The Chicago private drain program, and where it stops

The City of Chicago will repair some broken sewer drains under the street at no cost to the owner of the building they serve. The rule is published, it is short, and almost every five figure quote in this city is written on one side or the other of the boundary it draws.

It is also narrower than people expect, and the narrow parts are where the disappointment happens.

What the private drain program actually covers

The City's own wording is short enough to quote in full, and it is worth reading once slowly rather than in summary:

The City may now repair sewer drain tiles coming from private residences, of up to four units, that are broken under the public way. This is the area from the city sidewalk to the center of the street. Tiles proven to be broken under the public way will be repaired by the City at no cost to the property owner when the following conditions are met: A licensed sewer contractor must be hired to rod and/or make a video inspection of the drain line, and the contractor must schedule a review by a sewer inspector.

Four things in that paragraph do the work. The building has to be a residence of up to four units. The break has to be under the public way. It has to be proven to be there on a recording. And the proof has to come from a contractor licensed to produce it, with a City inspector booked to see it. The Department of Water Management runs the whole thing.

Trenchless sewer repair in Chicago carries a scale diagram of the same boundary, with who pays marked on each zone of the run.

Who pays for sewer line repair in Chicago

Everything from the building to the city sidewalk is private plumbing, and its repair is the owner's bill. That is the answer for the large majority of failures we get asked about, because most of a Chicago lateral sits on the lot rather than under the road.

The reason sits in the City's own words, on its basement flooding page: much of the water that floods basements travels across private property, and the City is not allowed to perform work on private property. It also puts a number on the scale of what it does own, at roughly 4,400 miles of sewer main. So the line the private drain program draws is not an accounting preference that an inspector can be talked out of on the day. It is the edge of what the City is permitted to touch.

That has a practical consequence for anyone reading a quote. A broken sewer pipe repair that runs from the basement wall to the parkway is entirely yours no matter how the program turns out, and the City's involvement can only ever subtract the last stretch from the bill. Anybody presenting the program as a discount on the whole job has misunderstood it, or is hoping you have.

What the program is not

It is not a fund, and there is no application for money. The City repairs its own side of the boundary with its own crews, so the process is built around evidence rather than around receipts. Nothing is reimbursed, so a repair carried out under the public way by your own contractor because it seemed faster is a repair the program has nothing to say about afterwards.

It does not cover maintenance either. The whole thing begins from a defect somebody has already found and put a distance against.

Why the whole thing is written around a licensed contractor

The condition that trips people up is the licensing one, and it makes more sense once you know that Chicago regulates sewer work separately from plumbing work.

A sewer permit from the Department of Buildings is required to construct, alter or repair a private sewer or sewer structure, to rod a public sewer, to videotape one, and to line either a public or a private one. So the two activities the private drain program asks for, rodding and filming, are both permitted acts in this city rather than casual ones.

Those permits are issued only to licensed drainlayers. A drainlayer applicant has to be bonded and insured, and since the start of 2022 a licensed plumbing contractor may obtain a courtesy drainlayer license for the purpose of obtaining sewer permits. Depending on where the work falls and how big it is, the Chicago Department of Transportation or the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District may have to issue permits of their own, and the finished work is inspected by the Department of Water Management.

Read all of that as a description of the law, because that is what it is. None of it describes us. This site brokers introductions and holds neither of those licenses, which is also why the useful thing we can hand you here is the City's own register of licensed plumbing contractors, open to anyone, including for whoever turns up at your door.

The licensing layer matters for one more reason before you book anything. The program does not accept just any video. The permit, the inspector and the recording are a sequence, and a perfectly good inspection carried out outside that sequence is not the one the City will act on. How that sequence runs, and why the footage counter on the recording is the number to write down, is set out on the page about sewer camera inspection.

It stops at the city limits

The program is the City of Chicago's, and it ends where the city does. Every suburb around it answers the same question with its own code, and the answers are not variations on one theme: some draw the owner's responsibility at the curb line, some carry it through the parkway and into the street, and some replace the question with a cost threshold or a trigger at sale. Those five rules are on the suburbs we cover, one page each, because none of them can be summarised as an exception to Chicago's.