City and County of Denver, Colorado
Commercial Plumbing Denver: What Has to Be Proved Dead Before the New Thing Can Live
Commercial plumbing pages usually describe what gets installed. This one is mostly about what has to be destroyed first, because in Denver the destruction is the part with the permit attached.
The City requires cut off of the sanitary sewer prior to demolition of existing structures and before the Sewer Use and Drainage Permit for new construction is released. Wastewater Permitting verifies that every required cut off has been completed as part of its review, and only then does the new permit issue.
Which means an old service line that nobody will ever use again sits on the critical path of a redevelopment. It is not a tidying task at the end of the demolition, it is a gate at the front of the construction. This page is about that gate, about the specification for killing a pretreatment device, and about the two ways a Denver business pays differently from a Denver household.
Discuss a Denver Commercial PremisesPlumber Denver: The Main City Page
A Tight Urban Site Is Automatically a Sewer Cut Off Site
The rule that catches most Denver commercial projects is a distance rather than a use. Cut off of the sanitary or storm service lines at the main is required for all projects where shoring, excavation or new building construction will be less than ten feet from the property line or the public main lines.
Ten feet from a property line is not a large number in a city building at Denver's current density. Infill sites, alley-loaded redevelopments and anything squeezing a new envelope onto an old lot will meet that condition almost automatically, and the moment they do, the old services have to be terminated at the main rather than simply capped somewhere convenient.
The City does allow flexibility on where. At the discretion of the Wastewater Management plumbing inspector, cut off may be granted at an alternate location. That discretion is worth asking about early, because the difference between cutting at the main under a live street and cutting somewhere inside the site is a difference in traffic control, reinstatement and programme rather than a difference in plumbing.
There is a second discretion in the same document and it is the useful one for a demolition contractor. A pre-clear may be granted prior to demolition at the inspector's discretion. But the City is explicit that the cut off must still be completed before any permit for new construction is released, so a pre-clear moves the work in the programme without removing it.
None of this is exotic engineering. It is sequencing, and sequencing is where commercial plumbing projects in this city actually lose weeks.
What Has to Be Finished Before It Can Start
Every other commercial page in this series has been organised around a live obligation: a clock, a permit threshold, an exemption, a machine. Denver is best read backwards, as a list of endings that gate a beginning.
The old sanitary service
Cut off is required for the sanitary sewer prior to demolition of existing structures and before release of the Sewer Use and Drainage Permit for new construction. First in the list and first in the programme.
The old storm service
Storm service lines fall under the same cut off requirement where the ten foot condition is met. Two networks, one rule, and both of them have to be dealt with rather than just the one you were thinking about.
Any pretreatment device
Existing pretreatment devices must have their connections cut off at the inlet and the outlet immediately outside the device. The City names the sand and oil interceptor among the device types this covers.
The void the device leaves
The device is either removed, or drained, cleaned and filled with granular material and compacted to 85 per cent dry density. A geotechnical specification, in a plumbing permit document.
The verification
Wastewater Permitting verifies completion of all required cut offs for compliance with the Revised Municipal Code and the Wastewater Rules and Regulations as part of the review, before releasing the permit for issuance.
Each visit, separately
A fee of $55.00 per inspection is charged for each trip or inspection, and requests must be in by 3:30 p.m. on the previous business day. Every ending in this list is an inspection, and every inspection is a booking.
Card four is the one worth pausing on. A buried pretreatment device is a void, and a void under a slab that is about to carry a new building is a settlement risk rather than a plumbing one. The City has written a compaction standard into a sewer permit because the pipe question and the ground question are the same question at that point.
Cards five and six together explain why demolition programmes in Denver need the plumbing inspections in the bar chart rather than in a footnote.
The Second Difference
A Denver Business Is Never Frozen and Never Forgiven
The sanitary sewer charge for commercial property is based on actual metered consumption in each billing period during the year. A household's is not: it is set once from a winter reading and then held there.
That difference sounds administrative until you follow it into the adjustment rules, where it produces a genuinely asymmetric outcome. Because commercial and industrial charges already track actual monthly consumption, the City states that it does not adjust those accounts for inside leaks at all.
The logic is consistent. A household frozen on a bad February reading is stuck with a figure that no longer reflects reality, so there is something to correct. A business billed monthly is already paying for exactly what it used, including the water that a failed fitting sent into the sewer, and that water really was treated.
Outside leaks are different, and here a business does have a route. The City will adjust for an outside leak on a written request with repair receipts. Where receipts do not exist it states it can send an investigator to verify the leak and the subsequent repair. Two conditions apply: no adjustment is made until consumption returns to the prior year's usage for the same period, and only the billing periods actually affected by the leak are adjusted.
For a facilities manager the operational read is simple. An internal fault is an immediate and unrecoverable cost, so detection speed is worth real money. An external one is recoverable, but only with evidence and only once the meter has settled back down.
The household side of the same machinery is set out on our Denver drain cleaning page.
The Division Charges No Late Fee, and That Is Not the Good News It Sounds Like
Buried in a page of billing questions is a sequence that any commercial property owner in Denver should read once. The Wastewater Management Division does not charge a late fee. What it does instead is set out below, in its own order.
| Stage | What the City states happens |
|---|---|
| Non-payment | No late fee is charged. A service lien may be filed against the property for unpaid sanitary sewer or storm drainage charges. |
| The lien | Filed with the City's Treasury Division, which increases the balance owed by a filing fee and monthly delinquency interest. Liens are paid directly to Treasury. |
| November | Service lien delinquencies unpaid as of November each year are sold at a tax lien sale, and the City Treasurer then files a tax lien against the property. |
| Three years | If the tax lien and interest are not settled within three years from the date the tax lien is filed, title to the property may be lost to a Treasurer's Deed. |
| Meanwhile | During the periods when liens are being processed the online payment portal shuts down for everyone, and the City asks people to wait five business days before trying again. |
A disagreement printed rather than resolved. The same customer service page gives two different Treasury numbers for lien matters, 720-913-9500 in one passage and 720-913-9300 in another. We have not picked one. If you need a lien payoff figure, expect to try both.
Denver is not the only city on this site where a utility bill runs to a property outcome. Our Worcester page traces the equivalent road in Massachusetts, and the two are worth reading together precisely because the mechanisms differ while the destination does not.
Two practical notes for commercial accounts specifically. Commercial accounts are not billed for trash service through the City and County of Denver, which surprises new owners. And from 1 May 2025 the City charges a non-refundable 2.5 per cent service fee on credit and debit card transactions, avoidable by paying online with an electronic check.
Five Commercial Regimes That Share No Subject At All
We have now written this page for five cities, and one of the more surprising results of doing them one at a time is that not one of them regulates the same thing as the others.
| City | What its commercial plumbing regime is actually about |
|---|---|
| Phoenix | Deadlines. Two code chapters running clocks in opposite directions. See our Phoenix commercial plumbing page. |
| San Diego | A whole sector permitted up front, with post-incident investigation of the neighbours. See our San Diego commercial plumbing page. |
| Los Angeles | An exemption that ends the moment you cause a problem. See our Los Angeles commercial plumbing page. |
| Sacramento area | Seven independent ways into one permit regime, two of them trades rather than thresholds. See our Sacramento commercial plumbing page. |
| Denver | Decommissioning. What has to be terminated, verified and filled in before a new permit will issue at all. |
Denver is the only one of the five whose commercial instrument points backwards. The others ask what a business will discharge. Denver asks what the site is still connected to.
One Denver instrument this page deliberately does not build on. The City funds its storm drainage system through a charge computed under Denver Revised Municipal Code 56-112 as a ratio of impervious surface to parcel size, applied in the same manner whether the property is residential, commercial or industrial, and updated from aerial photography, GIS, site plans and site inspections.
The City adds a striking detail. The code does not allow the fee to be based on the quantity of storm water that actually enters the system, because such a method would be too expensive and cumbersome to implement and maintain. We have kept all of that to two short paragraphs because our Detroit page already carries the measured-from-above stormwater charge in full, and repeating it here would produce two versions of one page.
Commercial Plumbing Denver: The Sequencing Questions
Cut offs before demolition, the ten foot rule, the compaction specification for an abandoned device, and why a business is billed and forgiven differently from a household.
Cut off of the sanitary sewer is required prior to demolition of existing structures and before release of the Sewer Use and Drainage Permit for new construction. Wastewater Permitting verifies completion of all required cut offs as part of its review, so this is a gate on the new permit rather than a tidying task at the end of the demolition.
For all projects where shoring, excavation or new building construction will be less than ten feet from the property line or the public main lines. At the discretion of the Wastewater Management plumbing inspector, cut off may be granted at an alternate location, which is worth asking about early on a constrained site.
The City states that a pre-clear may be granted prior to demolition at the inspector’s discretion. It moves the work within the programme rather than removing it, because the cut off must still be completed before any permit for new construction is released.
Its connections must be cut off at the inlet and the outlet immediately outside the device. The device is then either removed, or drained, cleaned and filled with granular material and compacted to 85 per cent dry density, before demolition of existing structures and before the new construction permit is released. Sand and oil interceptors are among the device types the City lists.
Because a buried tank that is abandoned in place leaves a void, and a void under ground that is about to carry a new structure is a settlement problem rather than a drainage one. Specifying granular fill compacted to 85 per cent dry density turns the abandoned device back into ground.
Yes, on both sides of the ledger. Commercial sanitary sewer charges are based on actual metered consumption in each billing period, rather than on a single winter reading held for a year. Because of that the City does not adjust commercial or industrial accounts for inside leaks at all. Outside leaks are adjustable on written request with receipts.
The City states it can send an investigator to verify the leak and the subsequent repair. Two conditions still apply: no adjustment is made until consumption returns to the prior year’s usage for the same period, and only the billing periods affected by the leak are adjusted.
No, and the alternative is more serious. The Division charges no late fee but a service lien may be filed against the property, increasing the balance by a filing fee and monthly delinquency interest. Delinquencies unpaid as of November are sold at a tax lien sale, and if the tax lien and interest are not settled within three years title may be lost to a Treasurer’s Deed.
A fee of $55.00 per inspection is charged for each trip or inspection, and requests must be made no later than 3:30 p.m. on the previous business day. On a demolition with several cut offs, that combination turns inspections into a programme item rather than a line in a fee schedule.
No. The only figures on this page are ones the City publishes itself, with their dates. Commercial work varies too much by building, use, age and scope for a headline number to be anything other than misleading, and this site does not publish prices.
Sources, and the Things Deliberately Left Out
The cut off requirements, the ten foot trigger, the pre-clear discretion, the pretreatment device abandonment specification, the verification step and the inspection fee all come from the City and County of Denver's sewer cut off, repair and device abandonment permit requirements. The commercial billing rules, the adjustment rules, the collection sequence, the storm drainage basis and the card service fee come from the wastewater customer service pages.
Two disagreements and one refusal, all printed rather than tidied. The City gives two different Treasury numbers for lien matters on a single page, and both are printed above. Separately, the permit document lists a right of way construction inspection number that was truncated when we extracted the text, so no partial telephone number appears anywhere on this page. A phone number that is nearly right is worse than none.
Deliberately not covered because other pages own them. Backflow prevention, which does not appear here at all, because our Phoenix commercial plumbing page carries it. Grease interception, which likewise appears nowhere, because our San Diego commercial plumbing page carries the equipment and the programme; where the City's own device list would have named it, we have used its other example instead. Those two allocations were written down before any of the six commercial pages in this series was drafted and are being held for a third batch running.
Also left out: the exemption threshold framing (Los Angeles), the seven permit doors (Sacramento), and the industry breakdown, service menu and maintenance agreement argument, which our national commercial plumbing page owns.
Related Denver pages: sewer line repair, which covers the definition that separates a repair from a reroute, and drain cleaning, which covers the household billing clock. For the wider region see our Colorado service areas, or get in touch.
No office, address, crew or response time of ours is stated for Denver, and we are not claiming to be based in this city.
Everything above was read from published City and County of Denver material at the time of writing. Permit requirements, fees, billing rules and collection practice all change. Nothing here is a permitting determination, a legal opinion or advice about a specific property.