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Who owns the water service line in San Rafael, CA

Which part of the pipe is yours

  • Water service line

    Yours from the meter to your building

    Why, and what to do
  • Sewer lateral

    Yours all the way to the main under the road — depends on which district bills your sewer: San Rafael Sanitation District or Las Gallinas Valley Sanitary District

    Why, and what to do
your buildingproperty linesidewalkstreetmain
The thick length is yours. A dashed marker means the position depends on your property — see below.

If something’s wrong

Who to call first about the water service line

BelowGrid has no first-call guidance on file from Marin Municipal Water District about the water service line.

The documents this answer is built on

Who is responsible for which part

Marin Water owns and maintains the service line from the main to and including the meter. The pipe from the meter to the building is the property owner's. This is Marin Municipal Water District's own statement.

Marin Municipal Water District
The District states that "the service line leading to your property is owned and maintained by Marin Water, as is the water meter" - the run from the main in the street, and the meter itself.
The property owner
The District states that "the pipe that runs from the meter to your home belongs to you and is your responsibility", and answers the leak question directly: "you are responsible for any leaks on your side of the water meter. Your water service begins at your water meter."

What else is worth knowing

In Tiburon, not every address is Marin Water's. The State's register puts Marin Water's system over about 74% of Tiburon's land and does not reach Angel Island; the part of Tiburon on the island, about 26% of the town's land, is mapped to Angel Island State Park's own water system. If you are on the island, that system's own rules apply; anywhere else in Tiburon, check the name on your water bill.

Sources

Marin Water, Frequently Asked Questions - Customer Service

Checked

What Marin Municipal Water District reported to the State about service-line materials

Federal rules required every community water system to inventory its service lines and publish the result. These are the figures this one filed.

The inventory records what each line is made of: lead, galvanized requiring replacement, non-lead, or lead status unknown. “Still unclassified” counts the lines whose material has not been identified. It does not mean they are lead.

Marin Municipal Water District has classified more of its service lines than most of California: 0.00% of its lines are unclassified, against 9.2% statewide.

Service lines reported
63,060
Still unclassified
0 (0.00%)
Across California, 9.2% of service lines are unclassified.
Share of service lines still unclassified
  • Marin Municipal Water District0.00%
  • California9.2%

What this page cannot tell you

  • This describes who is responsible for which part of the pipe. It is not a record of what your own service line is made of.
  • The State's service area map puts 95% of San Rafael's land inside the boundary it maps for Marin Municipal Water District. A share of land is not a share of homes: open space counts the same as a dense block. Measured 25 Sep 2026.
  • 63,060 is the whole of Marin Municipal Water District's reported inventory, not this city alone. The State's file records no city for these lines, so they cannot be counted per city.
  • Classified does not mean inspected. Across California only 22% of service lines were established by field inspection; most of the rest come from records, the year of construction, or a predictive model.
  • These figures were submitted to the State by the water system itself and were read on 4 Sep 2026. They may not reflect its current inventory - ask the water system to confirm anything about a specific address.
Marin Municipal Water District: official site

Where else this answer applies

Marin Municipal Water District also supplies the places below, and the statement above governs them too:

Each of them settles the sewer lateral separately, often under a different authority from this one.

Your other pipe: the sewer lateral

For the sewer lateral, San Rafael gives the opposite answer to the one above:

Two sanitary districts serve San Rafael, and both say the sewer lateral is privately owned and the property owner's to maintain. San Rafael Sanitation District adds that this runs the entire length "including the portion that runs under the street". Which district you are in matters for other things - most of all for what happens when you sell.

Your sewer lateral is yours to the main; your water line stops being yours at the meter.

Same trench, separate authorities, decided separately.

Who pays for the sewer lateral in San Rafael, CA

Look up a specific address

This page describes what applies to properties in San Rafael in general. To see which authorities serve one address, and what records exist for it, search for it.

Search for an address

How this compares across California