Global Water Resources, Inc.

Index to Consolidated Financial Statements

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REPORT OF INDEPENDENT REGISTERED PUBLIC ACCOUNTING FIRM [PCAOB ID:34]

To the shareholders and the Board of Directors of Global Water Resources, Inc.

Opinion on the Financial Statements

We have audited the accompanying consolidated balance sheets of Global Water Resources, Inc. and subsidiaries (the "Company") as of December 31, 2025 and 2024, the related consolidated statements of operations, shareholders' equity, and cash flows, for each of the two years in the period ended December 31, 2025, and the related notes (collectively referred to as the "financial statements"). In our opinion, the financial statements present fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of the Company as of December 31, 2025 and 2024, and the results of its operations and its cash flows for each of the two years in the period ended December 31, 2025, in conformity with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America.

Basis for Opinion

These financial statements are the responsibility of the Company's management. Our responsibility is to express an opinion on the Company's financial statements based on our audits. We are a public accounting firm registered with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (United States) (PCAOB) and are required to be independent with respect to the Company in accordance with the U.S. federal securities laws and the applicable rules and regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the PCAOB.

We conducted our audits in accordance with the standards of the PCAOB. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain reasonable assurance about whether the financial statements are free of material misstatement, whether due to error or fraud. The Company is not required to have, nor were we engaged to perform, an audit of its internal control over financial reporting. As part of our audits, we are required to obtain an understanding of internal control over financial reporting but not for the purpose of expressing an opinion on the effectiveness of the Company's internal control over financial reporting. Accordingly, we express no such opinion.

Our audits included performing procedures to assess the risks of material misstatement of the financial statements, whether due to error or fraud, and performing procedures that respond to those risks. Such procedures included examining, on a test basis, evidence regarding the amounts and disclosures in the financial statements. Our audits also included evaluating the accounting principles used and significant estimates made by management, as well as evaluating the overall presentation of the financial statements. We believe that our audits provide a reasonable basis for our opinion.

Critical Audit Matter

The critical audit matter communicated below is a matter arising from the current-period audit of the financial statements that was communicated or required to be communicated to the audit committee and that (1) relates to accounts or disclosures that are material to the financial statements and (2) involved our especially challenging, subjective, or complex judgments. The communication of critical audit matters does not alter in any way our opinion on the financial statements, taken as a whole, and we are not, by communicating the critical audit matter below, providing a separate opinion on the critical audit matter or on the accounts or disclosures to which it relates.

Regulatory Matters – Impact of Rate Regulation on the Financial Statements — Refer to Note 3 to the financial statements

Critical Audit Matter Description

The Company’s regulated utilities are subject to rate regulation by the Arizona Corporation Commission (the “ACC”). The ACC has jurisdiction with respect to the rates charged to water and wastewater service customers in Arizona. Management has determined it meets the requirements under accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America to prepare its financial statements applying the specialized rules to account for the effects of cost-based rate regulation. Accounting for the economic effects of rate regulation has a pervasive effect on the financial statements.

The ACC establishes rates designed to permit the recovery of the cost of service and a return on investment. Decisions to be made by the ACC in the future will impact the accounting for regulated operations, including decisions about the amount of allowable costs and return on invested capital included in rates and any refunds that may be required. While the Company has indicated it expects to recover costs from customers through regulated rates, there is a risk that the ACC will not approve (1) full recovery of the costs of providing utility service, or (2) full recovery of all amounts invested in the utility business and a reasonable return on that investment.

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We identified the impact of rate regulation as a critical audit matter due to the significant judgments that underlie the Company’s regulatory account balances and disclosures and the high degree of subjectivity involved in assessing the impact of future regulatory orders on the financial statements. Management judgments include assessing the likelihood of (1) recovery in future rates of incurred costs, and (2) a refund to customers. Given that management’s accounting judgments are based on assumptions about the outcome of decisions by the ACC, auditing these judgments required specialized knowledge of accounting for rate regulation and the rate setting process due to its inherent complexities.

How the Critical Audit Matter Was Addressed in the Audit

Our audit procedures related to the uncertainty of future decisions by the ACC included the following, among others:

•We read relevant regulatory orders and settlements issued by the ACC for the Company and other public utilities in Arizona, regulatory statutes, procedural memorandums, filings made by interveners and utilities, and other publicly available information to assess the likelihood of recovery in future rates or a future reduction in rates based on precedents of the ACC’s treatment of similar costs under similar circumstances. We evaluated the external information and compared such information to management’s regulatory asset and liability balances for completeness.

•We evaluated the Company’s disclosures related to the impacts of rate regulation, including the balances recorded and regulatory developments.

/s/DELOITTE & TOUCHE LLP

Tempe, Arizona

March 4, 2026

We have served as the Company's auditor since 2003.

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