What should a drain and sewer technician job description include? (free template)

Duties and responsibilities.

Write the description before you advertise the job.

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, essential functions are the fundamental duties of the position, not the marginal ones, and a written description prepared before advertising or interviewing is evidence of what is essential — a function can be essential because the job exists to perform it, because few employees are available to share it, or because it is highly specialised.

For a stoppage hire, that same list doubles as your screening rubric.

Write the day as it runs on your drain truck: arriving at a backed-up fixture or sewer line, diagnosing where the blockage sits, clearing it with the right machine, camera-inspecting and locating the line, telling the customer whether the line is clogged or damaged, quoting any repair on the spot, cleaning up and documenting the ticket.

Duties to draw from: clearing stoppages in fixture drains, sewers and main lines with cable machines and jetters; camera inspection and locating; the repair-and-replace work your trucks carry, if any; explaining findings and options to customers; recording every ticket in your field software; keeping truck stock and equipment straight.

What you will still train is everything shop-specific — your pricing, your truck stock, your software and your documentation standard.

Split the work the way your trucks run.

Residential or commercial.

Drain clearing only, or clearing plus camera, locating and repair.

Emergency and on-call participation, if the role carries them.

A commercial drain and sewer job description that names the building types and line sizes is a different posting from a residential one, so put the split in the title line as well as the duties list — a construction-side plumber reading it should know immediately whether this truck clears lines or replaces them.

Then state the physical demands plainly: you may list requirements such as lifting a set weight, working in crawl spaces or climbing ladders, and ask whether the applicant can meet them.

Licence and registration requirements — worded as your state issues them.

A job title and a licence are different lines, and for drain work the map is unusually patchy: seven states — Florida, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New York and Wyoming — have no state plumber licence at all, so plumbers there are licensed by cities or counties, or through an industry board.

Where a state does address drain clearing, the approaches differ: Texas registers drain workers with its plumbing board — a drain cleaner-restricted registrant clears obstructions in sewer and drain lines through existing code-approved openings under a responsible master plumber, and the next rung, the drain cleaner registration, requires at least 4,000 of those supervised hours and adds installing cleanouts and removing and resetting P-traps to clear obstructions — while West Virginia's plumber-certification FAQ puts unclogging sinks among what is not plumbing work requiring a plumber licence.

So never write a generic "must hold a state plumbing licence" line.

Name the exact class or registration your state — or city or county, where licensing is local — requires for the drain and sewer work you sell, worded the way the issuing board words it, with the board named.

If you have not looked it up yet, keep the line bracketed until you have; the template below carries the placeholder.

If a strong hire can qualify after you hire them, say so: "or ability to obtain within [N] days" is an honest line.

Name any certification the job actually requires exactly as the issuing body does, too.

One in this trade: NASSCO runs PACP, LACP and MACP pipeline, lateral and manhole assessment classes, plus ITCP-CIPP inspector training — those are classes, not licences: evidence of inspection training you can ask about, never a substitute for whatever your board requires.

Verify before you post.

Licence and registration rules change, and the states our research checked each handle drain licensing differently — treat the examples above as illustrations rather than a complete map.

The fuller licence picture, including how to verify a candidate's credential, is in our guide to how to hire a drain and sewer technician.

Confirm the exact registration or class for your jobs with your state plumbing board — or with the city and county where licensing is local — before the posting runs.

Pay and pay-plan disclosure.

Post a real range — the low, the high, and how the plan works.

As of September 2026, rules confirmed in our research to require the range in the posting itself include California (employers with 15 or more employees, Labor Code 432.3), Colorado (compensation, a benefits description, and how and when to apply, under the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, per the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment), Washington State (15 or more, wage scale or salary range — or a fixed wage — plus a general description of benefits), the District of Columbia (minimum and maximum projected salary or hourly pay in every listing, plus healthcare benefits disclosed before the first interview), Maryland (wage range and a general description of benefits and other compensation), Maine (10 or more employees, from July 29, 2026, per the Maine Department of Labor), Massachusetts (employers with 25 or more in the state, since October 29, 2025), Minnesota (30 or more), Illinois (15 or more — a hyperlink to a public page with the pay scale and benefits satisfies the rule), New Jersey (10 or more employees over 20 calendar weeks), New York (4 or more), Vermont (5 or more) and Virginia (from July 1, 2026).

Delaware's law is signed but takes effect two years after enactment — September 26, 2027 — and will not apply to employers with 25 or fewer employees.

Connecticut and Rhode Island do not require the range in the posting: Connecticut requires the wage range on request or by the time of an offer, and Rhode Island requires it on request and before pay is discussed.

Our research did not confirm posting requirements in Hawaii or Nevada, and city ordinances were outside this check, so verify each state — and each city — where the job is located.

The state-by-state rules are in our guide to pay transparency laws by state.

If the job is paid on commission, say so in the posting: New York's labor department requires postings to clearly state when a position is commission-based, and Vermont goes the other way — an ad for a job paid on commission, in whole or in part, need only disclose that fact and may skip the range.

Name the pay plan itself — hourly, flat rate, commission, salary, or a mix — and how overtime and after-hours call-outs are paid, in the posting rather than at the offer.

One rule does not change with the label: a flat-rate (per-job) tech is still owed FLSA overtime, computed on total job pay divided by hours actually worked, plus half-time for each hour over 40, unless an exemption applies.

On the number itself: BLS publishes no drain-technician wage — its one plumbing occupation, Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters (SOC 47-2152), covers the trade at every level and the pipe trades alongside it, with no drain-versus-plumber split; O*NET's sample job titles for the occupation include Drain Technician, but the wage tables have no drain-only line.

Within that whole occupation, the median wage was $63,800 a year ($30.67 an hour) in May 2025, and the middle half earned between $50,190 (25th percentile) and $85,110 (75th percentile) — figures from the OEWS release published May 15, 2026, which include commissions and production bonuses but exclude overtime pay.

Benchmark the range against the whole-trade tables on our drain technician salary page and the competing offers in your own metro rather than against a "drain technician average" of unknown origin.

Schedule, on-call, truck and equipment.

These lines describe the day more concretely than the duties list does, so put each in the posting rather than leaving it for the interview.

On-call is normal in this trade — BLS describes most plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters as working full time, including nights and weekends, with plumbers often on call for emergencies — so say yours out loud: give the working days and hours, the honest seasonal shape of the work, and whether there is a rotation, how often it lands on one tech, and how after-hours call-outs are paid — with that pay treatment in the pay section, not nowhere.

Truck and equipment: say whether the truck is company-provided and whether it goes home with the tech, and what the company supplies — cable machines, the jetter, the camera and locating gear, fuel card, tablet — against what the tech carries, such as hand tools.

If you fund registrations, licence renewals or training classes, name it.

Read your posting the way a busy candidate would: fast, looking for a reason to stop.

The fastest reasons to stop are all fixable in the copy.

No pay range.

A posting that hides the number reads as a number worth hiding.

In the states that require the range in the posting, leaving it out is also a legal exposure, not just a conversion problem.

A licence line your state does not issue.

A generic "state plumbing licence required" tells a working drain tech you have not checked your own market — seven states leave plumber licensing to cities, counties or an industry board, Texas registers drain workers with its plumbing board, and West Virginia puts unclogging sinks outside its plumbing-work definition.

Name the exact class or registration and the issuing board, or state plainly that you will help the right candidate obtain it.

A title that hides the split.

A bare "Drain tech wanted" does not tell a candidate whether the truck clears lines or also repairs and replaces them, or works homes or commercial buildings.

Put the split in the title line.

On-call discovered after the offer.

If the rotation is real, the posting says so — a hire who accepts the rotation in the ad has accepted it knowingly.

Age-coded wording.

Terms like "young", "age 25 to 35", "recent college graduate", "boy" or "girl" violate age-discrimination rules unless a statutory exception applies, and help-wanted ads may not show a preference for, or discourage, applicants based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age 40 or older, disability or genetic information.

Describe the work, not the person you imagine doing it.

Referral-only hiring.

Recruiting mainly by word of mouth through a mostly one-group workforce can itself be discriminatory if almost all hires come from that group.

Post the job publicly.

Small-shop assumptions.

Federal EEO laws cover private employers with 15 or more employees and the age law those with 20 or more, but state laws often cover smaller shops, so check yours.

Federal contractors must include the equal-consideration tagline in job ads; many other employers add an equal-opportunity line voluntarily.

Screening rules you have not checked.

Background-check, ban-the-box and paid-sick-leave rules were not verified state by state in our research — confirm the rules where you hire before you screen.

Eligibility verification, before the first day.

While applications come in, check whether your state mandates E-Verify.

Florida requires private employers with 25 or more employees to use it for new hires, and North Carolina requires the same of employers with 25 or more employees in the state.

South Carolina requires every private employer to verify every new employee within three business days, and Arizona, Alabama and Mississippi require every employer to use it too.

The thresholds reported for Georgia, Tennessee and Utah were not verified in our research, so check your state's current rule directly.

Federal contractors covered by the FAR E-Verify clause must enroll within 30 calendar days of contract award.

With the copy fixed, put the posting where drain techs actually look: browse drain technician jobs to see what candidates see on the board.

When you are ready to run the full process, our guide to how to hire a drain and sewer technician covers sourcing, screening, pay and the first 90 days, and how to write a job ad for HVAC technicians covers the ad-writing mechanics.

The day-to-day definition of the role is our drain and sewer technician career guide.

This page is employer career information, not legal advice. Confirm licence and registration requirements with the issuing board — the state, or the city and county where licensing is local — pay-posting rules with each state labor department, and employment-law questions with an employment attorney.