Do these four things before you call anyone
- Main water off. Clockwise until it stops. This single action decides whether you have a $400 problem or a $9,000 one.
- Power off to the affected area if water is near outlets, fixtures, or the panel. If reaching the breaker means standing in water — don’t. Call 911.
- Open the lowest faucet in the house to drain remaining pressure away from the break.
- Photograph everything before you mop. Wide shots and close-ups, including the burst section. This is your claim.
Where the pipe burst decides who you call
Work out where the water is entering, not where it is pooling. Water runs along joists and inside walls, so the wet ceiling is often nowhere near the break.
Inside a wall, under a sink, or at a fixture → plumber. Ordinary repair: cut out the failed section, replace it, pressure-test. Fixr puts a wall or kitchen burst at $150 to $500 and a bathroom burst at $150 to $800.
Under the slab — a warm patch on the floor, the sound of running water with every fixture off, an unexplained jump in the water bill → a plumber who does leak detection. Not every plumber owns acoustic and thermal equipment. Ask on the phone before booking, because one who doesn’t will either guess where to break the concrete or decline the job when they arrive. Fixr puts slab repairs at $500 to $4,500.
In the yard between the house and the meter → still your pipe, and it’s a plumber or an excavation contractor. The tell: a soggy patch of lawn that never dries, weak pressure at every tap, and the meter dial turning with all water off inside. Fixr puts an underground or main water line burst at $600 to $5,000.
On the street side of the meter → the water utility, not a plumber. They have the street key and the responsibility. Don’t pay for a diagnosis of someone else’s pipe.
An irrigation or sprinkler line → shut the irrigation valve and call an irrigation contractor, not an emergency plumber. Fixr prices these at $150 to $350, and nothing inside the house is at risk.
A fire sprinkler head in an apartment or commercial space → the building’s sprinkler contractor, through your landlord or property manager. A plumber will not touch a fire suppression system.
Timing tells you what comes next. If it burst during or just after a hard freeze, other pipes in the same run are likely frozen and will fail as they thaw. If it had been weeping for months before it opened up, the rest of the plumbing of that age is on the same clock — and that history matters to your insurer, which is covered below.
Who repairs what
A plumber repairs the pipe. That’s the whole job — they’ll cut out the failed section, replace it, and pressure-test. They do not dry your house.
A restoration company handles everything the water touched: moisture readings inside wall cavities, industrial dehumidifiers, air movers, and removing soaked insulation or drywall that won’t dry in place. Most homeowners skip this, let it “air dry”, and meet mold six weeks later.
If your main valve won’t close or the break is upstream of your meter, it’s the water utility’s problem — they have a street key and will shut the service line, usually free and usually fast.
Who to call first, and what happens if you swap the order
- Main water valve off. If it won’t close or the break is upstream of the meter, the utility’s emergency line becomes call number one instead.
- Photograph everything, before you mop.
- Emergency plumber — kill the source.
- Your insurer’s claims line — open the claim the same day.
- Restoration company — dry the structure.
The order is not cosmetic. Each way of getting it wrong costs something specific:
- Restoration before the source is stopped. They will be running dehumidifiers in a house that is still filling. Many mitigation companies will not set equipment until a plumber confirms the leak is dead, so you pay a call-out for nothing.
- Repairs or drywall before the insurer has seen it. You have removed the evidence. Adjusters assess what they can inspect, and a rebuilt wall is very hard to argue about.
- Waiting for the adjuster before you dry anything. The opposite mistake, and just as expensive. You are generally expected to prevent the damage getting worse; sitting in a wet house for four days waiting for an appointment can itself be held against the claim. Emergency mitigation goes ahead — it is the non-urgent rebuild that waits.
- Calling an electrician first because the lights flickered. Unless wiring or the panel got wet, the electrician has nothing to do until the water is off and the area is dry.
Who will tell you this isn’t their job
Expect at least one of these calls, and skip the wasted ones:
- The plumber will not dry your house. They fix the pipe and leave. Soaked insulation, wet subfloor, and the wall cavity are not their scope.
- The restoration company will not repair the pipe. Different licence, different trade. Some subcontract a plumber; most expect you to have one.
- A drywall contractor, handyman, or painter should refuse to close up a wall that still reads wet on a moisture meter. If one agrees to do it anyway, that is the contractor to walk away from — you will be paying them again in two months, with mold in between.
- The water utility will not touch anything past your meter, however dramatic the leak looks.
- A general contractor will often decline an active water event and tell you to come back once it is dried and the claim is settled. That is not them being difficult; the rebuild is genuinely a later phase.
- A home warranty, if you have one, is a separate call from your insurer and covers different things. Read which covers the pipe and which covers the water damage before assuming either does both.
Frozen pipe? Two extra rules
If a pipe froze and burst, others in the same run are likely frozen too. Keep the heat on and open cabinet doors under sinks. And never thaw a pipe with an open flame — heat gun, hair dryer, or warm towels only. Torches on frozen pipes are a well-documented cause of house fires.
The insurance sequence that protects you
Photos → call the claims line → mitigate the damage (they expect you to prevent it getting worse) → keep every receipt → don’t authorize non-emergency repairs until an adjuster has weighed in. Burst pipes are the textbook “sudden and accidental” covered loss, but insurers do deny claims where the home was left unheated or where a known slow leak was ignored.
The word doing the work in that phrase is sudden. A pipe that split at 2am is the straightforward case. The denials cluster on the other kind: a fitting that had been weeping into a cabinet for weeks before it finally opened. Read as gradual damage, that becomes a maintenance problem rather than a covered loss, and “I hadn’t noticed it” tends to land as an admission rather than a defence — the standard is roughly what a reasonable owner should have spotted, not what you actually did.
Three things follow from that, and they are all free:
- Report it the day it happens, not the following week when you have a quote. A gap between the date of loss and the date of the call is the first thing that gets questioned.
- Don’t narrate a history you’re not sure of. “There’s been a damp smell in there for a while” is an honest sentence that reclassifies your claim. Describe what you found and when you found it.
- Keep anything that timestamps the discovery — the photos with their metadata, the text to your partner, the plumber’s dispatch time.
If the burst was a freeze, note the thermostat setting and whether the heat was on. Unheated or unattended homes are the other common denial route, and a photo of the thermostat costs you nothing.