A message system, and it does not own a line
Each state's dig law sets up one place to tell. Virginia's is called the Underground Utility Damage Prevention Act, in Title 56 of the Code of Virginia. North Carolina's title adds a word, Safety, and sits in Chapter 87 of the General Statutes. Both do the same structural thing: instead of hunting down every company with something buried under your yard, you make one report and the center hands it on.
That is the whole job. The center owns no pipe and no cable, marks nothing, inspects nothing and decides nothing about your project. It costs nothing to use in either state. Virginia 811 takes locate requests on 811 or 1-800-552-7001, North Carolina 811 on 811 or 1-800-632-4949, and both run a web route as well.
Worth keeping straight for a different reason too. In Virginia the body that enforces the dig law is the State Corporation Commission, not the center. North Carolina splits it again: reports go to the Underground Damage Prevention Review Board, and where that board recommends a penalty it is the Utilities Commission that issues the order. Either way the outfit you call is not the outfit that would ever hold anybody to it, which is the opposite of how a building department works.
The words on a ticket, since none of them mean quite what they sound like
A locate request, which North Carolina's statute calls a notice, is what everyone on a job site calls a ticket. It is a report, not a permission. An operator, as these acts use the word, is the utility whose line is in the ground, not the person running the machine. An excavator is not a machine at all: it is whoever makes or begins the digging, which can be a crew, a homeowner or a utility.
A positive response is what an operator posts back through the center's own system to say that it has marked its line, that it has nothing in that area, or that work may begin. And a working day is a defined term with a hard edge rather than a figure of speech: each act writes out its own version, both drop the weekend, both drop their own state's legal holidays, and Virginia's also drops the national ones.
Those five words carry most of the weight in both acts. What order they run in on a real pour, and what each clock is counted from, is a different question from what they mean, and it is not one to settle out of a glossary.
The duty attaches to moving dirt, not to the size of the job
Neither act asks how big the job is, what it costs, or whether a building official has ever heard of it. What sets it off is ground being opened. North Carolina hangs the requirement at G.S. 87-122(a) on whoever is responsible for the dig, to be met before that work starts. Virginia's version is written wider still, reaching whatever person makes or begins an excavation at all. The words in the statute are no person, not no contractor.
Excavate is a defined term in both acts and both definitions read as a long run of verbs. Grading and scraping are on both lists, which is the part that surprises people, because stripping a pad for a driveway feels like site work rather than digging. Neither definition carries a depth floor or a square footage floor.
Setting up our trailer line pump on the drive is not excavation. The trench underneath the pour was, and the report for it sits where each statute puts it: in North Carolina on whoever is responsible for the excavation, in Virginia on any person who makes or begins one, subject to each state's exemptions. We place the locate request for the digging we do.
Four things 811 is not
It is not a permit. A ticket clears nothing at a building department, a planning office or a road authority, and none of those three clear the digging either. Separate systems that happen to land in the same week.
It is not a survey. Virginia's own wording is marking the approximate location of a line, and approximate is the statute's word rather than a hedge we added to it. Paint on the grass is not a property corner and it is not a depth reading.
It is not complete. In Virginia a ticket counts as notice to the operators that are members of the center, and it stops where that operator's ownership stops. What sits on the far side of that boundary on any one property, and who can be hired to go find it, is a separate question from what the three digit number does.
And it is not somebody else's problem by default. Each act carves out a narrow bit of homeowner work, the two carve-outs are not the same size, and neither one is as wide as people assume. Before you rent a machine and open a trench yourself, place a ticket, which is free in both states. A rented trencher or mini excavator takes a Virginia homeowner outside that state's carve-out, which reaches only hand digging, and North Carolina's lets an owner skip only the notice, and with a machine only on their own single-family property where the dig stays clear of every operator's right-of-way, easement and permitted use, which is hard to confirm from the yard. Sort out who is cutting each trench, and so who places each ticket, while footings or a foundation are still being planned rather than on the morning the trucks roll.