Jacksonville is a big city with a small-town sewer map. Whole neighborhoods inside the consolidated city, mostly on the Northside and the Westside but also in Mandarin and Arlington, were built on septic tanks in sandy soil, and a lot of them are still there. Septic tanks in that soil, with a water table that rises in a wet summer and drains into the tributaries of the St. Johns, are the reason the City and JEA have been paying to replace them with sewer since the City Council approved the Septic Tank Phase Out program on August 23, 2016. If you own a house on septic in Duval, here is what the program does, whether your street is in it, and what to do when the tank fails and the program is nowhere near you.

What has been converted

The program works one project area at a time, and it is slow because each one is a full construction project: new sewer mains in the street, a lateral to each house, and new water service where the houses were on wells. JEA’s program page carries the current status of every project; as of its March 2026 update:

Biltmore C, finished in 2022.
Beverly Hills West, finished in 2023.
Beverly Hills East, finished in 2024.
Christobel (about $41 million): construction began in spring 2026 after a preconstruction meeting in March.
Riverview: passed the 70 percent sign-up threshold in November 2025 and is in design; construction comes after design and bidding.

JEA is explicit that physical connections to its system come several years after a neighborhood qualifies.

If your street is in one of those, the connection either happened already or is on the schedule. If it is not, the program has a longer list of candidate areas and a process for getting on it.

How a neighborhood qualifies

The program does not convert a house; it converts a designated project area, and the owners there have to want it. Under the program rules, at least 70 percent of the property owners in the area have to sign up and complete the documentation before the project moves into design, bidding and construction. That threshold exists because every house on the street gets a lateral and a connection whether or not its tank is failing, and because the sewer main only makes sense if most of the houses use it. Meeting it starts the process; it does not set a connection date.

When a neighborhood is approved, the program installs the water and sewer service on private property, up to the house, and abandons the old septic tank in place: pumped out, the bottom broken, and filled with sand so it cannot collapse later. The homeowner does not pay for the lateral, the connection, or the abandonment under the program. What stays with the homeowner is the monthly JEA sewer bill afterward, and any plumbing inside the house that turns out to need work when it is connected to a pressurized system for the first time, which is what a plumbing contractor gets called for.

What the program does not do

It does not repair or replace a failing septic tank. If your tank has failed and your street is not in construction, the tank is your problem this year, not the program’s.
It does not reach St. Johns, Clay or Nassau; it is a City of Jacksonville and JEA program for Duval. The other counties have their own utilities and, where they extend sewer, their own rules.
It does not connect a single house that happens to sit near a JEA main. That is a private connection, and it is the next section.

A private connection

A house next to an existing JEA sewer main can connect on its own, outside any program, and some do it when a tank fails on a lot too small or too wet for a new drainfield. There are three pieces: the lateral from the house to the main (a plumbing contractor, permitted through JaxEPICS, dug or bored across the yard), the abandonment of the tank (pumped, holed and filled, by a licensed septic contractor under DEP rules), and JEA’s own connection and capacity fees, which JEA states and the contractor does not control. Ask for a written quote that separates the three so you can see what is plumbing and what is the utility.

When the tank fails and there is no sewer

Most septic houses in Duval, and nearly all of them in the other three counties, are not getting sewer soon. When the tank or the drainfield fails, the path is a repair or a replacement under a permit from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which took over septic permitting from the Health Department on July 1, 2021. Two rules matter on the First Coast:

The Lower St. Johns basin. The river has a basin management action plan (BMAP) for nutrients, and under the 2023 law (HB 1379), a new septic system on a lot smaller than one acre inside a BMAP area has to be an enhanced nutrient-reducing system rather than a conventional tank and drainfield. That covers most of the small-lot septic neighborhoods in the city and along the river in Clay and St. Johns.
The water table. A drainfield that floods every September is not failing so much as drowning. A mounded drainfield, or an enhanced system, is the design answer; a plumbing contractor can tell you whether the backups are the tank or the house drains, which is the first thing to settle before anyone quotes a new system.

The signs that the septic system rather than the plumbing is the problem: the lowest fixtures in the house back up when it rains, the ground over the tank or the drainfield is wet or sunken, and the smell is outside rather than at one drain. A plumbing contractor puts a camera in the house side and tells you where the line stops; the septic contractor takes it from the tank outward. The sewer line and septic-to-sewer page covers the camera inspection, the private connection and the repair options.

What to say when you call

Whether the house is on septic or sewer, and whether your street is in the phase-out (JEA’s program map answers that); which fixtures back up and whether it follows the rain; when the tank was last pumped; and whether there is a cleanout in the yard. Ask for the septic contractor’s DEP registration if the tank is the job.

Septic-to-sewer in Jacksonville: what the JEA phase-out does