Licenses, Permits and Who Owns the Pipe

Three ways states handle the license

There is no national sewer license. Each state decides who may open the ground and connect a building to a public sewer, and the decisions fall into three rough groups.

In the first group, the state plumbing license covers the building sewer out to the public main or the property line. A licensed master plumber, or a plumbing contractor employing one, is the person the permit office expects to see on the application. Many states in the Northeast and Midwest work this way, and in those places a contractor who only holds an excavation or general building license is not supposed to touch the lateral at all.

In the second group, the state treats a sewer lateral as underground utility construction and issues a separate classification for it. The names vary: utility contractor, underground utility and excavation contractor, sewer and water specialty, pipeline contractor. The plumbing license may stop at the building wall or a few feet past the foundation, and a different board, or a different classification under the same board, takes over from there. Florida, Georgia and Tennessee all have versions of this split, and so does California, where the C-42 sanitation system classification exists alongside the C-36 plumbing license.

In the third group the state issues no license that reaches the sewer at all, and the county or city fills the gap with its own registration, bond and exam. Parts of Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, New York and Pennsylvania work this way. A contractor registered in one city may be a stranger to the city next door, and the permit clerk will not take a license number from a jurisdiction she does not recognize.

The practical rule: find out which pattern your state follows, then look the contractor up in the register that pattern points to. The state pages behind Find a Contractor name the board and the license class for each state.

What a license proves, and what it does not

A current license proves that someone in the company passed an exam, that the required bond and insurance were on file at renewal, and that the board has a place to send a complaint. It is not evidence that the crew arriving at your house has ever lined a pipe, fused HDPE, or run a camera. A plumbing exam in most states covers water heaters and fixtures and never asks about cured-in-place resin. The license check is the floor, not the ceiling; experience with the specific method is a separate question, and the method pages on this site cover how to ask it.

Insurance matters as much as the license. Ask for a certificate of general liability naming you as certificate holder, and confirm workers' compensation is in force if anyone other than the owner will be on site. A license bond, where the state requires one, is typically small and exists to pay fines and small claims to the board, not to finish your job. A performance bond that would actually complete the work is rare on residential jobs and routine on municipal ones.

The permit pattern

Most sewer repairs in the United States involve some combination of three permits, and the mistake owners make is assuming one of them covers all three.

1. The building or plumbing permit. Issued by the city or county building department, pulled by the licensed contractor, and tied to the pipe on your property. Lining and bursting are usually treated as "repair" or "replacement of building sewer" and need this permit even when no trench is dug. Some jurisdictions have a specific trenchless or lining permit; many simply use the plumbing permit and add a note.
2. The sewer connection or tap permit. Issued by whoever owns the main: a city public works or utilities department, a county sanitation district, or a regional authority. It governs the connection at the main and the segment the utility considers its concern. Where the utility and the building department are the same city, this may be folded into the plumbing permit. Where they are not, it is a second application, sometimes with a second fee and its own inspector.
3. The right-of-way or street-opening permit. Needed whenever the work crosses the sidewalk, the planting strip or the street. It comes from public works or the engineering department, usually requires a traffic control plan on any street that carries traffic, and almost always requires the contractor to hold a separate right-of-way bond with the city.

The contractor pulls all of these. A bid that leaves permits to the owner, or says none are needed, is telling you something about how the job will go.

The inspections that follow

Each permit brings an inspector. An open trench is inspected before backfill so the inspector can see the pipe, the bedding and the slope. A lined pipe is accepted on a post-cure video, which the inspector may watch live or review from a recording the contractor submits. A burst or newly laid pipe gets a video and, in many places, a low-pressure air test or a water test before the connection at the main is approved. Right-of-way work is inspected again after restoration, when the city checks the compaction and the surface patch. None of these inspections happen unless the permit was pulled, which is the reason the permit matters to you and not only to the city.

Call before you dig

Every state requires a call to its one-call center, reached by dialing 811, before mechanical excavation, and the required lead time is generally two or three working days. The marks show public gas, electric, water, telecom and sewer mains in the right-of-way, not private lines on your lot, so a careful contractor also locates the private side with a transmitter in the camera head or a private locating service. A lining job with no digging may not legally need the ticket; a bursting or open-cut job without one is a violation in every state.

Where your pipe ends

The lateral is the pipe from your building to the public main. Who is responsible for which part of it is set by local ordinance, and there are three common models.

• Owner to the property line. You maintain the pipe on your lot. The utility maintains the segment under the sidewalk and street and the tap at the main. This is common in older eastern cities and in many utility districts.
• Owner to the main. You are responsible for the entire run, including the part under the public street, up to and sometimes including the tap. This is the prevailing rule in much of the West and South and in many smaller cities everywhere. It means the right-of-way permit, the street cut and the restoration are your contractor's problem and your invoice.
• Utility-maintained right-of-way segment with conditions. A middle model in which the utility fixes the public segment, but only if a camera shows the defect is there, only after you have repaired your side, or only up to a cap. Some utilities instead offer a lateral repair program or insurance rider for a small monthly charge.

A growing number of cities add a point-of-sale lateral ordinance on top of the ownership rule. When a property changes hands, the seller must produce a passing camera inspection or a certificate from a recent repair, and a failed inspection has to be fixed or escrowed before closing. The East Bay cities around Oakland and Berkeley have the best-known program; versions exist in parts of Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and the Pacific Northwest. If you are buying or selling, ask the title company and the city whether one applies.

Why the answer changes at the city limits

Licensing comes from the state, the permit comes from the city or county, and the ownership rule comes from the utility, and those three boundaries rarely line up. One metro area can hold a core city that owns laterals to the property line, a suburb that makes owners responsible to the main, and an unincorporated pocket under a county district with a third rule. The first useful question you can ask is which one your address belongs to. Your state guide on this site starts that answer; the city or utility you actually pay the sewer bill to finishes it.

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