About Utility Hotline
The network for private utility locating.
Utility Hotline exists to make hiring a private utility locating company simple. You describe your site one time, we send your request to locating companies that cover your area, and they send you their own quotes. No phone marathon, no markup, and no charge to you. Our purpose is to get more sites swept before the excavator shows up.
Our story
One request reaches the right locators
Finding a private locating company has always been harder than it should be. The work spans very different techniques, every company covers a different patch of the map, and the only way to compare options used to be a string of phone calls. Utility Hotline replaces that with a single request.
Locating also gets bought in two different vocabularies. An engineering firm or a general contractor scopes the work by method, asking for a ground penetrating radar sweep or an ASCE 38 quality level because a spec requires it. A property owner or a facility manager scopes it by target, searching for the septic lateral or the irrigation main and having no opinion about instrumentation. This site is built along both axes, so either search lands on a page that answers the actual question and points at the companies that do the work.
We do not own locating equipment, we do not send crews, and we never quote you ourselves. We are the connection layer between the people who are about to break ground and the locating companies best suited to sweep the site first, so their quotes come to you instead of you chasing them down.
Call 811 first
One-call, then everything past the meter
Call 811 in the United States, or your provincial one-call center in Canada, before you dig. The ticket is free, it is required by law before excavation in most jurisdictions, and it brings out the member utilities to mark the public lines they own. Nothing on this site is a substitute for that call, and we will never tell you to skip it.
What one-call does not do is finish the property. The member utilities mark what they own, and their responsibility normally ends at the meter, the pedestal, or the edge of the right-of-way. Everything past that point belongs to the property owner: the water service running to the building, the gas run out to a shop or a generator, site lighting and sign circuits, irrigation mains, sewer and septic laterals, and the power and fiber feeding a second structure. Those lines appear on no one-call map, and in most cases no as-built drawing survived either.
That second half is what a private locating company covers, and it is the half Utility Hotline exists to get you. Private locating complements one-call, it never replaces it. Our state and city pages name the one-call program that covers that jurisdiction and the number to dial, so you are pointed at the right one before anyone breaks ground.
No catch
Why it's free, and how that works
Utility Hotline is free for the people who use it. There is no charge to submit a request and no charge to receive quotes, no membership, no fee to unlock contact details, and no obligation to hire anyone.
We are just as clear with locating companies. We take no commission on the work you book and no per-lead fee for sending a request their way. The price you and a locating company agree on is entirely between the two of you. Nothing is marked up, and nothing is skimmed off the top.
The site is funded the same way a trade publication is: through sponsorships and advertising from companies that want to reach people who are about to dig. That is what keeps the lights on, so submitting a request stays free on both sides.
The model borrows its logic from 811 itself. That service works because it removes a barrier instead of adding one: the ticket is free, so people actually call before they dig. We apply the same idea to the private side of the meter. Take the cost and the friction out of finding a locating company, and more sites get swept before the first shovel goes in.
How the network works
From one request to a booked locating company
One site, described once, reaches the locating companies best suited to sweep it. An owner-operator and a regional firm show up side by side, so you can choose on scope, price, and availability.
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You describe the site once
One short request captures where the site is, what you are digging or building, and what needs to be found. If you are not sure which locating method the job calls for, leave it blank and describe the work instead.
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A person reviews the request
We read every request by hand and choose the locating companies that cover that area and do that kind of work, from an owner-operator locator to a regional subsurface utility engineering firm.
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Those companies quote you directly
The companies we send it to contact you with their own scope, their own pricing, and their own timing. We never quote you ourselves, and nothing is marked up.
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You compare and hire
Line up the quotes you receive, ask the questions you need to ask, and hire the company that fits. There is no obligation to hire anyone, and you only talk to the companies you want to.
Part of the Hydrovac Hotline network
An established network, pointed at locating
Utility Hotline is built on the Hydrovac Hotline network, the established service that connects customers with underground service providers across North America. Hydrovac Hotline proved the model: a free way to get a job in front of qualified companies, with no commission and no per-lead fee, and let the quotes come back to you.
Every request submitted here is tagged as utility locating before it reaches that network, so it goes to companies that do locating work rather than to a fleet that only runs vacuum trucks. The coverage, the review by a real person, and the no-commission terms carry over. What changes is the trade: this site is for finding what is buried, not for digging it up.
Ready to find what’s buried?
Describe your site once and we send your request to locating companies that cover your area. They reply with their own quotes. It is free to submit, and there is no obligation.