Lining companies line everything. Repipe crews rip out everything. Neither answer is always right, and here is how to tell which is yours.
That is the uncomfortable truth of this trade. Call a trenchless company and they will find a way to line your pipe. Call a repipe crew and they will find a reason to tear out your floor. Both of them are convinced they are right. Both of them are sometimes wrong.
Neither method is better than the other. They solve different conditions. Using the wrong one costs you money, or it costs you the whole fix a year later. So here is the version without a thumb on the scale.
Cured-in-place pipe lining pulls an epoxy-saturated liner through your existing pipe and cures it hard. It forms a new pipe inside the old one. No floor demolition. The old cast iron becomes a mold for the new liner and stays where it is.
A typical whole-home lining job runs in the neighborhood of 17 thousand dollars on a 2,000 square foot home, though it varies with the layout and how much access there is. We keep current numbers in the cost guide.
Replacement means opening the slab, digging out the old cast iron, and laying new PVC. It is invasive. Concrete gets cut, waste lines get rerouted in fresh pipe, and the floor gets closed back up. Whole-home replacement in this area generally lands somewhere between 30 and 50 thousand dollars depending on depth, layout, and how much of the run is affected.
Lining works when the host pipe still has structure. The liner needs something to cure against. If the old pipe can hold its shape while the epoxy sets, lining gives you a new pipe without touching your floor.
Good candidates:
Lining a pipe that has no floor is throwing money away. If the bottom of the pipe is channeled out, there is nothing for the liner to form against, and you get a liner that sags into the gap or fails at the missing section. See the channeling explainer for why so many pipes down here are exactly this case.
Lining also cannot fix a pipe that has collapsed, lost its slope, or bellied badly. If the pipe geometry is gone, lining preserves a broken shape.
Replacement is the answer when the pipe is too far gone to save.
Ripping out a slab on a pipe that could have been lined is the mirror-image mistake. It is more money, more disruption, and more risk to your foundation and finishes than the pipe actually required. A repipe crew that quotes replacement without running a camera first is guessing, and you are paying for the guess.
Here is the part no lining-only or repipe-only company will tell you: the camera has to come first, and the person reading it cannot have already decided the answer.
We camera the line before anyone talks price. Then we tell you what the pipe actually is. If it lines, we quote lining. If it needs replacement, we quote replacement. On a lot of homes it is both, because part of the run is intact and part of it is channeled, and the honest fix is to line what can be lined and open the floor only where it truly has to come up.
That mixed answer is the one you almost never get from a company that only owns one kind of equipment. A crew that only lines cannot sell you a dig. A crew that only digs cannot sell you a liner. We would rather quote you both and let the pipe decide.
A pre-1975 home in the Cape Coral area gets a lining quote for the whole house and a replacement quote for the whole house, thousands of dollars apart, and the homeowner assumes one company is honest and one is scamming. Usually neither is lying. Each one is just selling the only tool it has. The camera almost always shows the real answer is a mix, and it comes in under both whole-house quotes.
Upload the report or a photo of the pipe. We will read it and tell you what it actually means for your pipes - repair or replace, honestly, no site visit needed. We respond within one business day.