The public sidewalk in front of your house is almost always yours to clear, on a deadline your city sets and your neighbor two miles away does not share.
Work is carried out by an independent snow removal operator under their own company name and insurance. This site arranges the introduction and clears nothing itself.
| City | Deadline | Penalty |
|---|---|---|
| Birmingham | 12 hours after snowfall ceases; overnight snow by 6:00 p.m. the following day | City clears it and charges the owner a minimum of $100 |
| Troy | 24 hours after the event ends, for snow over 2 inches plus all ice | Not published |
| Novi | 48 hours after accumulation of 2 inches or more ends; ice sanded or salted immediately | Not published |
| Farmington Hills | “The City does not plow or salt sidewalks” — entirely the owner’s, once snowfall ends | Not published |
Birmingham’s is the strictest deadline found anywhere in the county, and the only confirmed dollar figure. Troy exempts single and two-family homes on non-major streets from side and rear-yard sidewalks abutting its listed thoroughfares — Adams, Big Beaver, Coolidge, Crooks, Maple, Rochester, Square Lake and the rest. Novi requires corner lots to clear the sidewalk ramps as well, and excludes rear-lot sidewalks. The ordinances, with sections.
A corner lot has public sidewalk on two sides rather than one, and in most of these ordinances the curb ramps at the intersection come with it. That is commonly three to four times the shoveling of the house mid-block, and no equipment shortcut removes it — the ramps in particular are hand work.
This is the entire reason every rate card in this county carries a corner-lot surcharge, and why it is assessed after review rather than quoted blind. Declare it at the time of quote and the number is honest; leave it out and it arrives later.
Residential sidewalk work is bundled into a seasonal contract and never itemized, so there is no published residential rate to quote. Commercial sidewalk work is itemized, and the City of Novi’s 2024 contract is public record:
| Surface | Per linear foot per push |
|---|---|
| City sidewalks, 48-inch minimum clearing width | $0.042 |
| City pathways, 72-inch minimum | $0.042 |
| Park sidewalks and pathways | $0.036 |
| Areas subject to extreme drifting | $0.550 |
The drifting rate is thirteen times the standard rate. That is the clearest published evidence in this market that exposure, not length, is what makes a walk expensive. If your association’s sidewalk runs along an open field, a retention basin or the windward side of a lake, expect the quote to reflect it — and expect an operator who has never seen it in February to underprice it.
For two decades a Michigan slip-and-fall claim over visible ice went nowhere, because Lugo v. Ameritech Corp. (2001) made an open and obvious hazard a question of no duty at all. On July 28, 2023 the Michigan Supreme Court overruled it in Kandil-Elsayed v. F & E Oil, Inc. and folded open-and-obvious into breach and comparative fault instead.
What that means for a sidewalk: the question is now what the property owner actually did — whether the walk was cleared, whether it was salted, whether anyone was warned. That is a question answered by records, which is why timestamped photos and service logs have become part of what a commercial or association buyer is paying for. The cases in detail.
Describe the property in a sentence and the quote comes back as a number rather than a range.
Call (248) 494-7362 Get a Seasonal Quote
Oakland County