There are more than 20 million miles of buried utility line in the US — enough to wrap the equator about 800 times. Hit one with a shovel or a rented mini excavator and the outcome ranges from a dead internet connection for your whole street to a ruptured gas service and an evacuated block. The prevention step is free, works in all 50 states, and takes about two minutes.
The catch is that 811 only finds some of what's under your yard, and most homeowners assume it finds everything. Here's how the process actually works, what gets marked, what doesn't, and what a strike costs in 2026 dollars when it goes wrong.
Every state routes 811 calls to a one-call center, and every center also takes requests through a web portal — often the faster option. The workflow is the same nearly everywhere; only the deadlines shift slightly by state.
One rule people miss: you can't machine-dig right on the marks even after they appear. Every state defines a tolerance zone — usually 18 to 24 inches on either side of the marked line — where digging must be done by hand or with vacuum excavation.
Locators everywhere use the APWA uniform color code, so paint means the same thing in Maine as it does in Arizona.
Flags and paint carry the same meaning; flags just survive rain and mowing better. A ticket that clears with no marks usually means no lines in conflict — but confirm that through positive response rather than assuming the locator never showed.
Locators mark lines owned by member utilities, and ownership almost always ends at your meter or point of connection. The electric company marks up to the meter; the wire a previous owner ran from the panel to the detached garage is invisible to them. The same logic applies to gas and water.
A useful rule of thumb: if no utility bills you for maintaining a line, nobody is coming to mark it. On many properties, that unmarked category is bigger than the marked one.
The usual suspects on a residential lot:
You have three honest options for these. Pull old records — county health departments keep septic permits, and propane suppliers often have site diagrams. Hire a private utility locator, which typically runs $150 to $450 for a residential visit in 2026, more if ground-penetrating radar is involved. Or expose the line carefully by hand before any machine touches the area.
When you hit a line without a valid ticket, the utility bills you for the repair. A damaged residential gas service commonly costs $1,000 to $5,000 to fix once a crew rolls, and severing a fiber trunk can reach five figures because carriers pass along outage and loss-of-service claims. State fines stack on top — typically $500 to $10,000 for a first offense, with gas violations at the high end.
Skipping the locate can also complicate your homeowner's insurance claim, since the dig violated state law. Add it all up and the Common Ground Alliance estimates strikes cost the US economy about $30 billion a year — which is exactly why utilities fund the 811 system themselves. Paying locators to visit your yard is far cheaper for them than repairing what a backhoe does to their network, so the service costs you nothing by design.
Requesting the ticket is genuinely a homeowner-level task, and it's worth doing even for fence posts, mailboxes, and tree planting — gas and fiber lines regularly sit under less than 12 inches of soil. There is no project too small; the law in every state applies to any digging, at any depth.
The digging itself is a different question. Once a job involves trenching, grading, stump removal, or working inside a tolerance zone, a licensed excavation contractor like Acme Excavation is the sensible handoff — crews that dig daily pull their own tickets, carry the insurance, and know exactly how your state expects the last 18 inches to be excavated.
Either way, the sequence never changes: white paint, 811 ticket, wait for marks, confirm responses, respect the tolerance zone, then dig.