PuroChile › Sectors

Water and waste

Water supply, sewerage and waste management: section E. It is the fastest-growing formal employment in the whole register — nearly four times its 2005 size — and it appears in 322 of the 346 communes, because water and rubbish are handled where people live.

Maps exactly onto CIIU Rev. 4 section E.

Dependent workers

84,436

2024

Share of all formal work

0.9%

Chile

Annual sales

153 M

UF · 2024 · 138 communes withheld

Since 2005

+277%

workers

Territorial distribution

332/346 communes

Shaded by how much of each commune's own formal payroll this sector is — not by headcount, which would draw the same map of where people live for every sector.

Most workers

Counted at the firm's registered address, not the workplace. SII assigns a company's whole payroll to the commune of its tax domicile, so a head office in Santiago carries the shifts worked everywhere else. Read this as where the sector files, and the count below as where its workers live.

Most concentrated

Communes with at least 200 workers in the sector, so a village with one firm does not top the list.

What the branch is made of

6 divisions · 11 activities

A section of twenty-one parts says what this page is called. The register files firms two levels below it, and those parts are not one economy: recogida de desechos and actividades de descontaminación y otros servicios de gestión de desechos share a letter and little else. Each division has a page of its own.

The list stops where 3 divisions have accounted for 85% of the branch's employment. The other 3 are together 15.0% of it and are drawn above, each as its own tile: every division of the register.

Two ways to count the jobs

SII 2024 · Casen 2024

Where the firm files

84,436

employees · SII register

Where the worker lives

60,241

employees · Casen

Everyone working in it

70,724

employed · Casen

Distance between them

−29%

Casen vs SII

Region by region

Firm's address (SII)Worker's home (Casen)

Neither figure is where the work happens. The register counts a job at the address the company pays its taxes from; the survey counts it at the address the worker sleeps at. A mine is at neither.

What they do is bracket it, and the gap between them is itself the reading. It is widest exactly where work is subcontracted or run from a head office, and narrowest where the firm and the job are in the same place.

They are also not the same quantity: SII counts every employment relationship reported during the year, so a person with two jobs counts twice, while Casen counts people at one moment. The two columns are read against each other, never subtracted.

Casen is a survey and is read at region and country level only: split by branch, the median commune cell holds six sampled workers. Cells under 30 are withheld.

Series 2005–2024

2005–2024

observed 2005–2024

Who the sector runs on

SII 2024

No salesMicro 0.0–2 mil UFSmall 2–25 mil UFMedium 25–100 mil UFLarge > 100 mil UF

The top bracket — firms selling over a million UF a year

Firms in it29

Of all firms in the sector0.38%

Of its sales61.9%

Of its payroll41.8%

Artificial intelligence

estimate · 2026-05

Exposure of the work

6.5%

of its tasks, worldwide

Use in Chile

0.89×

of its share of employment

Chile against the world

1.84×

all sectors, per capita

Covered by the estimate

100%

of the sector's workers

What this sector employs, by occupation

ManagementProfessionals and techniciansAdministrative supportServices and salesTrades, operators and elementary occupationsCasen 2024 · employed people in the sector

Less AI use than this sector's weight in employment would give it: 0.89 times its share, estimated from the occupations it actually employs in Chile.

The two figures answer different questions. Exposure is a property of the work — how much of what these occupations do is work AI is used for anywhere. Use is a property of the country — how much of that is actually happening here.

Nationally, 48% of Chilean conversations are work, and they split 51% augmentation to 49% automation — AI alongside the person more often than instead of them.

An estimate, not a measurement, and the only one on this site. The index publishes by US occupation, not by sector: these figures weight it by the occupational mix Casen finds in this sector in Chile, across six groups coarse enough for the two classifications to agree. Withheld cells put a floor of 1.1 points of national use under any group. Source: Anthropic Economic Index, junio 2026 (CC BY), cruzado con la Encuesta Casen 2024.

By region

Region	Workers	Of the sector	Of its own payroll	Living here	Firms	Since 2005
Metropolitana	49,090	58.1%	0.8%	25,407	2,286	+398%
Valparaíso	6,850	8.1%	1.0%	7,199	832	+125%
Biobío	6,034	7.1%	1.1%	4,120	537	+87%
O'Higgins	4,536	5.4%	1.0%	2,940	540	+372%
Antofagasta	3,775	4.5%	1.6%	2,506	233	+893%
Coquimbo	2,345	2.8%	1.0%	2,586	440	+654%
Los Lagos	2,339	2.8%	0.6%	3,265	529	+257%
Araucanía	2,286	2.7%	0.7%	2,816	517	+47%
Maule	2,142	2.5%	0.4%	3,130	587	+146%
Ñuble	1,668	2.0%	1.1%	—	321	+1,035%
Atacama	1,202	1.4%	1.3%	1,102	180	+359%
Los Ríos	641	0.8%	0.6%	—	247	+364%
Magallanes	484	0.6%	0.6%	—	47	+415%
Tarapacá	454	0.5%	0.4%	1,370	143	+4%
Arica y Parinacota	297	0.4%	0.5%	—	104	+6%
Aysén	293	0.3%	0.8%	—	89	+85%

"Workers" is SII's count at the firm's registered address; "living here" is Casen's count of employees of this branch who live in the region. They are different measurements of different things and the columns are read side by side, not subtracted. A dash is a cell with fewer than 30 sampled workers.