Water Service Line Replacement

The City of Missoula, City Council, and the Public Works & Mobility Department are pleased to offer a service to replace leaking water service lines for our customers at a low-cost.

There are over 13,000 galvanized water service lines in Missoula that have outlived their expected life.  Missoula’s water system leaks at an unacceptably high rate and most of this leakage is attributable to leaking customer-owned service lines. This leakage is a significant cost to all of our customers through higher power and treatment bills. Missoula Water has recently invested in leak detection technology that is likely to identify hundreds of leaking water service lines each year. Replacing a water service line typically costs more than $10,000 and many homeowners in Missoula cannot afford this expense. The objective is to provide additional construction resources to provide an affordable option.

What can you expect us to do?

We will typically submit a bid to replace a full water service line from the main in the street into the house. We will not bid on simple leak repairs. Typically, when a line has a leak it is an indicator that the line has outlived its useful life and the entire line needs to be replaced. When possible, we will try pulling a new service line in place of the old line, which can be cheaper and less impactful than digging a trench, but it often does not work. If that is not an option or pulling the line does not work, we will bid the cost of digging the trench. We will only charge for the actual cost of the work, never exceeding the bid amount.