Marks, Sketches, or a Map: Choosing a Locating Deliverable
Paint is gone in a few weeks. Whether that matters is the whole question, and it decides what you should be buying.
Surface Marks
APWA color-coded paint and flags on the ground. Readable by every crew on site without a drawing or a device, which is why it is the correct product when someone is digging this week. Its weakness is that it is temporary — paint does not survive rain, traffic, or a construction season, and there is no way to re-find a mark that has worn off short of re-locating.
Field Sketch with Offsets
A hand drawing recording each marked line with measured offsets to permanent features — building corners, curbs, poles. This is the cheap insurance that makes marks recoverable: when the paint goes, the sketch lets someone re-establish the same lines with a tape measure.
It should be standard on any private locate. If a quote does not mention it, ask.
Surveyed Coordinates
Each mark captured with survey-grade GNSS or a total station instead of left as a paint dot. This is the step that turns a locate into a record: the positions are in a real coordinate system, so they can be re-staked years later from survey control, dropped into design drawings, or loaded into a GIS.
Specify the datum and projection your existing drawings use. A deliverable issued on a different basis can plot a metre or more off your base plan, and reconciling that afterwards costs more than getting it right up front.
CAD, GIS, and File Formats
Common outputs are layered DWG or DXF drafted in APWA utility colors, a PDF overlay on your site plan or aerial, GIS formats such as shapefile, file geodatabase, or GeoJSON, a KMZ for viewing in Google Earth, and a CSV point file with northing, easting, elevation, and descriptor codes.
If your organization maintains a GIS, hand over your existing attribute schema before the work starts so the layer drops in without rework.
Sealed SUE Drawing
The full engineering deliverable: records research, surveyed surface features, field designation, and test-hole verification, all tied to project survey control and issued signed and sealed with an ASCE 38 quality level annotated per segment. This is what a design package needs and it is not what a digging crew needs.
How to Choose
- Digging this week, small site — marks plus a field sketch
- Digging over months, or a site too large to hold in paint — coordinates, and budget re-marks anyway
- Feeding a GIS or an asset register — GIS deliverable in your own schema and datum
- Designing anything — SUE with quality levels
- Installing new plant — capture the as-built before backfill, while the position is still a measurement
Frequently asked questions
Is a map worth it if we already have marks?
It depends entirely on whether anyone will need the information again. For a single trench next week, no. For a campus, a plant, or any site where the same question will be asked in five years, yes — the alternative is paying for the same search a second time, and the second search does not benefit from anything the first one learned.
What accuracy should I expect on coordinates?
The survey capture is the strong part; the locate underneath it is the weak part. RTK GNSS under open sky positions the mark itself tightly, and a total station covers ground where canopy or buildings block satellites. But the mark records where the locator interpreted the line to be, so the deliverable should be labelled by quality level per segment rather than presented as one uniform accuracy figure.
Does a utility map replace calling 811?
No. A map is a planning and design document, not a locate ticket, and it does not show anything installed, repaired, or abandoned since the survey date. File the one-call ticket before every dig regardless of how good the map is.
Can we get the map updated later?
Yes, and it is much cheaper than starting over, because survey control and the existing layer give the next crew a base to work from. Sites that treat the map as a living record — updating it as work happens rather than commissioning a fresh survey every few years — end up with better data at lower total cost.
Related guides
View allSUE Quality Levels Explained: QL-D, QL-C, QL-B, and QL-A
A line on a drawing tells you nothing about how it got there. Quality levels are the standard that fixes that.
What Private Utility Locating Costs, and What Moves the Price
Nobody publishes a rate card for locating, and the ones you find online are guesses. Here is what a locating company is actually pricing when it quotes your site.
How to Read Utility Marks on the Ground
Marks are a language, and most of the people digging near them were never taught to read it. It takes ten minutes.
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