Know what’s buried.
Before you dig.

They cover different halves of the same site. A one-call ticket, placed with 811 in the US or your provincial one-call center in Canada, is free and notifies the member facility owners so each can mark the public lines it owns. What comes back is the public side: the mains in the street and the right-of-way, and the utility-owned service, which generally stops at the meter, the curb stop, or the property line. Everything past that boundary belongs to the property owner and is outside one-call entirely: the water and gas runs into the building, site lighting and sign circuits, irrigation mainlines and valves, sewer and septic laterals, private fire loops, campus distribution between buildings, and anything a previous owner installed. A private locating company is hired by you to find and mark that side. Place the one-call ticket first, book the private locate alongside it, and hand dig or vacuum excavate inside the tolerance zone regardless of how clean either set of marks looks.

Anything the utility does not own. In practice that means the water service past the meter, a gas run out to a shop or a generator, electrical feeds to detached garages, gates, wells, and yard lighting, irrigation mainlines and zone valves, sewer and septic laterals along with the tank and drain field, private fire loops and yard hydrants, and the power, data, and fiber running between buildings on a campus or industrial site. Abandoned lines are outside one-call as well, and they are frequently the ones nobody remembers. None of that is a shortcoming of the program: one-call was built to notify facility owners about their own lines, and private lines have no facility owner to notify.

Utility Hotline is a free way to reach private utility locating companies across the United States and Canada. You describe your site once, we send your request to locating companies that cover the area, and they contact you with their own scope and quote. The site takes requests for all eight locating services, meaning private utility locating, ground penetrating radar, utility mapping, line marking, subsurface utility engineering, leak detection, concrete scanning, and vacuum potholing, across water, gas, electrical, sewer and septic, fiber and telecom, and irrigation lines. Which companies can take on a given scope depends on your area, and the quotes that come back are what tell you. We do not own equipment, we do not send crews, and we never quote you ourselves.

It is quoted per job rather than off a published rate, so any number posted on a website would be a guess about your site. What actually moves the price is how much ground has to be swept, how many utilities are in play, whether the lines are metallic or plastic, how reachable the meters, valves, and tracer wire access points are, how much of the site is under pavement or slab, and whether you need surface marks only or a drawing and GPS data as well. Travel to a rural site counts too. Describe the job once and locating companies serving your area send you their own quotes so you can compare them side by side.

Yes, it is free to submit a request and free to receive quotes, and no, we take no commission. There is no membership, no fee to unlock contact details, and no obligation to hire anyone. On the other side, locating companies pay no commission on the work they win and no per-lead fee for receiving a request. The price you agree on is between you and the company you hire, and nothing is marked up.

The platform is funded by advertising across the Hydrovac Hotline network, the same way a trade publication is funded, rather than by charging the people on either side of a job. Advertisers reach an audience of people who buy and perform underground work, and that is what pays for the site, so submitting a request and receiving quotes cost the customer nothing and receiving a request costs the locating company nothing.

It depends on what is buried and on what you have to prove. Private utility locating is the general sweep of a site, an electromagnetic locator and a radar cart used together. Ground penetrating radar is what finds plastic pipe, clay tile, concrete duct, tanks, and voids that carry no signal. Line marking puts the answer on the ground in APWA colors for a crew that is about to dig. Utility mapping turns the same findings into a CAD or GIS record that outlives the paint. Subsurface utility engineering delivers it at an ASCE 38 quality level a design engineer can seal. Leak detection pinpoints a pressurized water leak so you dig one hole instead of the run. Concrete scanning clears a slab before coring or cutting. Vacuum potholing exposes a line so its position and depth are verified rather than estimated. If you are unsure, leave the service blank on the form and describe the situation instead.

Often, but not with an electromagnetic locator alone, because PVC, HDPE, and PEX carry no signal and there is nothing for a receiver to follow. Tracer wire is the designed answer and it fails often, since it was never installed on older plastic, gets cut during backfill, corrodes at splices, or terminates underground with no accessible connection point. The realistic alternatives are a sonde pushed through the line and tracked from above, acoustic tracing that couples a signal into the water column, or ground penetrating radar reading the pipe and its trench backfill. Each has ground where it struggles: radar gives up most of its depth in wet clay and other conductive soil, and acoustic range collapses in traffic noise and loose fill. A locating company worth hiring will try more than one approach and tell you plainly if the line cannot be confirmed, in which case vacuum potholing at a known point is how the position gets established.

A person reads it. Requests are reviewed by hand rather than pushed through an automatic filter, then sent to private locating companies that cover the area and do the kind of work described. Those companies contact you directly with their own availability, scope, and price, and each one sets its own timing. You compare what comes back and hire whoever fits, or nobody at all. Including your dig date, the site address, what you are digging, and what you already know is buried gets you replies that account for the real job.

Cities across the United States and Canada. Enter the job site on the request form and we send it to locating companies that actually work that ground rather than to a list scraped from a directory. Coverage is deepest around the larger metros, and many companies travel well outside them for rural, agricultural, and multi-site scopes, so a remote site is worth submitting rather than assuming nobody serves it.