Foundation Repair Cost Calculator

Where these numbers come from

Look up your own soil before anybody looks at your house

USDA NRCS, Web Soil Survey is free and covers your address. USDA states that “NRCS has soil maps and data available online for more than 95 percent of the nation’s counties” and that the site is “The site is updated and maintained online as the single authoritative source of soil survey information”. What you are looking for is the shrink-swell potential of the soil under your house. Expansive clay — soil that swells when wet and shrinks when dry, moving the ground under a footing by inches across a season — is the dominant cause of residential foundation movement in the United States, and it is concentrated in known regions rather than spread evenly. ⚠️ USDA also notes that “Onsite investigation is needed in some cases”: the map is where the conversation starts, not where it ends. Retrieved 2026-08-23.

The cheapest line on this page, and the only independent one

A structural engineer’s report is $750 on this model against a job of $13,131 — under 6% of the total. Without it the job is $12,381, which is the wrong way to save money here. An engineer takes floor elevations, reads the crack pattern, and writes down what is happening and whether it is still happening. Then they leave. Everybody else who will look at your foundation is preparing a quote while they look, and that is not a criticism of them — it is a structural fact about who you are getting advice from. On the highest-priced search term this site has measured, it is the single most useful thing we can tell you.

Length gives the count, depth gives the price

30 feet of affected wall at roughly 7-foot centres is 6 piers, and that number does not change. What changes is what each one costs: $1,965 at eight feet and $2,700 at twenty-five, taking the job from $12,543 to $16,953. ⚠️ And the depth is genuinely unknown in advance — a push pier is driven until it refuses, and refusal is wherever the competent stratum happens to be. Two houses on one street can differ by fifteen feet. That is why the useful question is not the price per pier but the depth it assumes. The spacing here is trade practice rather than a standard; the real spacing comes from whoever calculates the load carried by each section.

Excavating below a footing is regulated work

Installing a pier means digging a pit against — and below — the bottom of your foundation. 29 CFR 1926 Subpart P, Excavations (govinfo.gov) addresses this directly. It provides that “Where the stability of adjoining buildings, walls, or other structures is endangered by excavation operations, support systems such as shoring, bracing, or underpinning shall be provided to ensure the stability of such structures for the protection of employees”, and separately that “Excavation below the level of the base or footing of any foundation or retaining wall that could be reasonably expected to pose a hazard to employees shall not be permitted except when: (i) A support system, such as underpinning, is provided to ensure the safety of employees and the stability of the structure”. Read in the regulation on govinfo, retrieved 2026-08-23. The practical version: this is not a job for whoever is cheapest and has no written method for the excavation. If the work goes inside the house, cutting the floor slab also brings OSHA 1926.1153, Respirable crystalline silica into play — the control is wet cutting and containment, and a saw running dry inside your house tells you what the rest of the job will be like. Retrieved 2026-08-23.

Push piers or helical piers

$13,131 against $14,931 here — helical piers run around 15 to 20% more. The difference that matters is not the price. A push pier is pressed in hydraulically using the weight of the house as the reaction, so it needs a heavy enough structure to push against and its capacity is inferred from refusal. A helical pier is screwed in while installing torque is measured, and torque correlates with capacity — so it can be documented at the moment it goes in rather than afterwards. That documentation is what the premium buys, and it is worth asking for in writing. Helicals are also the answer under lighter structures: porches, additions and chimneys that cannot provide the reaction a push pier needs.

What none of these repairs fixes

The water. Most residential foundation movement is a moisture story — clay that swells and shrinks with the seasons, or soil washed out from under a slab — and piers, straps and foam all address the symptom. USGS Water Science School, Groundwater decline and depletion covers what happens when the water in the ground changes, retrieved 2026-08-23. The unglamorous work is guttering that discharges well away from the house, ground that falls away from it rather than toward it, and drainage that actually goes somewhere — priced on our basement waterproofing and French drain pages, and a fraction of anything here. ⚠️ Particularly for a bowing basement wall: the soil pressure that bent it is still there after the bracing goes in.

Labour rates by area, and what this page will not do

BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, for construction labourers, equipment operators and cement masons, adjusted to your metropolitan area. Retrieved 2026-08-20. Benefit load from BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation. ⚠️ This page prices work. It does not diagnose anything and it cannot: a crack that means nothing in one house means a great deal in another, and nobody can tell which from a description. Everything here exists to let you read a quote, not to replace the person who should be writing it.

Material prices

Modelled estimates, not sourced prices. No public, machine-readable source of US residential material prices exists, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Each line carries its own uncertainty band. How we estimate them.

Contractor overhead and profit applied at 33–43% over direct cost. Data last reviewed 2026-08-23.