Category 3 cleanup after a sewer backup, toilet overflow or contaminated runoff: extraction, removal, disinfection and documented drying.
Fastest: call (833) 490-5225. Or send this and we call you back.
Sewage cleanup is the Category 3 job: grossly contaminated water from a sewer backup, a toilet overflow or storm runoff. A crew extracts it, takes out porous materials that cannot be disinfected, cleans every hard surface and dries what stays. Phoenix Water Damage Restoration covers Phoenix and Maricopa County, and the phone is answered day and night.
Keep people and pets out of the room, and stop using water anywhere in the building — no sinks, no laundry, no flushing — until the line is clear. If water has reached an outlet or an appliance, leave the power to that area off unless you can get to the panel without standing in it.
A backup in a slab-on-grade house comes up wherever the drain line is lowest: a shower pan, a tub, a laundry floor drain or a hall-bath toilet. From there it runs across tile and under baseboards, and there is no lower level for it to drain away into, so a couple of inches covers a surprising amount of floor.
What sets this apart from a clean-water loss is not the volume, it is the contamination. Technicians work in protective equipment, treat soaked porous materials as waste rather than as something to dry, disinfect the hard surfaces that stay, and only then start drying. Clearing the blocked line itself is licensed plumbing work.
Treat sewage as contaminated: no bare hands, no household vacuum, and no walking it through the rest of the building on your shoes. Keep children and pets out, run no water until the line is clear, and throw out food, toothbrushes and anything else the water splashed.
On the call you are told to stop running water in the building and keep the room shut off. The crew establishes what the water is and whether a plumber is already on the way to clear the line.
Technicians work in gloves, boots, suits and respiratory protection. Doorways are sheeted off and air is kept moving out of the room, so odor and aerosols do not travel through the rest of the building.
Contaminated water comes out with extraction units. Carpet, pad, wet drywall below the water line and anything porous that absorbed it are cut out and bagged, because disinfecting a sponge does not make it clean.
Tile, concrete, framing and other hard surfaces are cleaned and then treated with an antimicrobial. Cabinet bases, toe kicks and the gap under floating floors are opened so they can be reached properly.
Only after cleaning do air movers and dehumidifiers go in, with daily readings until materials hit a documented dry goal. You receive the readings, the photographs and a list of everything discarded.
Sewage work costs more than clean water for one reason: much of what the water touched leaves the building instead of being dried. The price follows the wet area, how many porous materials have to go, and whether contents need cleaning off site.
| Job | Typical range | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Category 3 (black water) mitigation (per sq ft) | $7.00–$10.00 | The per-square-foot range cost guides for the Phoenix area report for grossly contaminated water |
| Sewage backup cleanup, typical house | $3,500–$12,000+ | Depends on how many rooms the water reached and what came out |
| Wet carpet pad removal and disposal (per sq ft) | $0.75–$2.00 | In a Category 3 area both pad and carpet are waste, not drying candidates |
| Flood cut: remove wet drywall 2–4 ft up (per linear ft of wall) | $3–$8 | Standard where contaminated water wicked up a wall |
| Antimicrobial application (per sq ft) | $0.50–$2.00 | Applied after cleaning, not instead of it |
| Contents pack-out, cleaning and storage | $1,000–$6,000+ | For furniture and belongings that can be cleaned off site |
Every line here is a working figure for Maricopa County in 2026, put together to give you a sense of scale: a sewage loss is only priced properly once someone has seen how far the water went. The emergency stage is approved before work begins, the plumber bills the line repair, and rebuilding is quoted later.
Category 3 is grossly contaminated water: sewage, toilet backflow, or floodwater and street runoff. It carries bacteria and other organisms, so the standard answer is removal rather than drying. Porous materials that absorbed it — pad, drywall, particleboard, insulation — are cut out, and whatever stays is cleaned and disinfected.
The ANSI/IICRC S500 standard, which the restoration trade uses as its reference for water damage work, is where those categories and the cleaning steps come from. It is published by a trade organization and carries no force of law, so asking a company how it applies the standard is a fair question to put before work starts.
Water also gets worse while it sits. Clean water standing in a closed Valley room in July, or in a hot garage, can slide into Category 2 or Category 3 territory on its own, which is another reason nobody waits for a written quote before extraction begins.
Hard, non-porous materials usually can: tile, the concrete slab, metal, solid cabinet frames and structural framing are cleaned and disinfected in place. Carpet pad, soaked drywall, particleboard, laminate, insulation and upholstered furniture that absorbed sewage are not worth keeping and leave as waste.
Tile over a slab is the one piece of good news in a Valley backup, because a glazed surface cleans. The mortar bed under it and the open edges are the problem, so a technician checks whether moisture has travelled sideways beneath the tile before deciding what stays.
Keep a list and photographs of everything discarded, written down as it goes out rather than from memory afterwards. That inventory does more for a claim than anything else you can do in the first hour.
Often not without an endorsement. Standard homeowners policies commonly exclude water that backs up through sewers and drains unless a water-backup endorsement was added, and flood is a separate policy again. What is covered is your insurer's call under the policy you hold, so read it or ask your agent.
That is worth checking before the monsoon rather than during it. The endorsement is usually modest next to what a backup across a tiled floor costs to put right, and it is the kind of thing nobody reads until the week they need it.
Whatever the answer turns out to be, document early: photographs before anything moves, the drying log the crew keeps, and the discard list signed off at the end.
Cleaning and removal usually take a day or two in a single room, and drying runs a few days after that, because a slab and a mortar bed give up moisture slowly. A whole-house backup, or one that sat while a plumber worked on the line, takes longer than that.
The crew re-checks readings every day and keeps going until materials reach the dry goal, rather than packing up after a set number of days. Equipment coming out early is the most common reason a cleaned room still smells a month later.
Where odor hangs on after the readings are met, the next question is whether moisture is still trapped somewhere nobody opened. The mold inspection page covers how that gets answered.
The line from the building to the city main is the usual culprit in older neighborhoods, where clay or cast-iron pipe has often had decades for roots to find a joint. A plumber clears or cameras the line; the crew deals with everything the backup touched indoors.
A blocked toilet or a stoppage under a hall bath pushes water across tile and out into the hall. The volume is often small, which is exactly why these get mopped and forgotten while the contamination stays in the baseboard and the bottom few inches of drywall.
During the monsoon, storm drains and sewers can both be overloaded at the same time, and runoff that has crossed streets, alleys and washes counts as Category 3 as well. Water that comes in at a garage door or a patio slider is covered on the flood damage cleanup page.
The age of the pipe decides much of this. Central and west Valley streets — Coronado's 1920s bungalows, Encanto, Alhambra, Maryvale and the older stretches of Tempe and Glendale — often still run on their original drain lines with mature street trees overhead, and roots at a joint are a classic cause of a backup.
The monsoon adds a second pattern between mid-June and the end of September. One short, violent storm can overload storm drains and sewers at the same moment, and low-lying streets and alleys deliver contaminated runoff to a garage door. The guide on what to do first after a monsoon flood runs through the hours after one of those nights.
Slab construction shapes the cleanup itself. With no basement or crawl space to catch a backup, waste water spreads across the finished floor of the room it came up in. On tile that means checking the bed beneath it; on laminate or wood-look plank it usually means the floor comes up.
Tell us what's happening and we'll tell you honestly whether it's a quick fix, and what sewage cleanup should cost.
Not sure if you're covered? Check your ZIP code.
Cleanup and drying after storm runoff, wash overflow or irrigation water enters a Phoenix garage or slab-level room.
Containment, removal of affected porous materials, HEPA cleaning and documented drying, with the water source found and fixed first.
Air movers, LGR dehumidifiers and daily meter readings that take a slab, tile bed, wall or ceiling to a documented dry goal.
Round-the-clock extraction from slab-floor homes in Phoenix, before water travels under tile, laminate and baseboard.
After a monsoon storm, make the building safe first: keep out of standing water that has reached outlets or appliances, do not walk or drive through running water, and photograph everything before it moves.
An Arizona homeowners policy usually covers water damage that is sudden and accidental, such as a supply line that splits or a water heater that fails.
A cup or two on a tile floor, with gloves, a disinfectant and a bag for the rags, is reasonable. Anything that reached carpet, drywall, a cabinet base or a wood-look floor is not, because the contamination goes where a mop cannot. Call (833) 490-5225 rather than mopping and hoping.
No. Clearing, cameraing or replacing a sewer line is licensed plumbing work, and a plumber should be on the way before the crew's work means much. The crew handles the water, the contaminated materials, the disinfection and the drying.
Yes, once the source material is gone and the structure is dry. Odor that survives a finished drying log nearly always means something porous was left in place, or moisture is still sitting under tile or behind a cabinet, so it gets chased rather than masked.
It is handled the same way. Runoff from streets, alleys and washes has crossed the ground and whatever was on it, so it is treated as grossly contaminated even though it is not sewage. The same rules apply to what is cleaned and what is discarded.
It is a genuine risk, which is why drying follows cleaning instead of waiting. EPA guidance is to dry water-damaged areas and materials within 24 to 48 hours, and sewage-related mold is on EPA's list of jobs to hand to someone who does it for a living.
That depends which rooms are affected and whether the kitchen and a bathroom are still usable. The crew will say plainly what is sealed off and for roughly how long. If the only bathroom is out of action, most people arrange to stay elsewhere until the line is clear.