Essential Utilities, Inc.
WTRG · Utilities · FY2025 filings · Shallow moat ·
Doesn't clear the bar
The five investor questions
2007–2025: revenue 566470000.00 to 2474615000.00, increasing; diluted EPS 0.71 to 2.20, increasing.
Not enough years of gross-margin data to score pricing power.
Median ROIC 5.8%, above the 12% hurdle in 0% of years.
Net debt/EBITDA 6.0x, interest coverage 3x.
Owner earnings +11.4%/yr, share count flat.
The pricingPower component abstained: Not enough years of gross-margin data to score pricing power. The other four 20% weights were renormalized over the scored 80%.
Price vs. owner-earnings value range
- Owner earnings (normalized)
- $498.2M
- Value range / share
- —
- Conservative high estimate / share
- —
- Recent price
- $39.39
- Price vs. high estimate
- No price data
Conservative range under moat-index@2.0.0: low end 11.1×, high end capped at 18×; 9% discount rate; high-end growth 4% (capped at 4%) using min(5y revenue CAGR, 5y diluted-EPS CAGR), clamped to 0%–4%; maintenance capex uses min(capex, D&A); abstain when D&A is unavailable. This is a disclosed model range, not intrinsic value as fact.
19 years of fundamentals
The business, in plain English
Across the filed record, revenue grew from $566.5M (FY2007) to $2.5B (FY2025) — about 8.5% a year compounded over 18 years.
It earned 6.1% on invested capital in FY2025, with a median of 6.6% across 18 filed years. The Returns on Capital filter above scores it 4/100.
The balance sheet carried $8.1B of total debt in FY2025 against $616.4M of owner earnings — roughly 13.2 years of owner earnings to retire it all. Balance-Sheet Safety scores it 2/100.
The share count rose 33.2% between FY2007 and FY2017 — existing owners have been diluted over the record. Capital Discipline scores it 77/100.
This breakdown is generated from the filed numbers and sub-scores above — no outside narrative, no estimates. Where a filing doesn’t disclose an input, the sentence that would need it is omitted instead of guessed.
Not disclosed in WTRG’s filings for these years — we don’t estimate it.
Gaps in a line mean that item isn’t in WTRG’s filings for that year — the series is never interpolated or estimated. The Table view lists every filed value, including operating and net margins, total debt, and share count.
Moat Score history
Tier changesSame-methodology crossings of the Wide / Narrow / Shallow bars
- Methodology upgraded moat-index@1.2.0tomoat-index@2.0.0 — readings across versions aren’t comparedJul 20, 2026
Scores are logged append-only and never overwritten — this record can’t be backfilled, which is exactly why it’s worth keeping.
Track record
How Essential Utilities, Inc.’s moat rated in each of the years we can reconstruct from its filings — scored only on what was knowable at the time — and what its price and returns did afterward. The score never saw a price; the two are joined only in hindsight, for education, not as a signal.
How to read this: each dot is what the engine would have scored WTRG on that December 31; the line below is its total-return price path (dividends reinvested) in the years since.
Two tracks, one timeline: the score has its own 0–100 scale (top), the price its own 100-based scale (bottom) — never a shared axis. The price path is a total-return (dividends reinvested) index built from the same data the forward returns use; gaps in the score line are years with no reconstructed rating (see the table for why). The Table view carries every value.
What followed, in the years it rated Wide
In the reconstructed history shown, WTRG did not rate Wide-moat in any year, so there is no wide-moat track record to report. That absence is itself the honest answer — we don’t manufacture a comparison where the rating never earned one.
Utilities context
#31 of 99 scored Utilities companies, ranked by Moat Score.
Nearest peers by Moat Score
- #29CWST CASELLA WASTE SYSTEMS, INC.42.9 out of 100, Shallow moatShallow moat
- #30NEE NEXTERA ENERGY INC42.5 out of 100, Shallow moatShallow moat
- #32LNT ALLIANT ENERGY CORP42.0 out of 100, Shallow moatShallow moat
- #33EVRG EVERGY, INC.41.8 out of 100, Shallow moatShallow moat
Compare WTRG with its nearest peers →All Utilities companies on the Index →
Common questions about WTRG
- Does Essential Utilities, Inc. have an economic moat?
- Based on its FY2025 SEC filings, the Moat Index scores Essential Utilities, Inc. (WTRG) 42.1 out of 100 — a Shallow moat. The five questions behind that score begin at 20% each; if exactly one genuinely lacks data, the other four weights are renormalized and disclosed. revenue and EPS trend 86, pricing power not measurable from the filings, returns on capital 4, balance-sheet safety 2, capital discipline 77.
- How has WTRG's Moat Score changed over time?
- The record logs 9 readings since Jul 17, 2026; the latest reads 42.1 out of 100 (shallow moat). No tier changes on record yet. (A methodology upgrade on Jul 20, 2026 re-based the score; readings across engine versions aren't compared.) The history is append-only — readings are only ever added, never rewritten.