Cost Guide
How much does drain cleaning cost in Washington, DC?
By All Purpose Anytime Services LLC
A sink in your rowhouse is draining slow, or water is coming up through the basement floor drain, and you want a number before anyone shows up. Angi's figures for Washington, DC put most drain cleaning between $182 and $390, with $282 as the average, and they run from about $125 for a toilet up to $900 for a main sewer line. Which end you land on depends mostly on which of those two jobs you have.
One fixture or the main
A slow bathroom sink in a Petworth rowhouse is that sink's own trap and branch. It's a short job on a small machine. Water rising in the basement floor drain when someone upstairs empties the tub is the house main, and that takes the big machine and a lot more cable.
The $125 end of Angi's spread is the first kind of job. The $900 end is a main sewer line.
Why older DC houses cost more to clear
A lot of the older attached houses in the inner DC neighborhoods have no cleanout you can get to. Without one we go in through a pulled toilet or down the roof vent, and somebody pays for that time. Putting a cleanout in while we're there costs once and saves that work on every call after.
Many of those houses still drain through cast iron stacks. Decades of scale narrow that pipe from the inside, and a cutter that's too aggressive can go through a thin wall, so we size the head to the pipe.
Then there's the question of whose pipe it is. You usually own the lateral out to the connection in the street, and DC Water holds the public side. In rowhouse blocks the line can cross a shared alley as well. If the blockage turns out to be in the public sewer, that's for DC Water to deal with, and it shouldn't turn into a plumber's bill for you.
About those hourly rates
Angi also lists DC plumbers at $100 to $300 per visit, or $75 to $200 per hour. Hourly billing is where a rowhouse with no cleanout gets expensive, because every minute spent pulling a toilet to reach the line lands on your bill. We price the job. How long it takes us to get in is our problem.
What you get from us
Coming out, finding which line is blocked and writing up the price costs you nothing, and there's no trip charge. You have the number before the machine comes off the truck. Evenings until seven and weekends cost the same as a weekday morning.
If the same line has blocked more than twice, it's time for the camera, and the camera gets its own price before we run it. A belly, a broken joint or a root mass will keep closing the line however often it's cleared. When the camera finds one of those, we price the repair and stop selling you clearings.
Our work carries a warranty of 60 to 90 days, depending on the job. For more on cable against jetting, read our longer guide on what moves a drain cleaning price.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure above comes from one page, Angi's cost guide for drain cleaning in Washington, DC, which we read in October 2026. Angi doesn't say what year its data was collected. We copied the numbers as printed, without rounding them or blending them with anything else, and none of them are our prices.
We also opened a ContractorPlus page for DC drain cleaning. It showed a total of $0.00, which is an empty template, so we left it out. What we say about our own process comes from our FAQ, our standards page and our drain cleaning guide.
Drain backing up in the District?
Say which drain, whether the basement floor drain is involved, and roughly when the house was built. The price is set before the cable goes in.
We take insurance jobs. Financing may also be available for qualifying projects. Ask when you call.