The Real Cost of a Foot of Pipe: What Five Years of Material Pricing Reveals
Affordable housing is often discussed in terms of home prices, interest rates, and land costs. But what about the infrastructure underneath those homes?
Every new neighborhood depends on miles of underground infrastructure such as water mains, storm drainage, sanitary sewer, and other utility systems. Before a home can be built, those systems have to be installed, and the materials required to build them have become significantly more expensive. We wanted to understand just how much material costs have changed, so we went back five years. What we found was more significant than the headline inflation numbers might suggest.
The Numbers at a Glance
Looking at a matched basket of pipe materials and comparing 2021 pricing with August 2026 pricing, we found:
- 55.5% increase in the cost of our matched pipe material basket
- 25.0% increase in CPI-U over the same period
- 2.2× the general inflation rate
In other words, the cost of these pipe materials has increased more than twice as much as overall consumer inflation.
Why Pipe Pricing Matters to Housing
It might be easy to look at the price of a single piece of pipe and assume the increase is relatively insignificant, but a residential development doesn’t need one piece of pipe. It needs thousands of linear feet. Water mains, storm sewers, sanitary sewer systems, and other underground utilities can represent a substantial portion of the infrastructure required to develop a property. When the cost of those materials increases by more than 50%, the impact compounds across an entire development.
Consider a subdivision with miles of underground utilities. A price increase that seems relatively small on a per-foot basis can become a significant project cost when multiplied across thousands of feet, and pipe is only one part of the equation. Material increases affect the broader cost of site development, from excavation and grading to utility installation, roads, and the other infrastructure required before a home is ready to be built.
How We Measured the Increase
We wanted this comparison to be as straightforward and meaningful as possible, so we reviewed every pipe item on an invoice received in August 2026 and identified comparable products from the same Ferguson branch on an invoice from August 2021. The goal was to compare like-for-like materials rather than simply comparing a general category of “pipe.”
Where possible, we matched:
- The same manufacturer
- The same pipe material
- The same size
- The same specifications
- Comparable products across the two time periods
We then compared the August 2021 unit price with the August 2026 unit price for each matched item. Finally, we built a market basket of 26 matched pipe quantities, comparing the 2021 cost against the 2026 cost.
What We Found
Across that matched basket, the cost increased by 55.5% over five years.
For comparison, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased approximately 25% over the same period.
That means our matched basket of pipe materials increased at more than twice the rate of general consumer inflation.
A Five-Year Increase You Can See Underground
The significance of this comparison isn’t that pipe prices increased. Most construction professionals already know material costs have risen. The more important question is how much they’ve risen compared with the broader economy. A 25% increase in general prices is substantial. But a 55.5% increase in a critical construction material creates a very different challenge for contractors, developers, and ultimately homeowners.
Underground utilities aren’t optional. A new development needs functioning water, sewer, and stormwater systems before the homes above them can be completed. There isn’t necessarily an easy way to substitute a completely different material or eliminate the infrastructure altogether. That means increases in utility material costs can flow directly into the overall cost of development.
What This Means for Affordable Housing
The conversation around affordable housing often focuses on the cost of the house itself, but affordability starts much earlier. Before a home is framed, roofed, or finished, someone has to prepare the site. Land needs to be cleared and graded. Roads need to be constructed. Stormwater needs to be managed. Water and sewer systems need to be installed. These are the costs of creating the infrastructure that makes housing possible. When those costs rise faster than general inflation, they put additional pressure on the economics of new residential development. That doesn’t mean material costs alone determine the final price of a home because land, labor, financing, permitting, equipment, design, and countless other factors all play a role. But infrastructure is an important part of the equation, and one that can be easy to overlook because so much of it ends up underground and out of sight.
Looking Beyond the Headline Inflation Number
The takeaway from our analysis isn’t simply that “everything costs more.” It’s that different parts of construction are experiencing very different levels of inflation. For contractors and developers, understanding those differences matters. General inflation statistics provide useful context, but they don’t necessarily tell the whole story of what it costs to build a project. The materials, labor, equipment, and services that make up a construction project can experience their own unique market pressures. Our five-year comparison of pipe materials is one example. The headline inflation number may tell us what the economy costs more broadly, but to understand what it actually costs to build, sometimes you have to look beneath the surface. In site development, that’s exactly where much of the cost is.