Ohio's dig law changed in June. This is what your crew works under now.

At least two working days before you commence excavation, and the day you give notice does not count toward that. On the other end, the notice cannot be given more than 16 calendar days before you start. If you are used to Michigan, that is a genuinely different rhythm from 72 hours and 14 calendar days, and the notice math is the easiest thing for a crew working both states to get wrong.

The statute does not state an explicit shelf life for a ticket. OHIO811 guidance treats a ticket as expired if excavation has not commenced within 16 calendar days, which is the same 16 that caps how early you can give notice. Treat the 16 as guidance you should plan around rather than as a number written into the law, and confirm it with OHIO811 for the job in front of you.

No. There is no fixed long-life project ticket in Ohio. Large or phased work is handled as a complex project under ORC 3781.28(E), where the excavator and the facility owners agree on a marking schedule and work through it segment by segment. That changes how you plan. In Michigan a project ticket gives you a 180-day clock to bore against. In Ohio the schedule is an agreement, so it is worth building it around real production rates and keeping the locators in the loop. On our fiber build we shared job links with them so they could see what was already bored and how fast the crews were moving.

The tolerance zone is the facility's width plus 18 inches on each side. Inside it, excavation has to be done in a careful, prudent, and nondestructive manner, which in practice means hand tools, hydro excavation, or air vacuum rather than a bucket. Ohio also requires a spotter watching whenever powered equipment approaches the zone, and when you bore parallel to a facility inside the zone, that facility has to be exposed every 100 feet. Michigan crews get caught by the spotter requirement, because Michigan has nothing like it.

Code 006 is High Profile or Critical Facility. The facility owner requests to be present for the excavation under ORC 3781.31(A), and the excavator must provide at least one full working day of notice before commencing. It is worth flagging separately because it does not read like a stop and it is not a normal clearance either. It is a schedule change. A crew that treats a 006 as a marked ticket arrives a day early and stands next to a facility nobody is allowed to work near yet.

001 is No Conflict and 002 is Marked, and those two are clearances for that owner. 003 means the excavator cancelled the request. 004 is locator coordination and 005 is facility owner coordination, both meaning the locate is not complete and somebody will contact you. 006 is the high profile or critical facility code with its extra working day of notice. 007 is used with complex project notifications only, 008 is a design notification, and 009 means the owner considers the excavation completed. 999 means no response was posted before the legal start date. Confirm every affected owner has responded, and that the marks are visible on the ground, before you break ground.

Ohio has a conditional exemption for a property owner digging on their own qualifying property, but it is narrower than people assume. It does not cover work near easements, right-of-way, or a known service, and it disappears the moment a contractor is hired to do the work. If you are the contractor, the notification obligation is yours. Michigan takes the opposite approach and exempts nobody, so a crew working both states should not carry an Ohio assumption north.

No. You keep filing through OHIO811 the way you do today. Quick811 is the layer after the ticket exists: response and revision history in readable chronological order, aging tickets surfaced before a crew is dispatched, geo-stamped photos filed to the right dig area, and one shared status view for the office and the field. On a build running 25,000 to 30,000 feet a week with 50 to 60 tickets open, that is the difference between planning tomorrow and guessing at it.