All of it. The brochure: "Customers are responsible for the line from the building all the way to the public sewer main." §15.40.050 says the same in code language.
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Your line, piece by piece
Quick answer
who owns the sewer line, the homeowner or the city? In Nashville, the homeowner owns the sewer service line from the house all the way to the public sewer main — including under the street (Metro Code §15.40.050). Metro's own brochure answers "where is the city part of my line?" with: "There is not one." One relief route exists — §15.40.050(B), explained below.
A sewer service line — your lateral — is one pipe with several names along its run, and the names matter because conversations (and quotes) get slippery when nobody says which piece they mean. Leaving your house, wastewater exits through the building drain, the horizontal pipe inside and under the structure. At the building line it becomes the building sewer: your lateral proper, running across your lot, usually through a cleanout near the house and sometimes a second one near the street. Then it crosses the part that causes all the arguments — the right-of-way, the strip of sidewalk and street verge the city controls — and ends at the tap, the connection point where your pipe meets the public sewer main in the street.
Every piece of that run, tap included as your connection, belongs to the property owner. The public main belongs to Metro. The boundary between your responsibility and the city's is not the curb, the sidewalk, or your fence line. It's the far side of the street's pipe. That's the whole geography of the thing, and everything else on this page is consequences.
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The law, in its own words
Metro Code §15.40.050 states it without decoration:
"The Owner will own and maintain his sewer service line from the public sewer main to the structure served."
Read the direction of that sentence carefully. From the public sewer main — the city's pipe, out in the street — to the structure served. Your house. The entire run between them is the owner's to own and to maintain: its clogs, its roots, its cracks, its collapse, its repair bills.
Metro Water Services says the same thing in its customer brochure, in plainer language than the code, and the brochure is worth quoting because it's the source every answer below is checked against:
"Customers are responsible for the line from the building all the way to the public sewer main."
And to the question every homeowner asks next — where does the Metro part of my line start? — the brochure's answer is three words long:
"There is not one."
No competitor page in Nashville explains any of this. We checked. The silence is not an accident of the market; a homeowner who believes the city owns half the pipe is a homeowner who waits for the city while sewage stands in the shower. Know the rule, and you can act on the right problem at the right speed.
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The one relief route: §15.40.050(B)
There is a single, narrow exception, and it lives in subsection (B) of the same code section. It is not a general promise that Metro fixes street-side pipes. It is a sequence, and every step of the sequence matters:
- Your plumber tries first. The relief applies after a genuine attempt by a plumber to fix the line has failed. Not before, and not instead of. This is why the camera footage and the written findings from that attempt matter — they are the evidence that the attempt happened and the failure is real.
- The failed section must sit in the public right-of-way or an easement. If the failure is under your lawn, it's yours, full stop. The relief is about the segment neither you nor your plumber can sensibly be asked to dig up in the public way.
- A two-foot section of your line is cut and removed at the right-of-way or easement boundary, and you sign a release. That paperwork is part of the mechanism, not a formality.
- Metro then repairs the right-of-way segment. For residential customers, at no charge. For commercial customers, the work is billed.
That's it. That's the whole door, and it's narrower than the rumours about it — "the city will fix the part under the street" is true only after a plumber's failed attempt, only for the segment in the right-of-way, and only through the cut-and-release procedure. A drain company that sends you to Metro first, without attempting the repair, is sending you on a trip that ends back at your own door. Our role in the sequence is step one done properly: camera the line, document the failure and its location precisely — the sonde locating on our camera inspection page exists partly for this — and attempt the fix, so that if your case qualifies, it qualifies on evidence.
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Before you pay anyone: the call that might make it Metro's problem after all
Ownership of the lateral doesn't mean every backup is yours. If the public main itself is blocked, wastewater backs up into the laterals connected to it — and that one genuinely is Metro's job. The tell is geography: if your neighbours on the same street are backing up at the same time, or sewage is surfacing outside, suspect the main before you suspect your pipe.
Metro Water Services runs a 24/7 line for exactly this: 615-862-4600, option 3 — and through hubNashville 311. Ask for the Sewer Main Clog Investigation. It's free, and it's the right first call when the street, not just your house, is involved. If the investigation clears the main, the problem is back in your lateral and it's yours — but you've established that on the city's time rather than your plumber's invoice. We tell people this on our own phone line too, at (615) 555-0134, even though it occasionally costs us a job. A company that bills you to clear your lateral when the main was blocked has charged you for the city's problem, and we'd rather not be that story in somebody's review.
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If you do dig: the boundary rules nobody mentions
Working on your own line, on your own lot, is mostly a matter of doing it right. The moment work touches the public way or the main itself, a permit layer appears that homeowners almost never hear about until they're standing in it:
- Digging in the street or easement requires an NDOT right-of-way permit. The segment under the asphalt is yours to maintain, but the asphalt isn't yours to open on your own say-so. Traffic control, compaction standards, restoration — the city has legitimate interests there, and the permit is how they're protected.
- Nobody cuts into the public main without Metro's written permit. Metro Code §15.12.040 governs taps: connecting to, or cutting into, the public sewer requires MWS's written authorisation. This is licensed-contractor territory, not a weekend project.
- TN 811 does not mark your lateral. The 811 one-call service locates public utilities before you dig. Your sewer service line is a private utility — it is not in their markings, and a yard painted with 811 flags can still hide your line exactly where you plan to dig. Locating a private lateral is a different job: it's what the sonde on a camera head is for, and it's a standard part of our inspection work. The Terry Love forum story in the next section turns on exactly this gap between what homeowners assume is marked and what actually is.
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The caveat: not all of "Nashville" is Metro
Everything above is Metro Water Services territory. Two chunks of the area aren't. Madison and parts of the northeast sit in the Madison Suburban Utility District (MSUD) — 615-868-3201 — and the Harpeth Valley Utility District (HVUD) serves its own territory to the west. If your water bill doesn't say Metro, the numbers change: MWS's investigation line, the §15.40.050(B) relief sequence, and the brochure answers below belong to the Metro code, and your district has its own rules and its own phone tree. Our Madison page exists largely to hold that caveat where Madison readers will find it. Check the bill before you quote the code.
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Why rain makes your line worse — and what the city is actually fixing
Nashville averages 50.51 inches of rain a year (NOAA's 1991–2020 normals), and core Nashville still drains through roughly 348 miles of combined sewer — pipes from the late 1800s that carry sewage and stormwater in the same barrel — out of a system of more than 3,200 miles. In a hard rain, stormwater forces its way into the system through every crack and bad joint, public and private alike — infiltration and inflow, I&I in the trade's shorthand — and a marginal lateral that copes in dry weather surcharges in wet. If your backups keep a weather diary, that's the mechanism, and our rain backup guide works it through.
Metro is fixing its side of that problem under the Clean Water Nashville programme: the overflow abatement programme born of the March 2009 EPA/TDEC consent decree, over $2.5 billion of work with a December 2031 deadline. It is real, it is enormous, and it is about the public system. It does not extend to your lateral, and no completion date on it changes §15.40.050. The city's pipes are getting rebuilt on the city's schedule. Yours are on yours.
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Where the confusion concentrates: the segment at the city connection
If there's one stretch of pipe that generates more owner-versus-city argument than all the rest combined, it's the last few feet — the segment where your line meets the main. A general-US forum case (a Terry Love thread, labeled as such — it's not a Nashville story) shows the shape of it: a homeowner had already replaced his failed Orangeburg line at his own expense, and the remaining problem was the clay segment right at the city connection, quoted at "at the most $1,200" for five or six feet buried six to eight feet deep. A master plumber answering the thread added the part nobody had told the homeowner: that section usually falls under the city's engineering department rather than plumbing inspections, it sits in the right of way, and it needs an encroachment permit and specific insurance, with fill compacted to city requirements so the street doesn't sink. Nashville's version of that same boundary has its own local machinery — the (B) relief sequence above, the NDOT permit, the §15.12.040 tap permit — but the moral is identical on both sides of the state line: the connection segment is where "surely the city handles this part" goes to die, and it's the segment to ask your questions about before the dig, not during it.
Good questions
Metro's own FAQ — the six questions, answered from the brochure
These are the questions from Metro Water Services' own customer brochure, with its answers — the document this page has quoted throughout, cited so you can check us against it.
Call (615) 555-0134 →"There is not one." The city's pipe is the main. Everything between your house and the main is the owner's.
No. That access serves Metro's visual inspection and smaller cleaning equipment; the larger work on your line is the owner's responsibility, done by the owner's plumber.
The §15.40.050(B) right-of-way repair is free to residential customers once the sequence is followed — plumber's attempt first, the failed segment in the right-of-way, the two-foot cut and the signed release. Commercial customers are billed.
Only to grade, and only where Metro itself made a repair. The brochure is explicit that Metro is "not responsible for plants, structures, or personal belongings within the work area" — final restoration of what grows and sits on top is the property owner's.
It varies by property; commonly about 10 feet on each side of the public sewer main. (The same brochure advises keeping trees at least 10 feet from your sewer line — water-hungry species 20 to 30 feet — and calling TN One Call 811 before digging.)
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Who is responsible for paying for repairs to a broken sewer line under a homeowner's property?
That question, in almost those words, is one of the most-asked sewer questions on Quora, and in most of America the answer requires a local-law dig. In Nashville it doesn't: the code section at the top of this page answers it. Under your property, the line is yours — its repair, its cost, and its camera footage alike. The exceptions are the ones this page has covered: a blocked public main is Metro's (call 615-862-4600, option 3 first if the street is affected); the right-of-way segment has the (B) relief sequence after a plumber's failed attempt; a tenant-caused blockage in a rental is a different who-pays question again — costs follow the cause, which is why our landlords and property managers work is built around footage that proves the cause; and if your bill says MSUD or HVUD rather than Metro, you're in another district's rulebook entirely.
If you're staring at a backup and working out whose problem it is: neighbours affected or sewage outside → Metro first, free. Only your house → your lateral, and the next step is seeing inside it. That's our camera inspection — video you keep, a verdict in writing — or, if sewage is coming up right now, the emergency page and (615) 555-0134. And if a line has failed outright, the sewer line repair page prices the options from the same footage. Either way: now you know whose pipe it is, and that's the knowledge this market's other companies were content to leave in the fine print of an invoice.
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