Home Cost Kit

French Drain Installation Cost Calculator

French drain installation cost runs about $24 per foot for a yard drain and $56 per foot against a foundation — a 100 ft run is roughly $2,400 or $5,600 depending on which you mean. Three different jobs share this name, and nearly all the money is in the trench rather than the pipe, so the depth the drain has to reach decides the figure.

Estimate the cost for your home

Estimated cost to install a French drain

$2,566

typical · range $1,908 to $3,224 · 100 ft · about $26 per foot

Labour priced at national wages. Enter a ZIP code to price it for your area. 42% of this figure comes from modelled material and restoration prices — each line shows its own uncertainty.

Priced from fema.gov Aug 2026bls.gov Aug 2026how every line is sourced

The one input that changes the answer for you.

How far the drain has to run to reach somewhere the water can go.

Which kind of drain

Three very different jobs share this name, and the price per foot between them differs by more than double. This is the question that decides your figure.

Shallow, in open ground, to move surface water away. The cheapest of the three by a wide margin.

Gravity to a lower point on the property. Cheapest, and needs the slope to exist.

Grates at low spots that pond, feeding straight into the drain.

1 / 4

The figure above is already calculated. Each step just makes it more yours, and you can stop at any of them.

Cost breakdown by line item
Line itemQtyCostSource
Machine excavationlength ÷ 25 ft/hour for yard drains, ÷ 8 for footing drains (modelled)4hour$452–$680sourced
Perforated drainage pipefull run length100linear ft$140–$360estimated±44%
Washed drainage stone, deliveredtrench volume × 0.6 fill ÷ 27 × 1.4 tons/CY7ton$196–$476estimated±42%
Geotextile filter fabriclength × trench width × 3 to line the trench300sq ft$33–$84estimated±44%
Catch basins and gratesone per surface inlet1each$55–$190estimated±55%
Daylight outlet and headwall1 where the outlet daylights1lot$90–$300estimated±54%
Labourer: lay pipe, place stone, backfill6 h + 0.14 h/ft, doubled to 0.28 on interior drains (modelled)20hour$880–$945sourced
Topsoil and seed over the trenchlength × trench width × 2.2 for access, on outdoor drains221sq ft$62–$188estimated±50%
Total$1,908–$3,224±26%

Where these numbers come from

Labour rates by area
BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, for excavating machine operators, labourers and plumbers in your metropolitan area. Retrieved 2026-08-20. Benefit load from BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation.
Excavation equipment
Machine hours are priced from the FEMA, Schedule of Equipment Rates 2025 (in effect for declarations on or after 1 July 2025), the published federal reimbursement rates that include fuel, maintenance and depreciation but not the operator, who is priced separately above. Retrieved 2026-08-21.
Where the water is supposed to end up
A drain only works if it has somewhere to discharge, and the cheapest answer is usually your own ground. EPA, Soak Up the Rain sets out the case for handling rainwater on the lot it falls on. What it will not do is tell you whether your soil drains, which is the question a dry well lives or dies on — USGS Water Science School, Infiltration and the water cycle explains why clay and sand behave so differently. Both retrieved 2026-08-22.
One outlet that is not allowed
Connecting a drain to the sanitary sewer is prohibited in most jurisdictions, and it is not a formality: clean groundwater entering a foul sewer is one of the recognised causes of the overflows described by the EPA, Sanitary Sewer Overflows (SSOs). A contractor who proposes it is proposing something that can be ordered disconnected at your expense. Retrieved 2026-08-22.
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 2026-08-22.

What this figure does not include

Permit fees
Many jurisdictions regulate where collected water may be discharged, and some require a permit. Fees vary with no national source and are excluded rather than averaged.
Waterproofing the foundation wall
An exterior footing drain is often installed at the same time as a membrane or coating on the wall, because the wall is already exposed. That is separate work and is priced by the square foot of wall, not the foot of trench.
Rock, roots and buried utilities
Any of them changes excavation cost several times over and none is knowable from a postcode. Have the utilities located before anyone digs; that call is free in most of the country.
Landscaping and hard surfaces
This covers topsoil and seed over the trench. Replacing a driveway, patio, planting or irrigation that the trench crossed is not included.
Whether you need one at all
Water in a basement is often a grading or gutter problem, and both are far cheaper to fix. A drain that treats a symptom will keep treating it.

Questions people actually ask

What is the average cost for a 100 ft French drain?

It depends entirely on which of the three drains you mean, which is why the calculator asks first. A 100 ft yard drain in open ground lands near $2,400, around $24 per foot. The same length as an exterior footing drain, which means excavating to the base of the foundation, is closer to $5,600, and an interior drain that involves breaking and repouring the basement slab is about the same. The name is identical; the job is not.

How much does a 200 ft French drain cost?

Roughly $4,200 for a yard drain and about $10,400 for an exterior footing run. Doubling the length does not quite double the price, because mobilisation, the outlet and getting the machine to site are paid once either way. In our model the per-foot figure falls by around a tenth between 100 and 200 feet. It is worth asking any contractor quoting a flat per-foot rate whether their number already accounts for that, because a flat rate over a long run usually favours them.

Are French drains worth the money?

Where water is genuinely arriving below grade and has nowhere to go, a drain is the correct answer and there is no cheap substitute. Where the cause is a downspout discharging against the wall, ground that slopes towards the house, or a blocked gutter, a drain is an expensive way to manage a problem that a morning of work would remove. The honest test is what changes when it rains hard for an hour. Fix grading and gutters first; they cost a fraction and they are the reason a surprising number of drains were never needed.

Is it expensive to put in a French drain?

Compared with most drainage work, yes, and the reason is that almost none of the money is in the pipe. Perforated pipe and fabric are among the cheapest materials on any job. The cost is the trench: the machine, the operator, the gravel by the ton, and putting the surface back afterwards. That is also why the same drain costs so differently in open lawn and against a foundation, and why anything you can do to shorten the run saves more than choosing a cheaper pipe.

Taken from Google’s “people also ask” results for this search on 22 August 2026, not invented.

Other cost calculators

The first of these are the jobs closest to this one — the ones that turn up in the same quote, or instead of it.