Sewer line repair in Indianapolis

What is under an Indianapolis yard

Most of the houses inside the old city limits — Meridian-Kessler, Broad Ripple, Irvington, Garfield Park, Fountain Square, Eagledale, the ranches out to Warren Park and Beech Grove — were connected to the sewer between the 1920s and the early 1970s. The lateral that runs from the basement wall to the main in the street is whichever pipe was cheapest that year. Before the war it was vitrified clay in short sections with mortar joints. After the war a lot of subdivisions used Orangeburg, a tar-soaked wood-fiber pipe that goes oval and collapses after fifty or sixty years. Some houses have cast iron for the first ten feet and clay beyond that.

All three are past their design life. Clay joints open up as the ground moves and let roots in. Orangeburg flattens under a driveway. Cast iron rusts from the inside until the bottom is gone. None of this is a maintenance failure; the pipes are old and the silver maples on the tree lawn have had seventy years to find them.

The second thing that makes Indianapolis different is the sewer itself. Citizens Energy Group owns the system, and the older neighborhoods sit on combined sewers that carry stormwater and sewage in the same pipe. When a summer storm drops two inches in an hour, that pipe surcharges and the water looks for the lowest opening — which is often a basement floor drain on a street off College Avenue or Shelby Street. That is a different problem from a broken lateral, and we tell you which one you have before anyone talks about digging.

What we do

Sewer line repair — a camera-located spot repair of the one or two bad sections: a collapsed clay joint, a root ball at the foundation wall, a crushed Orangeburg run under the walk. Most are $1,500–$4,000 and done in a day. Details on the sewer line repair page.

Sewer line replacement — a new PVC lateral from the house to the main when the whole run is failing. Open trench where the yard allows it, $4,000–$15,000 depending on depth and what has to be restored. See sewer line replacement.

Trenchless sewer repair — cured-in-place lining or pipe bursting through the old pipe from one or two pits, which is how we replace a lateral under a 90-year-old oak in Meridian-Kessler without cutting it down. $6,000–$20,000. The trenchless page explains when each method works.

Sewer camera inspection — the recorded scope that every quote starts with. $250–$500, credited against the repair. See sewer camera inspection.

Hydro jetting and drain cleaning — clearing roots, grease and cast iron scale from a pipe that is still sound, and the prep step before lining. See hydro jetting.

The Citizens rule

Since 1 January 2026, work on a sewer lateral in the Citizens Energy Group service area has to be done by a contractor bonded with Citizens, under a permit, with the tie-in inspected. That applies to us and to anyone else you call. If a contractor tells you a permit isn't needed for a lateral, they are either not bonded or planning to skip the inspection, and either way the problem becomes yours at resale. We pull the permit as part of the job and the cost is on the estimate as its own line.

Where we work

Marion County and the ring around it: Carmel, Fishers, Noblesville and Westfield to the north, Zionsville and Brownsburg to the northwest, Avon and Plainfield to the west, Greenwood to the south, Lawrence to the northeast. Area codes 317 and 463. Carmel and Greenwood have their own pages because their older blocks fail the same way the city does: Carmel and Greenwood.

If it is backing up right now

Stop running water, don't flush, and call. Emergency sewer repair Indianapolis-wide goes ahead of scheduled work. If the backup only happens during or after heavy rain, tell us that on the phone — it changes what we bring and it may not be your lateral at all. The post on signs of a broken sewer line covers what the symptoms mean; the sewer line repair cost page has the real 2026 ranges.