It decides how many people the property can hold, what you can add to the house later, and occasionally whether the deal happens at all.
“Septic” covers several arrangements with different lifespans, different rules and very different running costs.
Private sewage systems in Alberta are permitted and sized for the home they serve, and bedroom count is the usual measure. That is where deals come apart: a permit issued for the original house does not cover the addition, the developed basement, or the two bedrooms someone framed in down there.
Read the permit and then walk the house against it. If the paperwork describes a smaller home than the one you are standing in, you have found the problem before it found you.
A licensed inspector looks at the tank and its baffles, runs the system under load to see how the field actually behaves, checks setbacks from the well, the property line and any watercourse, and locates the field so you know what you must never build on, park on or plant over.
Ask for recent pump-out records too. Replacement cost is site-specific and worth nothing as a general figure, but the shape of the risk is consistent: a field that has failed is a rebuild rather than a repair, and re-siting it has to respect the same setbacks from your well. The rest of the acreage sequence is in our acreage buyer guide.