Most plumbing problems can wait. A few cannot, and the ones that cannot are not the loudest or the most annoying. The question that sorts them is not how bad it looks. It is whether it is still moving, and whether you can stop it.
Leave the building on foot, take everyone with you, and call 911 and your gas utility from somewhere else.
This is the one item on the page with no judgment attached to it and no second option. The Texas gas utilities publish their own instructions, word for word, and we reproduce them whole rather than in summary on our gas-line page. Go and read them there, because the item a summary drops is the item somebody needed.
Everything below assumes gas is not involved.
A leak you have shut off is Monday’s problem. A leak you cannot shut off is tonight’s, no matter how small it looks.
This is the whole decision, and it is more useful than any list of scenarios, because it works on the one you have rather than the ones we thought of.
Water that is running into your house and will not stop is doing damage on a clock. Water that has stopped is doing none. So the first move on anything wet is not to judge the severity. It is to reach for the valve: the fixture shutoff under the sink, or the main for the house. TDI puts the same instruction first, and adds the part people find out too late: “Know how to turn the water off at the main valve or at the valves under your sinks and near appliances.”
Know how, in advance. At two in the morning is not when you want to be learning where yours is, and we show you where to look.
If the valve works and the water stops, you have converted an emergency into an appointment. Call in the morning, at a normal rate, with the damage already bounded.
If the valve does not work, or you cannot reach it, or the water is coming from somewhere upstream of it, you are in the other category and the rest of this page is about that.
Your insurer can decline a claim on the grounds that you did not act, and Texas’s own regulator says so.
The Texas Department of Insurance published this in January 2026, in one sentence: “Your insurer may deny your claim if you don’t protect your property.”
That reframes the cost of waiting. The question is not only what the extra hours of water will ruin. It is that your own inaction is a thing an adjuster can point at.
There is a second clock, on telling them. TDI again: “You usually must report water damage that was hidden from view within days after you first see it.” Note what that is about. Not damage that happened days ago. Damage you have just discovered, that had been out of sight. The moment you find it, something starts running.
And the general instruction, which costs nothing: “Tell your company as soon as possible.”
What a policy is likely to cover and what it is not is a separate question with a real answer, and our page on frozen and burst pipes has it rather than this page.
Gas, water you cannot stop, sewage in the house, water near electricity, and no water at all in a freeze. Everything else is a weekday job.
Gas, as above. Nothing else on this page outranks it.
Water you cannot stop. Covered above. This is the category, not an example of it.
Sewage coming back into the house. Wastewater on the floor is not dirty water, and both the first steps and the question of who pays are their own page: sewage backing up into the house. What makes it urgent rather than disgusting is that every fixture you run adds to it, and the clock on a claim against a city can be as short as 90 days in Texas.
Water near electricity. A ceiling filling above a light fitting, or water reaching a panel or an outlet, is not a plumbing judgment any more. Kill the power to that area if you can do it safely and call an electrician or the fire service.
No water at all in the house, in a freeze. In winter that is often a frozen pipe rather than a supply problem, and it means a split you have not found yet, and our freeze page covers it.
Everything else is a weekday job: a dripping tap, one slow drain, a running toilet, a water heater that has gone cold, low pressure. Annoying is not the same as urgent. A cold shower costs you nothing but comfort; an hour of unstopped water costs you a floor.
If the water is coming from the street side of your meter, you are calling your utility, not a plumber, and some of them answer around the clock.
The boundary is the meter in the two Texas utilities we have read on it, and we quote both. On the utility’s side of that line, the repair is theirs.
San Antonio publishes its after-hours position plainly. SAWS tells customers that for a leak that appears to come from its water or sewer system, “please call 210-704-SAWS (7297) and press ‘1’, any time of day or night”, and that an unscheduled outage is the same number, “any time of day or night”.
We are not publishing a table of after-hours numbers for every Texas city, because we could read only one utility’s own instruction on 25 September 2026. Austin’s and Fort Worth’s pages did not serve us, and we are not going to assemble a life-safety directory out of guesses or a third-party listing site. Find your own utility’s emergency number now, while nothing is wrong, and put it in your phone next to the gas one.
We do not publish a rate, because nobody who is not selling the call-out publishes one.
We do not publish an after-hours rate or a multiplier. Nobody who is not selling the call-out publishes one, so anything we printed would be a competitor’s marketing repeated with our name on it.
What you can weigh without a number is the other side of it. If the water is stopped, waiting until morning costs you the wait. If the water is not stopped, the hours are buying damage, and TDI’s two sentences above are the reason that is not only a repair bill.
Whoever you call, at whatever hour, still has to hold the license the work needs. Here is how to check a Texas plumber’s license, screen by screen, and it takes about a minute, which you have while they are driving.
Every figure on this page comes from one of the documents below, each published by the body that sets, measures or administers the thing it describes. We record the document’s own date and the date we read it, because published pages change without notice.
| Source | Document date | We read it |
|---|---|---|
| Texas Department of Insurance — When are water damage and mold covered by insurance? | the page carries a ‘Last updated’ label with no value in the served HTML; treat as undated | 2026-09-25 |
| Texas Department of Insurance — Unexpected indoor waterfall? Home or renters insurance might help. (Texas Insurance Blog) | dated on the post as January 29, 2026 | 2026-09-25 |
| San Antonio Water System — Report a Problem | undated utility page | 2026-09-25 |
Tell us the job once — we send it to up to 3 license-verified plumbers. Free, no spam, delete your request anytime.
Secure form. Sent over an encrypted connection to up to 3 license-verified plumbers. Never sold to data brokers, and you can have your request deleted anytime.