading and usage tracking, resident billing, payment processing, and collections to its customers. It also provides customer service, dispute resolution and regulatory compliance/reporting across multiple states.
Conservice primarily serves large multifamily portfolios, property management companies, student housing operators, and build-to-rent communities.
Conservice’s strengths can be considered the fact that it’s the largest utility billing provider in the U.S., its extensive regulatory and compliance expertise and scalable infrastructure for large property portfolios.
All of these three companies typically integrate third-party hardware and standardized metering solutions, which means technology choices are often tied to their service platform. Property owners looking for full control over meter selection or infrastructure may prefer working directly with hardware vendors or choosing full-system providers — the final category included in this article.
Top 3 Best Water Submetering System Providers
Instead of focusing only on hardware or billing services, water submetering system providers deliver a complete, integrated solution that combines water meters, communication networks, and software into one unified system. In practice, this means the meters, connectivity, and data platforms are designed to work together from the start. For property owners, the advantage is a single ecosystem that provides real-time consumption data, automated meter reading, and centralized management, all within one platform rather than across multiple vendors.
1. Mainlink
Mainlink offers a fully integrated water submetering solution combining Axioma’s NTEP certified ultrasonic water meters, LoRaWAN® communication, and cloud analytics. Its “plug-and-play” system incorporates ultrasonic hot/cold water meters, LoRaWAN gateways, and a secure cloud platform. Building managers can remotely monitor every unit’s consumption in real time, automatically detect leaks or waste, and export data for tenant’s billing.
Mainlink provides ultrasonic water meters manufactured by Axioma Metering. Meter readings are collected remotely and automatically through LoRaWAN gateways and transferred to Mainlink’s data management platform. Existing (legacy) meters can also be connected via pulse output to LoRa devices and integrated into Mainlink’s LoRaWAN network.
Typical use cases for Mainlink’s services include multi-unit residential and commercial buildings (apartments, condos, student housing), smart buildings, and mobile home parks. Mainlink has experience in new construction and retrofits alike.
One of Mainlink’s strengths is that it provides real-time, automated, and remote meter readings, with instant leak and anomaly alerts. Water submetering solution doesn’t require transceivers and repeaters, so with less hardware, more control is achieved. Also, ultrasonic meters have no moving parts (16+ year battery life) for maintenance‑free operation. Their LoRaWAN connectivity delivers long range and low power, minimizing gateway count. Finally, the company’s AWS‑based cloud platform is ISO/IEC secured and supports integrations via API for billing and management.
2. Next Century (Next Meters)
Next Century Submetering Systems (operating as Next Meters) is one of the biggest wireless submetering players in North America, with over 2.8 million meters in the US and Canada. The company’s end-to-end system includes water, gas, and electric meters plus its own long-range wireless network and data platform. Their philosophy is “simple installation and value from data”. All meter reads are pulled into NextCentury’s cloud app for analytics and billing. Building owners use the dashboard or mobile app to track consumption, while tenants get individual bills and real-time alerts (for example, unusually high use or leaks) via text/email.
Next Meters’ system includes wireless water meters (cold/hot, NTEP-certified) installed at each unit, a low-power wide-area network, and gateway/base stations that forward data to the cloud. The platform also supports cellular/NB-IoT in its new Next Connect stack for broader connectivity. The SaaS includes a web/mobile portal for meter data, plus APIs for billing systems.
Typical use cases for the provider primarily feature multi-family housing and large residential complexes. Next Century’s meters are found in apartment buildings, condos, mobile home parks, student housing, etc. Adding to that, they are used by property management and billing companies in major US cities and have expanded to municipal utilities, too.
3. Truety (QMC – Quality Metering Company)
Truety is the brand name of Quality Metering Company’s wireless utility metering platform. It specializes in “encoded, utility-grade” water submetering for North America. Each Truety water meter encodes the pulse data at the source, preventing tampering. It then sends data over a LoRaWAN network to the cloud. The MeterConnex platform (web and mobile) then provides real-time reads, billing reports, and analytics to property owners and billing companies. This eliminates human errors and reduces costs.
Truety installs brass multi-jet water meters with built-in LoRaWAN® transmitters, plus the MeterConnex software for data management, automatic billing, and leak/flow alerts. Also offered are thermal energy and electricity meters under the same ecosystem. A network of LoRaWAN gateways collects meter data over large areas, reducing infrastructure.
Truety targets multi-family and manufactured-home communities, apartment complexes, mobile home parks, and similar properties. It’s also used in commercial buildings and distributed metering sites (RV parks, marinas, campgrounds).
Truety’s benefits are high accuracy and low maintenance. Their meters use “true encoded data” technology with no loss of counts, ensuring billing accuracy. They boast long battery life (over 10–15 years) and IP68-rated cases for durability. LoRaWAN connectivity provides wide coverage and built-in encryption, so a single gateway can serve many buildings at a lower cost.
The aforementioned companies are not just meter suppliers, but full-service platforms. All their hardware is developed to work seamlessly together, and new device generations should be backward compatible, which means a building can expand or upgrade its metering system without replacing existing units. The companies’ emphasis on data analytics and ease of use goes beyond what a hardware-only vendor offers. In short, these firms provide end-to-end metering-as-a-service solutions (meters + network + software + analytics) rather than selling components separately or only providing services.
How to Choose the Right Water Submetering Company
Choosing between hardware vendors, service providers, and full-system companies starts with an honest assessment of your internal capacity and goals.
If you’re a regional multifamily operator with an in-house accounting team and established utility billing workflows, a hardware-focused vendor may be the most cost-efficient route. Especially if you are looking for a plug-and-play solution for seamless installation and overall integration. You control the meters, integrate them into your existing billing software, and avoid long-term service contracts.
Photo by Rose Galloway Green on Unsplash
If your primary pain point is resident billing disputes, compliance risk, or service staffing, a service-based provider makes more sense.
On the other hand, if you’re developing a 400-unit build-to-rent community or scaling a portfolio across multiple states, operational complexity changes the equation. A full submetering system provider can standardize hardware, automate reads through AMI infrastructure, centralize billing, and provide portfolio-wide analytics for leak detection and water conservation, reducing long-term operational friction. While the upfront investment may be higher, the predictability and scalability often justify it for larger or growth-focused owners.
Ultimately, the decision comes down to three questions: Do you have the internal team to manage billing and compliance? Are you optimizing for the lowest upfront cost or long-term efficiency? How complex is your portfolio today, and in three to five years?
Hardware vs Services vs Full Submetering Systems
The right choice of submetering company depends firstly on what problem you’re actually trying to solve. There are three distinct types of providers, and each one serves a different operational need.
Hardware-based companies specialize in manufacturing or supplying submeters and related infrastructure. Their responsibility typically ends at delivering reliable equipment and technical specifications. You are still in charge of maintenance, billing, compliance, and resident communications.
Service-based companies focus on billing administration, resident invoicing, and regulatory compliance. Customer service, collections, and reporting are given top priority, as they frequently employ third-party meters. Instead of engineering the actual infrastructure, their value is in lessening your administrative burden.
Full submetering system providers deliver an integrated, end-to-end solution that includes hardware, installation, remote reading technology, billing services, and ongoing support.
None of the three types mentioned above is foolproof. Hardware suppliers need internal resources but provide the most control. Service providers simplify billing, but they could also restrict options for infrastructure and equipment. Although full-system suppliers streamline processes and enhance data accessibility, they frequently demand a larger initial investment and a longer commitment period.
Key Factors to Consider When Selecting a Water Submetering Solution
Think about this — what does a successful system actually need to deliver over the next 10–15 years? The answer usually comes down to a handful of practical factors:
- Accuracy. Meters must meet recognized standards such as AWWA or NSF certifications to ensure fair billing and regulatory compliance.
- Operational considerations. Installation effort can vary widely depending on the technology, as some systems require extensive wiring or gateway infrastructure, while newer wireless solutions are designed for faster retrofits.
- Data access and visibility. Property owners increasingly expect real-time usage data, leak alerts, and easy-to-use dashboards. You should, too.
- Billing integration and long-term maintenance. The best solutions integrate smoothly with billing platforms and property management software, while minimizing ongoing maintenance through long battery life, remote meter reading, and reliable connectivity.
To summarize, the right solution is the one that balances accuracy, operational simplicity, and long-term sustainability for your specific property portfolio.
Why Smart Water Submetering Is Gaining Adoption in the US
Water submetering is a natural homeowners’ response to pressure in the utilities market. Water and sewer costs continue to grow across the United States, particularly with the recent influx of AI data centers, and property owners are no longer willing to absorb usage that they cannot quantify. At the same time, conservation laws, drought-related policies, and stricter municipal billing regulations make precise consumption tracking more critical than ever.
You have probably already decided to join the submetering adoption wave, and you are making the right choice. Just be aware that the right solution still depends entirely on your property. If your goal is basic cost allocation, hardware may be enough. If compliance and resident billing complexity are your primary concerns, services may solve the problem more efficiently. And if you’re building for long-term operational scale and data-driven asset management, a full system may align better with your strategy.
Before choosing a company, define what you actually need (equipment, administration, or a fully integrated solution) and make the decision from there.
