Northwest Contracting Services
Verified against state license rosterSeptic Tank Pumping
- Phone
- 901-365-6252
- Website
- none
Shelby County
Septic services in Memphis, Tennessee
Operators based within 12 miles of Memphis
Listed by where the business is, not by who it says it serves. Every operator here holds a current state permit, and the address it is placed by comes from the state's own published list — so this is a checkable claim rather than a service-area promise. A Tennessee installer permit is valid statewide, so operators further out can work here too; these are simply the ones closest to you.
Soil and septic suitability around Memphis
The USDA has already rated this ground for exactly one use: a septic tank absorption field. Within 4 miles of Memphis — 32,006 acres across 40 soil map units — it rates 55.3% of the land very limited for that use and 25.7% somewhat limited, and almost none with no limitation at all.
- Very limited · 55.3%
- Somewhat limited · 25.7%
- Not rated · 19%
What the limitation actually is
A rating on its own tells you nothing you can act on. The reasons do, and around Memphis the leading one is slope on 27.8% of the mapped area, followed by depth to saturated zone on 26.6%. In full:
| Limiting feature | Share of area | What it means on site |
|---|---|---|
| Slope | 27.8% | The ground is too steep for a conventional field |
| Depth to saturated zone | 26.6% | A seasonal water table sits too close to the surface |
| Flooding | 25.6% | The site floods often enough to matter |
| Slow water movement | 15.2% | Water moves through the soil too slowly for a drain field to keep up |
| Seepage, bottom layer | 8.8% | The layer beneath the trench is porous enough that effluent could reach groundwater without being filtered |
Shares overlap: most soils here are limited for more than one reason at once, so these do not sum to 81%.
The soils themselves
The named soils and land types that make up most of the ground around Memphis. Memphis alone accounts for 26.3% of it.
| Soil or land type | Share | Drainage | Slope | Depth to bedrock | Septic rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Memphis | 26.3% | Well drained | 2 to 60% | None in profile | Somewhat limited |
| Sharkey | 7.6% | Poorly drained | 0 to 3% | None in profile | Very limited |
| Crevasse | 5.2% | Excessively drained | 0 to 3% | None in profile | Very limited |
| Commerce | 4.1% | Somewhat poorly drained | 0 to 2% | None in profile | Very limited |
| Falaya | 3.7% | Somewhat poorly drained | 0 to 2% | None in profile | Very limited |
“None in profile” means SSURGO records no bedrock or other restrictive layer within the depth it describes, not that none exists.
What that means if you are building or repairing here
Steep ground
A drain field has to be close to level. Effluent is distributed along a trench by gravity or by pump, and on a grade it runs to the low end, overloads it, and surfaces there. Around Memphis enough of the ground is steep that field placement tends to decide house placement rather than the other way round — the usable field area is often a bench or a shoulder some distance from the best building site, and the connection between them is a cost. It is worth knowing which part of a lot is the field before you fall in love with a view.
A seasonal water table
Some of the ground around Memphis carries a water table that rises close to the surface for part of the year and is nowhere to be seen for the rest of it. A field built into saturated soil does not treat effluent and does not drain, and the soil does not have to be wet on the day it is looked at for that to be true — the evidence is in the profile, as mottling and grey colours, which is one of the reasons the work is done by someone trained to read a soil pit rather than by timing water in a hole in August.
Ground that floods
The bottomland around Memphis floods, and a septic system in it fails in the least pleasant way available. Flooding lifts tanks, backfills fields with silt, and pushes untreated effluent to the surface where people walk. The practical consequence is straightforward and it is about siting rather than design: the field goes out of the floodplain, even when that puts it a long way from the house, and a lot whose only buildable ground is bottomland may not support a system at all.
Area of interest: a 4-mile radius around the USGS Geographic Names centre point for Memphis (GNIS 1326388, 35.1495, -90.0490), chosen because five of this state's communities are unincorporated and have no boundary to use, and because the lots that need a septic permit are in the ring around a town rather than inside it. Soil from USDA-NRCS Soil Data Access, SSURGO interpretation “ENG - Septic Tank Absorption Fields”, area-weighted by mapped acreage and by each component's share of its map unit. Survey areas: Crittenden County, Arkansas (2025-09-10), Shelby County, Tennessee (2025-08-29). Retrieved 2026-09-09.
This is a survey, not a soil map for your lot. A permit needs a high-intensity map of the specific parcel, produced by a TDEC-approved soil consultant — see soil map vs perc test.
Permitting in Shelby County
Shelby is one of nine Tennessee contract counties that run their own septic program instead of the state's. County rules apply and, where stricter than the state's, control. See the Shelby County detail →