# How Much Water to Store Per Person · Larder & Well > Source: https://larderandwell.cc/water/how-much-water-to-store-per-person Water ## How Much Water to Store Per Person The taps stop before the pantry runs low. Here is the number to store, what it weighs, and where it can safely sit. By Ruth Calloway, November 10, 2026 Store one gallon of water per person per day, for drinking and sanitation, and keep at least three days of it on hand. The CDC asks households to work toward a two-week supply where they can, which comes to 14 gallons for one person and 56 gallons for a family of four. That is the floor, set for a normal climate and healthy adults. Heat, a baby, a nursing mother, someone sick or a dog all push the number up, and two weeks of water for four people weighs close to 470 pounds, so where you put it matters as much as how much you buy. **Your next step:** find your household's two-week number in the table below, then fill, label and date the first week's worth this weekend. ### One gallon a day covers drinking and basic sanitation [Ready.gov](https://www.ready.gov/water) sets the household baseline at one gallon per person per day for several days. It also says a normally active person needs about three quarters of a gallon of fluid a day from water and other drinks. The remaining quarter gallon is what you have for brushing teeth, washing hands, mixing a powdered meal and rinsing a pot. That is a tight allowance. Nobody showers on it and nobody flushes a toilet with it. Think of the gallon as the amount that keeps a person healthy, with washing water coming from somewhere else: a rain barrel, a creek, a pool, the bathtub you filled when the storm warning came. The time frame is where the two federal sources differ in tone. Ready.gov says "several days." The CDC's guidance, republished by [Ohio State University's food safety program](https://foodsafety.osu.edu/news/creating-and-storing-emergency-water-supply), says to keep at least a three-day supply and to try for two weeks. Three days is what a household needs to ride out a short boil order or a storm until help arrives. Two weeks is the figure for a long outage, a winter storm that keeps trucks off the road, or a well pump with no power behind it. ### Plan more for heat, babies, the sick and pets The gallon is an average for a healthy adult in mild weather. Both Ready.gov and the CDC list the people who need more: * **Hot weather:** Ready.gov says water needs can double in very hot temperatures. A Gulf Coast hurricane outage in August is the case to plan for, and it often comes with no air conditioning. * **Pregnant and nursing women:** both sources name them as needing extra. * **Children and anyone sick:** a child with a stomach bug or a fever loses fluid fast, and a medical emergency can call for water to clean a wound. * **Pets:** the CDC tells households to store more for animals. Your vet can give you a daily figure for your dog or cat. Powdered infant formula has to be mixed with safe water, so a household with a bottle-fed baby needs that water on top of the family's gallon a day, and it needs to be water you trust without question. ### Water storage for a family of four, worked out Multiply the people by the days, then add for heat and anyone on the list above. For four people at the federal minimum, the totals look like this. Weights use the standard 8.34 pounds per gallon. [University of Nebraska Extension](https://extensionpubs.unl.edu/publication/g2220/html/view) rounds the same figure to almost 8.5 pounds and puts a full 55-gallon drum at over 450 pounds. | Period | Gallons | Weight | | ------------- | ------- | ------ | | 3 days | 12 | 100 lb | | 1 week | 28 | 234 lb | | 2 weeks | 56 | 467 lb | | 2 weeks, heat | 112 | 934 lb | Four people at a gallon each: the stack grows from a few days of water to two weeks. For one person, two weeks is 14 gallons, about 117 pounds. That fits in a closet. The family total is one full 55-gallon drum, or eleven 5-gallon containers, and in a hot summer it doubles to two drums. The common objection is space. Most families do not have a spare corner for a thousand pounds of water, and that is the honest reason to build in stages: three days in sealed commercial bottles first, then a week, then two weeks in larger containers, with a way to treat water from another source behind all of it. ### Containers: sealed bottled water first, then food-grade jugs The CDC calls unopened, commercially bottled water the safest and most reliable emergency supply. It is sealed at the plant, it carries a date, and it needs nothing from you except a cool, dark shelf. For the first three days, a stack of cases is the simplest answer. For anything you fill yourself, the CDC asks for FDA-approved food-grade containers, which will not pass harmful substances into the water. If you cannot get one, the container should have a lid that closes tightly, be made of a durable material that will not break (so no glass), and ideally have a narrow opening for pouring. Never reuse a jug that held bleach, pesticide or any other toxic chemical, however well you rinse it. Before filling a container with tap water, the CDC's cleaning steps are short: 1. Wash it with dish soap and rinse it well. 2. Mix 1 teaspoon of unscented household bleach (5 to 9 percent sodium hypochlorite) into 1 quart of water. 3. Pour it in, cap the container and shake so the solution touches every inside surface. 4. Wait at least 30 seconds, pour it out and let the container air-dry. 5. Fill with clean tap water and cap it tightly. Size the containers to the people who will lift them. A 5-gallon jug weighs about 42 pounds full and can be carried to the kitchen. A 55-gallon drum stores the most water per square foot of floor, but it is filled where it will stay and emptied with a siphon or a drum pump. Many households end up with both: drums for depth, smaller jugs for daily use. ### Where to put it: cool, dark, solid floor, away from fuel The CDC's storage advice comes down to three conditions. Keep containers between 50 and 70°F, out of direct sunlight, and away from gasoline, pesticides and other toxic substances. Plastic is not a perfect barrier, and fumes from a fuel can or a bag of weed killer sitting next to a water jug have no place in a drinking supply. That rules out more spots than people expect. An attached garage often holds the mower gas and the lawn chemicals, and it swings hot in summer. A sunny back porch grows algae. The best places are usually inside the house: a basement, a closet on an outside wall, under beds, the bottom of a pantry. UNL Extension tells rain-barrel owners to set a full drum on a flat, secure surface because of what it weighs, and the same goes indoors. A drum belongs on a ground floor or a basement slab, raised on a pallet or sturdy platform so a siphon hose or spigot can reach the bottom. Upstairs, spread smaller jugs across rooms instead of stacking half a ton in one spot, and keep them where they cannot freeze, since water expands as it turns to ice and can split a container. Spreading the supply has one more advantage. If a pipe bursts in the basement or a tree comes through one room, the water in the other rooms is still there. ### Label it, date it, swap it every six months Ready.gov and the CDC agree on rotation: water you bottled yourself gets replaced every six months. The CDC adds a label rule. Mark each container "drinking water" with the date you filled it, so nobody mistakes it for the mop bucket and you can see at a glance what is due. For commercial bottled water, Ready.gov says to keep it in its sealed original container, and the CDC says to observe the expiration date. Rotate cases through the kitchen the way you rotate canned goods: buy new ones, move the oldest to the front, drink those. An easy way to remember the six-month swap is to tie it to the clock change in spring and fall. Dump the old water on the garden, sanitize the container, refill it and write the new date. ### Water already in your house Most homes hold a reserve that never makes it onto a list. The CDC names the water heater tank, the water in the pipes, ice cubes and the toilet's back tank (the reservoir, never the bowl) as household emergency sources. A standard water heater holds 30 to 60 gallons, which for a family of four can mean another week or more. Getting it out takes a few steps, and the order matters. Utility guides such as [Eugene Water & Electric Board's water heater flyer](https://www.eweb.org/documents/emergency-preparedness/keep-this-with-your-water-heater-flyer.pdf) give the sequence: 1. Turn off the power: the breaker for an electric heater, or set a gas heater to "pilot". 2. Close the cold-water inlet valve at the top of the tank, so a contaminated city supply cannot flow in. 3. Open a hot-water faucet somewhere in the house to let air in. 4. Attach a hose to the drain valve at the bottom and fill clean containers. Treat that water before drinking it. Sediment settles in the bottom of a tank, and Virginia Tech Extension and the CDC both advise boiling or disinfecting water drawn from it. The first gallons out of the drain are often cloudy and can be set aside to settle. Water in radiators, or in a boiler that heats the house, is off limits: the CDC says never to use it for drinking, cooking or washing. ### Using what you stored: drink it, do not ration it Ready.gov's advice here runs against instinct. Do not ration drinking water unless authorities tell you to. Drink what you need today and look for more for tomorrow, and cut what your body needs by keeping still and staying cool. Dehydration makes people sick and slow at exactly the moment they need to think clearly. Drink the water you know is clean first, the sealed bottles and your dated containers. Hold suspect water, cloudy tap water or anything from a stream, until it has been treated. Skip coffee, soda and alcohol as substitutes, because Ready.gov notes that caffeine and alcohol dehydrate the body and raise the amount of water you need. ### When storage runs out, treatment takes over No household stores enough water for every crisis, which is why the supply plan has a second half. Ready.gov's treatment methods are a rolling boil for one full minute, or 1/8 teaspoon of plain 5.25 to 6 percent bleach per gallon with 30 minutes of standing time and a faint chlorine smell at the end. Keep a bottle of unscented bleach with the water for that reason, and for sanitizing containers. A filter turns a creek, a pond or a rain barrel into a source that lasts as long as the element does, but most filters leave viruses behind and none removes dissolved chemicals. Our guide to [what emergency water filters remove and what gets through](/water/best-way-to-filter-water-in-an-emergency) covers how to pair one with bleach or a boil. Rain-barrel water in particular needs treatment: UNL Extension rates untreated roof runoff as unsafe to drink because of bird droppings and chemicals from roofing materials. ### My take: build it in three steps I'd start with three days of sealed commercial water per person, because it costs little, needs no cleaning and sits on a closet shelf. Then I'd add food-grade 5-gallon jugs until the house holds one week, spread across two or three rooms. The second week is where a drum on a pallet in the basement earns its place, if the house has a slab to put it on. I'd count the water heater as a bonus and not as part of the two weeks, because a seized drain valve or a flooded basement can take it off the table. And I'd keep a jug of fresh bleach and a filter beside the water, so that when the stored supply does run low there is a way to make more. Work out your household's number from the table above, then fill, label and date the first week's containers this weekend. The rest of our storage and treatment guides are in the [water section](/water). ### Sources * [Ready.gov: Water](https://www.ready.gov/water) * [Ohio State University Food Safety: Creating and storing an emergency water supply (CDC guidance)](https://foodsafety.osu.edu/news/creating-and-storing-emergency-water-supply) * [CDC: Finding other water sources in an emergency](https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/emergency/finding-other-sources.html) * [University of Nebraska Extension G2220: Rainwater harvesting with rain barrels](https://extensionpubs.unl.edu/publication/g2220/html/view) * [Eugene Water & Electric Board: Keep this with your water heater](https://www.eweb.org/documents/emergency-preparedness/keep-this-with-your-water-heater-flyer.pdf) How we write: we work from public health, emergency-management and extension guidance and say what we have not tested. See our [editorial policy](/editorial-policy). ### Water storage questions Is a case of 24 bottles enough for one person? A case of 24 half-liter bottles holds a little over three gallons. That covers one person for about three days at the federal minimum, and no more. Can I store water in old milk jugs? The CDC asks for food-grade containers with a tight lid, and a container that held bleach or pesticide is ruled out entirely. A thin milk jug is hard to clean of milk residue and the plastic is light, so a purpose-made water container is the safer buy. Does stored tap water go bad? Water you filled yourself should be swapped for fresh every six months, per Ready.gov and the CDC. Sealed commercial water keeps until the date printed on it if it stays cool and out of the sun. Should I count the water heater toward my two weeks? Treat it as a reserve on top of your stored supply. It is useful, but it needs a working drain valve, the right shutdown steps and treatment before drinking. How much water does a dog need in an emergency? The CDC asks households to store extra for pets without giving a set amount. A large dog drinks far more than a cat, and both drink more in heat, so ask your vet for a daily figure for your own animal, multiply it by fourteen days and add that to the household total before you buy containers. Written by Ruth Calloway Pantry, water and homestead skills Ruth Calloway writes Larder & Well's guides to food storage, water, off-grid power and the old household skills. She works from extension-service bulletins, USDA and Ready.gov guidance, manufacturer manuals and years of homesteader discussion threads, and she says plainly where the sources disagree. She does not claim to have tested what she describes; when a method is untested or risky, her articles say so. [rcalloway@larderandwell.cc](mailto:rcalloway@larderandwell.cc) Last checked 2026-11-10 Planning food alongside the water? See [how much food a family of four needs for three months](/food-storage/how-much-food-to-store-for-a-family-of-four). --- [Larder & Well](/) Keep the household fed, watered and warm when the stores close. Food storage, water, off-grid power, homestead skills and the old ways, written for American households that want to stay fed, watered and warm when the grid, the economy or the supply chain fails. [Send a correction or a question](/contact) © 2026 Larder & Well. Independent, written from sources you can open. A page that ever carries a paid link says so above it. Nobody pays for a place in our guides.