What a Utility Owns and What You Own

Why this matters

Every supply complaint eventually becomes a question about a line on a drawing: is the fault on the utility's side of the service point or the customer's? That single answer decides who is allowed to touch it, who pays for it, how fast it gets fixed, and whether your shop is quoting a repair or making a phone call. Get it wrong in one direction and you sell a customer work that the utility would have done at no charge on the same day. Get it wrong in the other and you have a tech with a wrench on somebody else's conductors, on the line side of every overcurrent device in the building.

Start with the hazard, because it outranks the ownership question. If a service is arcing, smoking, burning, or has a conductor down or exposed, nobody diagnoses anything. Clear people back from the equipment and from anything metallic bonded to it, keep them clear of the ground around a downed conductor, and call the utility's emergency number, which is a different number from its service line and is answered around the clock. Then call the customer back from a safe distance and tell them what you did. A burning service is a utility emergency in every jurisdiction, and it gets a same-day response that a scheduled request never gets.

The boundary has a name and it is not the meter

The point where the utility's facilities end and the premises wiring begins is called the service point. The NEC defines it in Article 100, and the code's own scope in Article 90, in the edition your authority having jurisdiction has adopted, excludes installations under the exclusive control of an electric utility. That is the structural fact underneath everything else: on the utility's side, the rules you know do not apply, and neither does your authority to work.

Where the service point physically sits is set by the serving utility in its own service rules or tariff, and it genuinely varies. Common patterns:

• On an overhead service, the connection to the service drop at or near the weatherhead is frequently the service point, with the drop belonging to the utility and the service entrance conductors below it belonging to the customer.
• On an underground service, it may be at the transformer secondary terminals, at a handhole or pedestal, or at the property line, and the lateral may belong to either party depending on who paid to install it and what the tariff says.
• On a commercial service with instrument metering, the utility's ownership commonly extends further into the building, and the metering cabinet is sealed.

The meter itself is almost always utility property. The socket it plugs into is commonly the customer's. That combination is why the meter looks like the boundary and is not one: two adjacent pieces of hardware, different owners, and only one party permitted to remove the part that de-energizes the other.

Who commonly owns what

Treat this as the shape of the answer, not the answer. The specific division for a given address is in that utility's service rules, and it is worth reading once for the utilities you work under rather than learning it one dispute at a time.

The part with no overcurrent protection

Line-side work deserves its own paragraph, because the risk is different in kind from the rest of the building.

Downstream of the service disconnect, a fault is cleared by a device you can identify, whose rating you know. On the line side of that disconnect - the meter socket, the service entrance conductors, the lugs on top of the main - there is no overcurrent device between you and the transformer. The available fault current is whatever the transformer and the conductors can deliver, and the clearing time belongs to the utility's upstream protection, which may be slow by design.

That is why line-side work is coordinated with the utility and performed dead, and why it is not the place to make an exception. The general gate applies with no softening: under 29 CFR 1910.333(a)(1) the parts are de-energized before work unless the employer can demonstrate that de-energizing introduces additional or increased hazards or is infeasible. Lock out per 29 CFR 1910.333(b)(2), or 29 CFR 1926.417 on a construction site, and prove dead with the live-dead-live sequence at NFPA 70E-2021, 120.5, with boundaries and PPE per 130.5 and 130.7 in the edition your employer's electrical safety program adopts. Note that 70E's own incident-energy methods have stated limits on the line side of a service, which is another way of saying this is not a place to improvise a PPE decision.

Utility line work itself falls under 29 CFR 1910.269, which covers electric power generation, transmission and distribution. That is a different qualification regime and a different employer's program. It is not a standard a service shop works to; it is the standard that tells you the work belongs to somebody else.

Which side is the fault on

Three field observations move the answer, and none of them require touching anything on the utility's side.

Do the neighbors have it? A symptom shared by adjacent premises fed from the same transformer is upstream of every service point on that transformer. One customer alone with the symptom points inward. This costs one phone call or one knock and it is the highest-yield question on the list.

Does it change with the customer's load? Measure at the service, on the load side of the disconnect, first with the building's normal load and then with a substantial load switched on. Voltage that sags materially with load, then recovers when the load drops, indicates resistance in the path, and the size of the drop compared between measurement points is what localizes it. Two sibling cards cover voltage drop as a diagnostic method and what it costs the equipment; the point here is that the same measurement taken at two points brackets the service point.

Is it on one leg or all of them? A symptom confined to loads on one leg, or a pair of legs behaving oppositely as the building's load shifts, points at a specific conductor or connection rather than at a general supply condition. A separate troubleshooting card in this library follows one of those cases from the failure record all the way back to the connection that caused it.

Worked case: a burned socket, and a job whose calendar is not its labor

Lights dimming when the air handler starts, worse over the past month. Neighbors are clear, so the fault is inward of the transformer. Voltage at the service disconnect sags noticeably when the largest load starts and recovers when it stops, and the sag is present on one leg more than the other. There is discoloration visible at the meter socket through the cover.

That places it at or near the socket, which in this jurisdiction belongs to the customer, behind a meter that belongs to the utility and is sealed. Both facts are true at once, and together they define the job.

What it is not. Not a shop that pulls the meter and gets on with it. The seal is the utility's, the line side is unprotected, and a socket already showing heat damage is exactly the connection most likely to fail in your hands while you are working on it.

What it is. A scheduled disconnect. The utility pulls the meter and de-energizes, the shop replaces the socket and the damaged conductor terminations, the utility inspects where its rules require it, reconnects and re-seals. Depending on the jurisdiction, a permit and an inspection sit between the repair and the reconnection.

The shape to tell the customer up front. The physical work is on the order of two hours. The calendar is several business days, driven by the utility's scheduling and any required inspection, and almost none of that span is work. Customers accept that timeline easily when they hear it before it happens and badly when they discover it on day three. Where the damage is severe enough to be a hazard rather than a defect, the emergency route above applies instead and the timeline collapses to hours, which is a decision made on the condition of the equipment, not on the customer's convenience.

The failure mode. A shop that works this as a normal repair, on the customer's side of a boundary it did not confirm, is doing unauthorized work on the line side of everything with no protection between it and a transformer. The version of that story that ends well still ends with a utility investigating a broken seal.

What changes the answer

If the site is primary metered or has a customer-owned transformer, the service point moves upstream and the customer owns equipment most techs never see, including medium-voltage gear that is outside a service shop's qualification entirely. Confirm before assuming.

If the property is master metered multi-family or a campus, the boundary is at the building or the campus service, and everything past it, including what looks like a service to each unit, is a customer-owned distribution system. The utility will not respond to a fault inside it.

If the utility is a municipal or cooperative rather than an investor-owned utility, the service rules can differ substantially from the neighboring territory, including who owns the lateral. Territory boundaries do not follow city lines and neither do the rules.

Establishing the boundary for a specific address

1. Get the serving utility's service rules or electric service requirements document for the customer class in question. It is published, it is specific about ownership, and reading it once covers every job in that territory.
2. Look for the seal and record what it is on. Sealed equipment is utility-controlled equipment, and the seal marks a boundary more reliably than any assumption about hardware.
3. Call the utility's service planning desk, not the outage line, for an ownership question and write down who told you, and when. Ownership answers vary by address, and having the source on the ticket is what makes the answer reusable.
4. Record the answer on the customer's file, not just on the ticket. The next call at that address should not repeat this work.

References

• NFPA 70 (National Electrical Code), Article 90 scope and the Article 100 definition of service point, in the edition adopted by your authority having jurisdiction
• The serving utility's published electric service requirements or tariff, which is the authority on where the service point sits and who owns each component
• 29 CFR 1910.333(a)(1) and 1910.333(b)(2); 29 CFR 1926.417 for construction; 29 CFR 1910.269 for electric power generation, transmission and distribution work
• NFPA 70E-2021, 120.5, 130.5 and 130.7, as adopted by your employer's electrical safety program
• See related: Working With Utility Companies Reference; The Utility Shutoff and Reconnect Coordination; The Fault That Was Upstream of Everything Anyone Checked