Foundation Repair Cost Calculator

The scope of work, which is the whole answer

Every band below is Fixr's, from its foundation repair page as published 27 January 2026. They are printed together because printed together they make the point: the bands barely overlap, so a single average across them describes nothing. Two of them are priced per pier rather than per project, which is marked, because that is the unit the trade actually sells them in.

The best-sourced figure on this page is $1,000–$3,000 per pier: Fixr, This Old House and HomeAdvisor all publish that band identically, which is rarer than it sounds in home-cost data. The worst-sourced is the pier count, and it is not badly-sourced so much as unpublished — see below.

Nobody publishes how many piers your house needs

This is the single largest gap in the public data on foundation repair, and it is worth being explicit about because it is also the number that decides your bill. Five publishers were read for this page on 11 September 2026 and not one of them prints a typical pier count for a house of any size. The closest anything comes is This Old House observing that a 2,000 sq ft home “might need twice as many support piers” as a 1,000 sq ft one — a ratio with no starting value, which cannot be turned into a count.

What can be derived, and is shown here as derivation rather than as a published figure: Fixr's stated underpinning ceiling of $40,000 against its own $1,000–$3,000 per-pier band implies somewhere between thirteen and forty piers at the top of the market. Its $5,000–$15,000 tieback project figure against $1,500–$2,000 per anchor implies three to eight anchors. Those two divisions are the only quantitative anchors that exist in the published record.

The real count comes off a structural engineer's report, at $300–$2,000. That is also the reason the report is worth buying before you take piering quotes: the contractor telling you how many piers you need is selling piers.

Foundation type is a second view of the same bill, not a surcharge

Fixr publishes cost by foundation type as well as by repair type: a slab at $1,000–$10,000, pier and beam at $2,000–$15,000, a crawl space at $2,500–$12,000 and a full basement at $2,500–$25,000. Reading those as additive to the scope figure is the easiest way to over-budget this page by several thousand dollars, so this calculator never does it — “slab repairs cost $1,000–$10,000” already contains “epoxy injection on a slab”. The scope table does the arithmetic; the type band is used as a cross-check, and when the two fail to overlap the results say so and leave your number alone.

One disagreement is worth flagging because it is a direct contradiction rather than a rounding gap. Fixr calls the full basement the most expensive type, “because they sit the deepest in the ground”, and HomeAdvisor's prose agrees. NerdWallet puts basements at $2,300–$7,600, among the cheapest. The reconciliation is that NerdWallet's figure traces back to basement waterproofing, a narrower scope than whole-basement repair, so the two are not measuring the same job. Fixr's table is the one used here. Separately, This Old House declines to publish a type table at all, quoting a contractor that repair costs average “about the same for all foundation types, except for pier and beam and stone foundations” — which is itself an argument for treating type as a cross-check rather than a price driver.

Why there is no regional multiplier on this page

Foundation repair obviously costs more in some markets than others. This calculator will not tell you how much more, and the reason is that nobody publishes it. Every one of the five publishers read on 11 September 2026 handles location qualitatively and then stops:

• This Old House gets closest to naming a region and still attaches no number: “If your home sits on expansive clay soils, like in parts of Texas, you're more likely to need costly solutions like foundational piering.” It also says urban labour rates run higher while rural rates run lower but carry travel charges.
• NerdWallet: “Labor and material costs vary across the U.S.” No figure.
• Fixr discusses soil at length — loam cheapest, clay dearest, sand between — and attaches no dollars to any of it, and names no region.
• Bob Vila and HomeAdvisor both list location as a cost factor with no table.

Inventing a multiplier to fill that gap would make the output look more precise while making it less true, which is the failure mode this site exists to avoid. So the calculator asks about soil instead — the one thing the publishers actually discuss when asked about place — and soil steers which repairs it flags as likely while changing no figure whatsoever.

What one square foot of foundation costs, and why it is useless alone

Fixr publishes foundation repair at $1.50–$12 per square foot of footprint, and multiplying it out reproduces its published footprint table row for row — the table below is theirs, not a derivation of ours. Look at the spread before you use it: the top of the band is eight times the bottom. That is not an estimate of a job, it is the entire distribution of foundation work expressed per square foot, which is precisely why the scope question comes first on this page.

The calculator prints this band beside your scope figure as context — is this a cheap job on a big house, or an expensive one on a small house? — and never as the estimate. Above 2,500 sq ft, the largest row Fixr prints, it extends Fixr's own stated rate rather than a published row, and it says so on screen.

The three tiers a foundation problem falls into

NerdWallet publishes the cleanest severity ladder anyone does, and it is more useful than an average because it tells you which of three quite different situations you are in. The calculator classifies your scope against it and applies no multiplier from it.

What this calculator assumes, stated plainly

• The arithmetic is Fixr's, and its page is dated January 2026. Every dollar figure computed here comes from Fixr's foundation repair cost tables, read directly on 11 September 2026, with a last-updated date of 27 January 2026. That is unusually fresh for cost data of this kind, which is why Fixr is the backbone here rather than a corroborator. This Old House (6 March 2026) and NerdWallet (25 February 2026) corroborate the headline to within about 1%.
• Where the publishers disagree, both figures are shown. Slab jacking is $500–$1,900 on Fixr against $550–$1,300 on This Old House and Bob Vila. House lifting is $20,000–$30,000 on Fixr against $20,000–$23,000 elsewhere. The engineer's report has nearly a fivefold spread on its top end across four publishers. Averaging them into a third number nobody printed is not something this site does, so the arithmetic uses Fixr throughout and the disagreement is printed next to the figure that carries it.
• This Old House is not an independent second source. Its page states its cost data is licensed from Angi, so where it agrees with Angi-derived figures that is one dataset appearing twice, not two publishers agreeing. It is cited as corroboration of the headline on that understanding.
• No regional band, no soil multiplier, and no severity multiplier. The first two are not sourceable and are not invented — see the section above. The third is a published classification rather than a coefficient, so it labels your result and never scales it.
• No per-linear-foot wall rate, because nobody publishes one. Crack repair is priced per crack everywhere, stabilisation per project or per strip set, piering per pier. The single genuine per-linear-foot figure in this dataset is the interior perimeter drain at $40–$120 per foot, and it comes from Fixr's separate basement waterproofing page rather than its repair page.
• The contingency is shown and not spent. This Old House and Bob Vila both publish $1,000–$2,500 for unforeseen conditions. It is deliberately outside your total, because a contingency the calculator has already spent is not a contingency.
• Not modelled: full foundation replacement, which NerdWallet and Bob Vila both put at $20,000–$100,000 or more — a fivefold band, which is another way of saying it needs an engineered drawing rather than a calculator. Also not modelled: the hourly labour rate, which four publishers put at about $200 an hour but none decomposes a job into, and the cost of whatever the excavation turns up.

Related calculators

Most foundation problems are water problems that were left alone, so price the cause as well as the symptom: the sump pump & French drain cost calculator prices the drainage side in far more detail than the single drain line here, and it is the first thing to look at if the cracking is seasonal. If the movement was found during a purchase inspection, the home inspection cost calculator prices the structural engineer's opinion as one of its add-on tests — it is the same report this page recommends buying first.

If the repair is a step toward finishing the space below, the basement finishing cost calculator prices what comes after — and the order matters, because nobody wants to open a finished wall to reach a bowing one. And if you are weighing this against everything else a house is about to ask for, the true cost of homeownership calculator puts it in context.

Methodology & sources

The cost figures on this page are generated from a single, sourced cost-data file (Repairing an existing residential foundation in the United States, priced by the scope of work actually being bought — crack injection, slab jacking, waterproofing, carbon-fibre reinforcement, tiebacks, piering or underpinning, and house lifting — rather than as one blended average. Piering and tiebacks are priced per pier because that is the unit they are sold in; every other scope is priced at its published project band. Foundation type is carried as a published cross-check on the result and never as a surcharge. Figures are US national and reflect Fixr's cost tables as published 27 January 2026, with NerdWallet's 25 February 2026 severity ladder and This Old House's 6 March 2026 page as corroboration. Full foundation replacement is out of scope and signposted as a separate job.). Fixr puts the national average at $5,200 on a $2,200-$8,200 typical range; This Old House reports $5,179 on $2,224-$8,134 and NerdWallet just over $5,000 on about $2,200-$8,100, so three publishers agree on the headline to within about 1%. The wider $1,000-$25,000 band above is the span across foundation types, which is the honest range for the actual question: a slab crack and a settled basement wall are the same search and not the same job. Piering is priced at $1,000-$3,000 per pier, a figure Fixr, This Old House and HomeAdvisor all publish identically, and the pier count is yours to supply because no publisher prints a typical one. No regional multiplier is applied: not one of the five publishers read on 11 September 2026 attaches a number to region, so none is invented here. Last verified September 2026.

• Fixr.com — How Much Does It Cost to Repair a Foundation? (page last updated 27 Jan 2026) — retrieved 2026-09-11
• NerdWallet — How Much Does Foundation Repair Cost? (page updated 25 Feb 2026) — retrieved 2026-09-11
• This Old House — How Much Does Foundation Repair Cost? (page updated 6 Mar 2026; its cost data is licensed from Angi) — retrieved 2026-09-11