How long can I leave the plumber found tree roots in my sewer line before it becomes dangerous?
For the tree, watch, indefinitely. For the plumbing, days if you have an active backup, because sewage in a finished basement is a health and insurance problem that worsens hourly. Between backups, roots re-occupy a rodded line on a fairly predictable cycle; if your interval is shortening year over year, the pipe defect is enlarging, and you are buying rodding on a schedule that will eventually cost more than lining the pipe once.
Whether it can still be saved
The tree almost always stays, and this is the entry where removal is most often the wrong purchase. Killing the tree does not repair a broken pipe, the dead roots stay in the line until they are mechanically cut out, and the next tree or shrub within reach will exploit the same joint. The durable fixes are all plumbing: cured-in-place lining, pipe bursting, or open-cut replacement of the failed run in PVC. Rodding and foaming root treatments are maintenance, not repair — each buys a year or two. Remove the tree only if it is a poor tree on its own merits, or if an open-cut trench will sever so much of its root plate that it will not be stable afterward, which is a real and routinely missed reason to take it down as part of the dig.
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