Where U.S. sewer lateral records actually are
A survey of 15 municipal open-data portals, run in August 2026. Two findings are worth knowing before you go looking for your own property’s records.
Key figures
- 83
sewer-related datasets
found across 15 municipal and county open-data portals, searched for sewer, lateral, wastewater and side-sewer terms.
- 1
declares a licence
Exactly one of those 83 datasets states its reuse terms in its metadata. The rest are published without any machine-readable licence at all.
- 0
jurisdictions cleared for automated reuse
Not because the terms are restrictive. Because in almost every case nobody has written down what the terms are.
Cities publish the pipes and keep the paperwork
Municipal open-data portals publish sewer infrastructure — mains, manholes, service areas — as map layers. They keep property-level lateral records, the certificates and inspections attached to a particular address, in permit portals behind a login.
Berkeley, California is the cleanest illustration. Berkeley has exactly the regulation this product was designed around: a sewer lateral certificate is required before transfer of title, certificates transfer with the property, and they stay valid to their printed expiry. Berkeley’s open-data portal publishes sewer mains and manholes, last updated in October 2015. The certificates live in a login-gated portal with per-address search: linkable, not ingestible.
Strong regulation, no open records. That pattern held across every jurisdiction examined.
The obstacle is licence review, not data availability
New York City publishes 113,795 rows of property-level sewer permits — of which 17,005 are distinct records, and 6,754 carry a complete borough-block-lot and can therefore be attributed to a parcel. It is the strongest source found anywhere in the survey.
Almost none of the 83 datasets found says what may be done with it. That is not the same as saying no: it means a human has to read the terms of use for each portal before anything can be published from it. Data availability was never the binding constraint.
Method, and how to check it
Fifteen Socrata and ArcGIS Hub portals were queried programmatically for sewer, lateral, wastewater and side-sewer terms. Every returned dataset was recorded with its declared licence field, its row count, and the date it was last updated. Four jurisdictions were then verified by hand against the city’s own published pages.
The NYC figures are counts from a full fetch of the DEP Water and Sewer Permits dataset, deduplicated on permit number and request status. The distinction between 113,795 rows and 17,005 distinct records matters: roughly 85% of the rows are byte-identical repeats.
Limitations. Fifteen portals is not a census of U.S. municipal open data. The survey covers portals with machine-readable catalogues, which biases towards larger cities; a city publishing sewer records as PDFs on a departmental page would not appear. Absence of a licence field does not mean reuse is prohibited — it means it is unstated.
What this means if you are looking
Start with the ordinance, not the records. What your city requires is public and citable; the records proving a particular property complied usually sit in a permit portal behind a login, and often do not exist at all. Knowing the requirement tells you what to ask for, and who to ask.