Methodology

How we check what is on this site

The closest direct competitor to this site publishes its cost tables under one line: “cost figures are estimates synthesized from public market data using AI research”. No sample size, no sources, no date, no way to check any of it.

This page exists to be the opposite of that sentence.

The rule the site is built around

A page on this site may not state a figure that does not exist, with its source, in a single file called wdfacts.py. That file will not accept a value without the document it came from and the date that document was read. Where a figure cannot be sourced, the page renders a visible {{TODO}} marker and the release check fails. (Those braces are written as HTML entities here precisely so that this sentence does not trip the check it is describing.)

That is a mechanical constraint rather than an editorial intention, which is the point. It is the difference between meaning to be accurate and being unable to publish otherwise.

What was read, and when

Every source below was opened and read on September 20, 2026. The list is generated from the same file the pages draw their figures from, so it cannot drift out of step with what the site actually cites.

1. Insurance Bureau of Canada — Water Damage and Flood Protection — What a standard Canadian home policy covers and excludes; which water perils are optional endorsements.
2. Insurance Bureau of Canada — Flooding and Insurance — Sewer backup and overland flood cover, and what the flood endorsement responds to.
3. Insurance Bureau of Canada — Severe Weather Centre — National insured catastrophe losses, used only as national context.
4. ANSI/IICRC S500 (2021), fifth edition — The standard a restoration scope of work is written against.
5. ANSI/IICRC S500 Consensus Body position statement, March 16, 2026 — Verbatim definitions of Category 3, inspection and preliminary determination, and the ruling that weather-driven water is not automatically Category 3.
6. Health Canada — Guide to addressing moisture and mould indoors — Mould area thresholds, the 48-hour growth window, and the position on air testing.
7. City of Toronto — Basement Flooding Protection Subsidy Program — Subsidy amounts and conditions, for work completed on or after November 12, 2025.
8. City of Toronto — The Sewers on the Street — Combined sewer share, sanitary sewer length and connection count.
9. City of Mississauga — Basement Flooding Prevention Rebate — Rebate amounts, the two-option structure and eligibility.
10. Region of Peel — Sanitary backwater valve rebate — The second, separate rebate a Mississauga homeowner can claim.
11. City of Ottawa — Residential Protective Plumbing Program — Rebate amounts under By-law No. 2025-89.
12. City of Ottawa — Residential Protective Plumbing FAQ (PDF) — When backwater valves became mandatory in new build, and where the lateral responsibility line falls.
13. City of Hamilton — Protective Plumbing Program — Grant amounts, eligibility, and the published fee table for five pre-qualified contractors.
14. ProLine Restoration — published severity pricing — One Ontario company's own price list, reproduced with attribution and used nowhere as an average.
15. Insurance Bureau of Canada — How to file a home insurance claim — The claim sequence, the duty to limit further damage, the 30-day proof of loss, and how settlements are paid.
16. Insurance Bureau of Canada — Types of home insurance coverage — The four levels of home cover, additional living expenses, and which water coverages are optional add-ons.

What counts as a source here

In descending order of weight:

1. A government or standards body publishing its own rule. City subsidy amounts from the city, mould thresholds from Health Canada, the water categories from the consensus body that maintains the standard.
2. A municipality publishing prices it negotiated with named contractors. Hamilton does this, and it is the only genuinely measured installed price anywhere in this subject.
3. A trade association describing its own members’ product. The Insurance Bureau of Canada on what a standard policy covers.
4. A named company’s own published price list — reproduced with that company named, every time, and never averaged into anything.

What is not a source: another website’s summary, an industry blog, an unattributed figure, or anything a language model produced without a document behind it.

What we have not measured, and therefore do not publish

This is the list the rest of the category does not print. Every item here is something a reader might reasonably expect to find on a site like this one, and every item is absent for the same reason.

• A national or provincial average restoration cost. We have not run a price survey. Every band on this site is attributed to the company that published it, by name, on the page where it appears.
• Prices by city. The one installed price we can show — Hamilton's pre-qualified contractor table — covers one device in one city. We will not interpolate it into four other cities and call the result a city price.
• Insurance premiums, deductibles or endorsement prices. These are set per policy and per insurer. We describe what the endorsements are and what IBC says they do; we do not quote what yours will cost.
• Claim approval rates, settlement times or adjuster behaviour. We can describe the documents a restorer's own standard tells them to produce. We have no data on what any insurer does with them.
• Anything about the companies that receive an enquiry from this site. We do not rate, rank, score or vet them, and this site says so on every page rather than implying otherwise.

An absent number is more useful than an invented one, because an invented one cannot be distinguished from a real one by the person reading it.

What we could not reach

Where a publisher’s own site could not be read from the machine this site was built on, that is recorded here rather than quietly papered over with a reproduction.

• ottawa.ca. The City of Ottawa's own pages sit behind a bot-protection layer that returned a challenge page rather than content to our build host. The Residential Protective Plumbing amounts were read from the City's own FAQ PDF on documents.ottawa.ca, which was reachable, and cross-checked against the City's indexed page text. The by-law that sets them is linked so you can check it yourself.

How borrowed figures are handled

One Ontario restoration company publishes severity price bands on its own website. Those bands appear on this site, and every single time they appear, the company is named in the same sentence and the figures are labelled as that company’s own published list.

They are never described as an average, a market rate, a typical cost, or what Canadians pay. Turning one company’s price list into “the average cost of water damage restoration in Canada” takes one sentence and destroys the only thing that makes it worth publishing.

Why every figure carries a date

Because these numbers move, and the failure mode is silent. Toronto’s subsidy amounts changed for work completed on or after 12 November 2025. Ottawa’s were reset by a by-law in force from 1 April 2025. A page written in 2024 and never revisited is not obviously wrong to a reader — it is simply wrong.

So the date a source was read appears next to the figure, not only in a footer, and the site is rebuilt from the sources rather than edited in place.

Who writes this

The site is written and maintained by its editorial team. There is no named individual expert on this site, because there is no individual whose professional credential stands behind what is published here — and inventing a reviewer, or borrowing a credential we do not hold, would be a worse dishonesty than the one we are criticising.

What stands behind the pages is the sources, each one linked, each one dated. If a figure here is wrong, it is checkable in one click, and a correction sent to contact@waterdamagequotesca.com will be acted on.

Independence

This site is paid a fixed advertising fee for each enquiry, agreed in advance. It does not change with the size of the job, with whether any work is booked, with whether a claim is paid, or with which company receives the enquiry. No company has paid for a mention, and no company is mentioned. The five contractors named on the Hamilton page are named because the City of Hamilton publishes their fees, and they are not endorsed, ranked or recommended here.

The full statement of what this site is, and is not, is linked in the footer of every page.

Last reviewed September 20, 2026.