A windstorm took down a limb across the street from us a few winters ago, and it clipped the cable running from the pole to my neighbor's house on the way through. He called the utility, they came out within a couple of hours, and he assumed that was that. It wasn't. The utility reconnected their wire and left, because the piece the limb had actually bent — the pipe and the fitting where that wire lands on the house — belonged to him, and fixing it was a job for an electrician he'd have to hire himself. He was baffled, and honestly so was I. Somewhere along that short run of cable there's a line nobody puts a sign on, and which side of it a problem falls on decides who shows up and who pays.
The invisible line between two systems
Everything electrical at your house belongs to one of two owners. The utility owns and maintains the network side, all the way up to a specific handoff. You own the premises wiring from that handoff inward — and "own" here means you're responsible for its condition, its repair, and the licensed electrician who does the repairing. The confusing part is that the handoff happens partway up the wall of your own house, in the middle of what looks to any reasonable person like one continuous piece of equipment.
The National Electrical Code, published by the NFPA as NFPA 70, has a name for that handoff: the service point, defined as the point of connection between the facilities of the serving utility and the premises wiring. Article 230 of the Code then covers services — the conductors and equipment on your side of that connection, from there to your service equipment. What the Code deliberately doesn't do is tell your utility where to put the service point. That's the utility's call, spelled out in its own service requirements, which is why the exact boundary shifts a little from one region to the next.
Following the path on an overhead service
If your power arrives on a wire through the air, the sequence is easy to trace from the driveway. There's a pole with a transformer somewhere near it. From the pole, a cable — the service drop — crosses to your house and lands at a bracket bolted to the wall or to a metal pipe standing above the roofline. That pipe is the service mast, the bracket is the point of attachment, and the fitting capping the pipe where the wires enter is the weatherhead. Below the weatherhead, cable runs down to the meter, and from the meter it continues inside to your main panel.
Utilities publish their own version of this split, and they're specific about it. Con Edison, for instance, tells customers plainly that it is responsible for the service wire from the street and for the electric meter itself, while the customer is responsible for the weatherhead, the service bracket and the hardware running from the connection point down the side of the house, the drip loop, the entrance cable, and the meter enclosure. Your utility's numbers and terminology may differ slightly, but the shape is nearly always the same: their wire, your attachment hardware, their meter, your box that the meter plugs into, and then everything inward is unambiguously yours.
Underground services move the handoff, not the logic
Newer neighborhoods often have no visible drop at all, because the power arrives underground. The wire from the transformer to your house is then called a service lateral, and it typically runs through conduit to a meter enclosure mounted on an outside wall. The ownership logic doesn't change — it just relocates. The utility owns the buried conductors and usually the pipe they run in up to a defined point, you own the portion of conduit and the enclosure on your side of it, and the meter inside remains theirs.
What does change is the failure mode. Underground services are wonderfully immune to falling limbs and largely immune to wind, which is much of the appeal. In exchange, when something does go wrong it tends to involve excavation, and the one thing to know as a homeowner is that any digging on your property — fence posts, a new tree, a mailbox — starts with a call to 811, the national before-you-dig number, which is free everywhere and legally required in most states. Hitting a service lateral with a post hole digger is a genuinely dangerous way to learn where it ran.
Two problems that look identical and aren't
Storm season is when this boundary stops being trivia. A wire down in the yard, a wire arcing at the pole, or a whole street dark is a utility problem and a utility phone call, full stop. A mast pulled loose from the wall, a bent weatherhead, a cracked meter socket, or a scorched entrance cable is your equipment, and it needs a licensed electrician — though the utility still has to be involved, because the power has to be cut and the meter pulled before anyone can work on it safely. That's why my neighbor's repair took two visits: one to reconnect their wire, one for an electrician to rebuild his mast, with a utility disconnect scheduled in between.
Either way, the first rule with anything at ground level is distance. A downed conductor cannot be judged by looking at it, so the safe assumption is that every one of them is live. ESFI notes that the ground around a downed line can be energized as far as 35 feet away, and that if someone is in contact with a line you should not touch them — call 911 and wait for people with the right equipment. Nothing about a homeowner's ownership of the mast implies any business getting near an energized service conductor.
Finding your own boundary on a calm afternoon
This is worth sorting out before you ever need it, and it takes about ten minutes. Stand back and find where power reaches your house: a wire from a pole, or a pipe coming out of the ground near your meter. Follow it visually to the meter and note the pieces in between. Then look up your utility's website for a page on service responsibility — most publish a diagram, often titled something like "what's ours and what's yours" — and match it against what you're seeing. Save the outage number in your phone while you're there.
While you're outside, it's a good moment to notice condition rather than just layout. Rust streaking down from the weatherhead, a mast that's visibly out of plumb, a meter socket with a cracked cover or a gap where water can enter, cable with brittle or split jacket near the meter, or vegetation growing into any of it are all worth a professional look. None of those are emergencies on a clear day. All of them are cheaper to fix on a clear day than during the storm that finds them, and they're the same items an inspector flags when checking over an older home's electrical.
What this is actually good for
Knowing where the line falls doesn't change any wiring in your house, but it changes how you handle the two or three days per decade when something at the service goes wrong. It tells you which call to make first, whether an outage is yours to fix or theirs, and why an electrician may be waiting on the utility rather than dragging their feet. It also tells you which pieces of hardware bolted to your wall you're quietly responsible for maintaining — the ones nobody mentions at closing, and the ones a windstorm finds without much effort. Take the ten-minute walk, save both phone numbers, and let a licensed electrician handle anything that turns out to sit on your side of that dashed line.