Free Tap Water Laws in Restaurants

A hotel in Italy recently refused to serve a guest tap water during dinner. She offered to pay a service charge just to get it. The hotel said no. Only bottled water, at around €7. She filed a lawsuit, claiming that access to water is a basic human right, which was heard by Italy’s Supreme Court. In May 2026, the court ruled in favor of the hotel, noting that Italy does not require restaurants to serve tap water by law.

That same year, a restaurant in Val Thorens got fined €8,000 for the same thing. France has a consumer law that makes free tap water mandatory, and it actually gets enforced. Spain brought in a similar rule in 2022, also partly because of all the plastic bottles. Portugal too. Germany never did, and in plenty of German restaurants still water costs more than beer.

The UK has an arrangement that probably surprises most British people: free tap water is only legally required if the venue sells alcohol. Every pub has to provide it. A café that doesn’t serve alcohol doesn’t. Ireland, despite sharing an island with some of those rules, has no equivalent law at all.

New Zealand just requires it everywhere, full stop. Australia ties it to the alcohol license like the UK does. The US has no federal rule, but the cultural expectation is so automatic that most Americans find it genuinely jarring to discover there’s no law behind it. California in 2015 actually banned servers from bringing water unless a customer asks first, as a drought conservation measure.

The Netherlands has no requirement and a petition signed by over 100,000 people demanding “tap water everywhere” to prove how much that bothers people. No law has followed yet.

Most of Africa, Latin America, and Asia have no obligation either.