How much does foundation repair cost?

Foundation quotes vary five-fold, and the labor rate is not why. The highest of the 224 state averages the Census publishes for these six trades, anywhere in the country, is $188.88 a field hour. Your scope has no ceiling at all, and that is where the money goes. Enter your quote and see what it is really charging for the people on your property.

§ 01 Your numbers

Change anything. The answer updates as you type.

What is the contractor proposing to do?

The most important box on the page, because the method decides which INDUSTRY you have actually hired.

The government has no code for 'foundation repair': we searched all 20,398 entries of the NAICS index and the phrase does not appear once. It files the work by METHOD instead, and the methods sit in six different industries. Push piers make your contractor a site preparation firm; underpinning makes him 'all other specialty trade'; urethane slabjacking makes him 'other foundation, structure and building exterior'. The sharpest illustration is the sunken slab: pump urethane foam under it and the index calls you a slabjacking contractor (238190), pump a cement slurry under it and it calls you a MUD-jacking contractor and files you under poured concrete (238110), $11.55 an hour cheaper. Same slab, same lift, different hose. Picking a method here sets the measured billed rate and the measured cost mix for whichever industry that actually is.

Crew size (people on site)

Count the people, not the company.

A pier crew is typically three: two working and one running the equipment. Ask the contractor directly, because with the days below it is one of only two numbers that determine the labor on your job, and a firm that will not tell you how many people are coming for how long is not quoting you, it is negotiating with you.

Days on site

Working days, not calendar days: concrete cures on its own time and nobody is billing you for the weekend it sat there.

A handful of piers on one corner is a day or two. A full perimeter underpinning is weeks. This and the crew size are the two numbers the whole labor line rests on, so get them in writing.

Billed rate (dollars per field hour)

MEASURED, and set by the method you picked.

The Economic Census records what each trade takes in for construction work and the field hours behind it, so this is what an hour of somebody's time on your property bills at, net of materials and subcontracting. Nationally the six trades run $97.27 (masonry) to $117.15 (piers). But that is the spread of six national AVERAGES, and it is not a bound on what any two firms charge: at state level a single trade's rate spans 2.0x to 2.8x, and pooled across every trade and every state the Census observes $60.38 to $188.88. Override this box if you know your local rate. What no source anywhere records is what YOUR contractor bills: the Census publishes this rate at two levels of geography and no others, the nation and the 224 state cells it does not suppress, and it suppresses a cell precisely when too few firms sit in it. The confidentiality that hides the small cells is the same rule that will never hand you one firm.

Labor, overhead and profit, as a % of the job

Also measured, also set by the method.

The Economic Census records how each trade's receipts split between materials, subcontracting, and everything else. Waterproofing is the most labor-heavy at 69.1% (you are buying a man, a trench and a membrane); poured concrete the least at 54.8% (you are buying a lot of concrete). We use it to gross your labor line up to a whole job. It is a trade-wide average, not a law, and it is the assumption on this page most likely to be wrong.

The quote you were given (dollars, 0 if you have none yet)

Enter it and we will tell you what hourly rate that quote is actually charging for the people on your property.

Then compare it against two measured things: the national rate for that method, and the $188.88 a field hour that is the highest the Economic Census observes for any of these trades in any state. This is the honest use of these numbers, because we are not guessing your price. You are supplying it, and we are checking it against something measured. If your quote implies $379 a field hour, that is twice the national ceiling, and the question is not whether the contractor is dear. It is what else is inside the number.

Estimated cost

$9,264

Typical range $7,411 – $12,970

Crew time, overhead and profit$5,623
Materials and subcontracted work$3,641
Total$9,264

See next steps →

There is no such thing as a foundation repair contractor, and that is not a figure of speech. We searched all 20,398 entries of the NAICS index and the phrase "foundation repair" appears in none of them. The government files the work by METHOD, and the methods belong to six different industries.

The index lists "Helical pier (i.e., drilled building foundations) construction" under site preparation contractors. It lists "Underpinning, construction" under all other specialty trade contractors. It lists "Urethane slabjacking contractors" under other foundation, structure and building exterior, and foundation waterproofing under building finishing, next to the caulkers. If you want the point in one example, take a sunken slab. One contractor pumps expanding urethane foam under it to lift it: the index calls him a "Urethane slabjacking contractor" and files him under 238190. The next pumps a cement slurry under the same slab to lift it the same inch: the index calls him a "Mud-jacking contractor" and files him under 238110, poured concrete, where he bills $11.55 an hour less. Same problem, same result, different hose. The classification follows the material, not your floor. Now what that means for the quotes on your kitchen table. We measured what all six bill per field hour. Nationally they run $97.27 (masonry) to $117.15 (piers), a spread of just 1.20x. But those are six national averages, and they are not a limit on what two firms can charge you: at state level a single trade's rate spans 2.0x to 2.8x, and across every trade and every state the Census observes $60.38 to $188.88. So rate variation is real and we are not going to pretend it away. What it does give you is a ceiling, and scope has none. $188.88 a field hour is the most the Census publishes anywhere in the country. Read that word: it publishes 224 of the 306 state-by-trade cells and suppresses the rest, so this is the highest rate we can SEE, not a proof that no firm charges more. If your quote implies more than it, the excess is not the price of labor, and somebody needs to tell you what it is.

§ 02 The return

Field hours in this job48

What this trade bills nationally, per field hour$117.15

What your quote bills, per field hourn/a

Of the labor, what the crew is paid$1,683

The billed rates, the wages and the cost mixes are measured from the 2022 Economic Census, in 2025 dollars. The prevalence figures are computed from American Housing Survey microdata with the survey's replicate weights. The scope, meaning the crew size and the days on site, is not sourced and cannot be: it is the number you must get from a structural engineer, and it is what decides your bill.

Where the money goes

Crew time, overhead and profit$5,623

Materials and subcontracted work$3,641

By the numbers

There is no NAICS code for foundation repair, and we checked properly this time: the 2022 NAICS index has 20,398 entries and the phrase appears in none of them.
More
The government files the work by METHOD, and the methods live in six different industries. Verbatim from the index: helical piers under SITE PREPARATION contractors (238910), underpinning and shoring under ALL OTHER SPECIALTY TRADE (238990), urethane slabjacking and epoxy injection under OTHER FOUNDATION, STRUCTURE AND BUILDING EXTERIOR (238190), foundation dampproofing and waterproofing under BUILDING FINISHING (238390) next to the caulkers, rebuilt footings and concrete repair under POURED CONCRETE (238110), and block or stone walls under MASONRY (238140).
The neatest proof that the classification follows the MATERIAL rather than your problem: a sunken slab.
More
Lift it by pumping urethane foam underneath and the NAICS index calls you a 'Urethane slabjacking contractor' (238190, billing $111.58 a field hour). Lift the same slab the same inch by pumping a cement slurry underneath and the index calls you a 'Mud-jacking contractor' and files you under poured concrete (238110, billing $100.03). Same job, same outcome, $11.55 an hour apart, because of what is in the hose.
Nationally the six trades bill within 1.20x of each other: $97.27 a field hour for masonry, $100.03 for poured concrete, $111.58 for slabjacking, $115.11 for waterproofing, $115.72 for underpinning, $117.15 for piers. All measured from the 2022 Economic Census, in 2025 dollars.
But do NOT read that 1.20x as a limit on what two contractors can charge you, and we originally did, which was a fallacy of division.
More
Those are six national averages. Go to state level in the same Census file and a SINGLE trade's billed rate spans 2.0x to 2.8x across the country. Pooled across all six trades and all states, the observed range is $60.38 to $188.88 a field hour, a 3.13x spread, and those are still averages of firms rather than firms.
What that does give you is a CEILING, and it is the useful thing here, as long as you know what kind of ceiling it is.
More
$188.88 a field hour is the highest billed rate the Economic Census PUBLISHES for any of these six trades in any state. Read that precisely, because we first wrote it as a universal and it is not one: the Census publishes 224 of the 306 possible state-by-trade cells and suppresses the rest, and $188.88 comes from slabjacking, which is the trade with the fewest published states of the six (14 of 51). A higher state average could be sitting behind a suppression and we would not be able to see it. What we can defend is the highest figure the Census publishes, not the highest that exists. Scope, by contrast, is bounded by nothing and measured by nobody. So if your quote implies $379 a field hour, the excess over that ceiling is not the price of labor, and nobody has told you what it is.
American Housing Survey 2023: 5.3% of American HOUSES have holes, open cracks or crumbling in the foundation.
More
That is 5.6 million of them. Note the denominator: the survey skips the whole exterior-condition module for every unit in a building of two or more apartments, so the answering universe is 106.2 million of the 145.3 million US housing units. Measured against all housing units the figure is 3.9%. We first published this as '5.3% of US homes', which was a unit-of-analysis error.
4 more
- The age of the house predicts foundation trouble far better than the foundation does. 10.0% of pre-1950 houses have foundation cracks or crumbling, against 6.4% of 1950s and 60s houses, 4.7% of 1970s and 80s, 3.3% of 1990-2009, and 2.4% of houses built since 2010.
  More
  A four-fold gradient.
- The crawl-space scare is mostly an age artefact, and it is the trap this page exists to spring.
  More
  Raw, crawl spaces look far worse than slabs: 6.8% against 4.4%. But crawl-space houses are older, with a median build year of 1970 against 1980 for slabs and 16.6 years between them on the mean. Standardise both onto a common age mix and the gap falls from 2.4 points to 1.0, which is barely significant (z = +2.00, p = 0.046). About 60% of the raw gap is simply that crawl-space houses are older, although the survey's own error bars put that share anywhere between 33% and 87%, so we will not pretend to more precision than that.
- The firm billing $117.15 a field hour for pier work pays the person doing it $35.07.
  More
  A 3.34x markup, measured, and it is the ordinary economics of a trade with equipment, insurance for undermining somebody's house, and a truck: not evidence that anyone is being gouged.
- Nothing on this page, and nothing on any page, can tell you how many piers your house needs.
  More
  That is a structural engineering question. Hire an engineer who is NOT also selling you the repair, get the scope in writing, and take that scope to the contractors. Here is the arithmetic behind the advice: the rate is bounded and measurable, and the scope is neither. Whoever decides the scope decides the bill, and right now that person is the man who profits from its size.

What is sourced here, and what is ours. The billed rates are sourced and they are the spine of the page: the Economic Census records what each of the six trades takes in for construction work and the field hours behind it, so we can compute what an hour of crew time on your property bills at, net of materials and subcontracting. The cost mix comes from the same place, and so does the wage, which is how we can tell you that the firm billing $117.15 an hour is paying the man in the trench $35.07.

An honest note on those two boxes, because they look like more evidence than they are. The rate and the labor share are not two independent facts. The rate is (receipts minus materials minus subs) divided by hours; the share is that same numerator divided by receipts. Divide one by the other and you get receipts per field hour. So the model rests on ONE measured quantity, and we split it into two boxes only so you can see and override each half. That is presentational. It is not corroboration, and we would rather say so than let the page look twice as sourced as it is. The prevalence is sourced, and it is the other half of the page. The American Housing Survey asks every household in a HOUSE whether there are holes, open cracks or crumbling in the foundation. 5.3% say yes: 5.6 million. We compute the cross-tabs from the microdata ourselves, with the survey's replicate weights, so the error bars are real ones. Ours is the scope, and it is the whole ballgame. The crew size and the days on site are the two numbers that decide your bill, and we cannot know either. We default to three people for two days because that is an ordinary small pier job, but a full perimeter underpinning is weeks. Nothing on this page can tell you how many piers your house needs. Only a structural engineer can, and since the rate is bounded while the scope is not, that written scope is worth more to you than any amount of haggling over the hourly rate. We will not print a price for a repair we cannot source, and here is everywhere we looked. The American Housing Survey asks the cost of 37 named kinds of improvement job (37 defined in the codebook, 36 of which actually occur in the 2023 data: landslide damage never appears). We read all 37, and foundation is not among them, so a foundation repair lands in "other major improvements or repairs inside home" with no sub-code and an uninterpretable median. DOE and NREL's measures database, both workbooks, all 93 sheets: its basement, crawl space and slab sheets are insulation assemblies, and there is no pier, underpinning, slabjacking or crack-injection line item in any of them. The Economic Census gives us receipts and hours but counts no piers, so it cannot price one. Its Kind of Business file, which rescued our gutter page, has 96 categories and no foundation-repair line. And the federal price indexes are indexes: they say foundation work got dearer, never what it costs. If a free source publishes an installed price for a push pier, we have not found it and we would like to. The biggest single assumption, named. The cost mix we use to gross your labor up into a whole job is a TRADE-WIDE average, and those trades do plenty of work that is not residential foundation repair: site preparation contractors dig commercial sites, poured concrete contractors mostly pour new buildings. If a residential repair carries proportionally more steel and less digging than the trade average, our materials line is too low. We flag it rather than bury it, because it is the assumption most likely to be wrong. And a sentence we shipped on this page that was simply false. We wrote, as the loudest line here, that a five-fold gap between two quotes "is not a rate difference and it cannot be", on the grounds that the six trades' national rates span only 1.20x. That is a fallacy of division: a spread of six group averages tells you nothing about the spread between two firms. It is the same error we made seven times on our gutter page. So we went back to the same Census file at state level and measured the dispersion instead of assuming it: within one trade, 2.0x to 2.8x across the states; $60.38 to $188.88 pooled. Rate variation is real. The advice survives, because scope is still unbounded and still unmeasured, but the arithmetic we offered as proof did not, and you should know we got it wrong.

Where every number above comes from

US Census

US Census Bureau, American Housing Survey 2023 National PUF (foundation condition, foundation type and year built, with 160 replicate weights)
www2.census.gov
US Census

US Census Bureau, AHS 2023 Items Booklet (the foundation question wording, and the list of 37 improvement job types that does not include foundations)
www2.census.gov
US Census

US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, EC2223BASIC (the billed rates, wages and cost mixes of the six trades, nationally and by state)
www2.census.gov
US Census

US Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS index file (which shows helical piers, underpinning, slabjacking and mudjacking landing in four different industries)
census.gov
BEA, residential improvements price index (deflator)
fred.stlouisfed.org

What this assumes, and where it could be wrong

Every one of these is a place the number could be off. They are here because you should be able to check our working, not because we are hedging.

A NAICS CODE IS A BUCKET, NOT A JOB, AND THE RATE ON THIS PAGE IS THE BUCKET'S.

NAICS 238110 is titled 'Poured concrete foundation and structure contractors', and only 83.9% of that class's receipts are concrete contractor, except paving or precast. The largest single slice, 83.9%, is concrete contractor, except paving or precast. NAICS 238140 is titled 'Masonry contractors', and only 55% of that class's receipts are masonry contractor, brick, block, or stone (except brick pav. The largest single slice, 55%, is masonry contractor, brick, block, or stone (except brick. NAICS 238190 is titled 'Other foundation, structure, and building exterior contractors', and only 20.8% of that class's receipts are ornamental metal contractor, including metal stairway, balco. The largest single slice, 20.8%, is ornamental metal contractor, including metal stairway, b. NAICS 238390 is titled 'Other building finishing contractors', and only 40.3% of that class's receipts are waterproofing and weather stripping contractor. The largest single slice, 40.3%, is waterproofing and weather stripping contractor. NAICS 238910 is titled 'Site preparation contractors', and only 5.5% of that class's receipts are foundation digging, drilling, or pile driving contractor, ex. The largest single slice, 49.2%, is excavation work: earthmoving or land clearing contractor. NAICS 238990 is titled 'All other specialty trade contractors', and only 24.2% of that class's receipts are asphalt, concrete, and brick paving contractor, residential . The largest single slice, 24.2%, is asphalt, concrete, and brick paving contractor, resident. So the billed rate here is the CLASS's rate, measured from real firms doing real work, and it is the measured figure we have for this job. It is not a rate for specialists in this job specifically, and we have four times called a class rate something it was not. We would rather show you the composition than let you assume it away.

The billed rates are MEASURED and they are the part of this page we are most confident in.

The Economic Census records the value of construction work each trade performs and the field hours behind it, so the rate is what an hour of crew time on your property bills at, net of materials and subcontracting. Nationally the six run $97.27 (masonry) to $117.15 (piers).

A national average is not a bound on your contractor, and where you live moves it more than the method does.

The 1.20x figure is the spread of six national MEANS. At state level, within a single trade, the billed rate spans 2.0x to 2.8x; pooled across all six trades and all states the Census observes $60.38 to $188.88 a field hour. And those state figures are themselves averages of firms, so real firm-to-firm dispersion is wider still and the Census publishes none of it. Where you live moves this rate far more than which method you choose.

AND THE CEILING IS THE HIGHEST FIGURE THE CENSUS PUBLISHES, NOT THE HIGHEST THAT EXISTS. We shipped it as a universal and it never was one.

The six trades give a possible 306 state-by-trade cells. The Census publishes 224 of them and suppresses or omits the other 82, because it will not release a cell with too few firms in it. So our $60.38 to $188.88 is the range of what we can SEE. It is worse than that for the top end specifically: $188.88 belongs to slabjacking, which publishes only 14 states of 51, so most of that trade's map is dark. We are not going to tell you a higher state average cannot exist. We are telling you that none is published, which is a fact about the Census, and the honest use of the number is as a yardstick rather than a legal limit.

The rate box and the labor-share box are not two independent measurements, and it would flatter the page to let you think they were.

The rate is (receipts minus materials minus subcontracting) divided by field hours. The share is that same numerator divided by receipts. Divide the first by the second and you get receipts per field hour, which means the model rests on ONE measured quantity presented in two boxes. We split it so you can see and override each half, not because it is two pieces of evidence.

The cost mix is the biggest assumption on the page, so we are flagging it rather than burying it.

The Economic Census records how each trade's receipts split between materials, subcontracting and everything else, and we use that to gross your labor line up into a whole job. But those trades do a great deal of work that is not residential foundation repair: site preparation contractors dig commercial sites, and poured concrete contractors mostly pour new buildings. If a residential repair carries proportionally more steel and less digging than its trade's average, our materials line is too low. We cannot test this, because the Census does not publish the mix for repairs specifically.

We map the Census's three cost lines onto our two without renormalising anything away.

The billed rate is already net of materials and subcontracting, so hours times rate IS the labor, overhead and profit line exactly. Our second line is therefore 'materials AND subcontracted work': everything that is not the crew's time on your property. Nothing is dropped and nothing is rescaled, which is deliberate, because on our gutter page we did drop a line and had to spend three paragraphs justifying it.

The crew size and the days on site are OURS, they are not sourced, and they decide your entire bill.

Three people for two days describes an ordinary small pier job on one corner of a house. A full perimeter underpinning runs to weeks. We have no way to know which one you need, and neither does any calculator: it is a structural engineering question and it needs a structural engineer.

We do not publish a price per pier, per linear foot, or per crack, because we could not find a free source that publishes one and we are not going to invent one and put a citation next to it.

Every place we looked is named in the model note above, and the list is specific rather than a shrug: the AHS's 37 job types (36 of which occur in the 2023 data), DOE and NREL's 93 sheets, the Economic Census basic and Kind of Business files, and the BLS price indexes. If a free source does publish one, we want to know.

The low and high band (20% below, 40% above) is our estimate of quote-to-quote spread and it is not a measured figure.

On this page the band is close to meaningless anyway, and that is the point: the variance in foundation quotes lives in the scope, not in the rate, so a band drawn around a fixed scope is drawing a circle in the wrong place.

The prevalence figures are computed from AHS microdata using the survey's 160 Fay replicate weights, so the standard errors are the survey's own rather than a textbook approximation.

Households that did not answer the foundation question, or were not asked it, are excluded rather than counted as having no problem.

And the ones who were NOT ASKED are the reason this figure is about HOUSES and not homes.

The survey skips its entire exterior-condition module (foundation, roof, walls, windows) for every unit in a building of two or more apartments: 36.9 million units, not one of which has an answer. It is a designed skip, not nonresponse, which you can see from the fact that those same records do answer the interior-condition questions. A further 2.3 million are houses that were asked and did not answer, and we drop those too rather than score a missing answer as a clean foundation. So the answering universe is 106.2 million of the 145.3 million US housing units, and the honest sentence is '5.3% of American houses'. We first wrote 'US homes', which was exactly the unit-of-analysis error this site exists to catch.

The age standardisation is ours and it is the analytical heart of the page.

Crawl-space houses are older than slab houses, so comparing the two raw confounds the foundation with the age. We apply each foundation type's rate WITHIN each build-year band to the age mix of all American houses, which is direct standardisation and is the standard method for exactly this problem. It is not a modeling trick; it is what you do when the groups you are comparing differ in a variable you have measured.

What survives that adjustment is a real but small effect: a crawl space is somewhat worse than a slab (6.1% against 5.1% age-standardised, z = +2.00, p = 0.046), which is borderline significance and nothing more.

We report it as borderline rather than dressing it up, because we have previously called a Spearman rho of +0.886 'no relationship' on the deck page by reading two noise dips as evidence, and the discipline runs in both directions.

The '60% of the gap is age' figure is a ratio of two noisy differences, and it is far less precise than a bare percentage makes it look.

Its replicate standard error is 14 points, so the 95% interval runs from 33% to 87%. We first printed '58%' three times with no interval at all, and it was additionally computed from rounded intermediates. Most of the raw crawl-versus-slab gap is age. We cannot tell you exactly how much of it, and we will not imply that we can.

Frequently asked questions

How much does foundation repair cost?

We are not going to tell you, and we would be suspicious of any page that does. No free source publishes what a foundation repair costs: the American Housing Survey asks households the cost of 37 kinds of improvement job and foundation is not one of them, DOE's cost database has no pier or underpinning line, and the Economic Census counts dollars and hours but no piers. What we can tell you is what the trades that do the work BILL: $97.27 to $117.15 a field hour nationally, and $60.38 to $188.88 once you allow for where you live. So if you know how many people are coming and for how many days, you can bracket the labor on your job. What nobody can tell you from a web page is how many piers your house needs, and that is the number that decides your bill.

Why is one quote $4,000 and another $28,000?

Not, on the evidence, because one contractor's hourly rate is seven times the other's. We first told you that a gap like this CANNOT be a rate difference, and that was a fallacy of division on our part: we had six national trade averages spanning 1.20x and wrongly read them as a limit on what two firms could charge. At state level a single trade's rate really does span 2.0x to 2.8x, so rate variation is genuine. But it is bounded, and $188.88 a field hour is the most the Census observes anywhere in the country, so rate alone will not stretch to seven-fold. SCOPE will, and scope is bounded by nothing. One contractor has priced sealing the crack and improving the drainage; the other has priced pushing steel piers to bedrock under half your house. Both may be honest. They are answering different questions. Go back to each with the same written scope and ask them to price THAT.

Is a crawl space really worse than a slab?

A bit, but far less than the internet will tell you, and this is the most misread statistic in the subject. In the American Housing Survey, 6.8% of crawl-space houses have foundation cracks or crumbling against 4.4% of slab houses, which looks damning. But crawl-space houses are older: a median build year of 1970 against 1980 for slabs, and 16.6 years apart on the mean. Age is what really drives this, and it drives it hard: 10.0% of pre-1950 houses have foundation problems against 2.4% of houses built since 2010. Put both foundation types onto the same age mix and the gap shrinks from 2.4 points to 1.0, which is barely statistically significant. Most of the scary number is just the fact that crawl-space houses are older. If you are buying, the year on the deed tells you more than what the house is standing on.

Do I need a structural engineer, or can I just call a contractor?

Hire the engineer, and hire one who is not also selling you the repair. Follow the arithmetic and you will see why. The rate is measurable and it is bounded: nowhere in the country does the Census see any of these six trades billing more than $188.88 a field hour. The scope is neither. It can vary many-fold between two contractors looking at the same crack, nobody measures it, and it is what your bill is actually made of. So the scope IS the price, and right now the person deciding the scope is the person who profits from its size. Every contractor who looks at your foundation is, by the nature of his business, both the diagnostician and the vendor. A few hundred dollars for an independent engineer's written scope separates those two roles, and then you can take one document to three contractors and finally be comparing like with like.

How do I check the quote I have been given?

Ask two questions: how many people are coming, and for how many days. That gives you the field hours. Then take the quote, multiply it by the labor share for that method (about 61% for piers, 69% for waterproofing, 55% for poured concrete, all measured by the Economic Census), and divide by the hours. That is what the quote is charging per hour of somebody's time on your property. The calculator above does the arithmetic. Judge it against two numbers: the national rate for that method, and the $188.88 a field hour that is the highest the Census observes anywhere in the United States. A quote implying $130 an hour is unremarkable, especially in an expensive state. A quote implying $379 is twice the national ceiling, which does not prove anyone is robbing you, but does mean most of that number is not labor and nobody has yet told you what it is.

Are foundation cracks always serious?

No, and 5.3% of American houses have some, which is 5.6 million of them, so it is common rather than exotic. Hairline cracks in a poured wall are frequently just concrete curing and shrinking, which it does for years. What actually worries an engineer is a crack that is wider at one end than the other, one stepping diagonally through a block wall, one wide enough to slide a coin into, doors that have started sticking, or a crack that is measurably growing: mark the ends with a pencil, date it, and look again in three months. The distinction matters enormously, because it is the distinction between an injection and a pier job, and the person telling you which one you have is usually the person selling it.

Related calculators

Driveway costWage dataUS Census

Half of contractor-hired driveway and walkway jobs cost less than $4,349, and only 21% top $10,000.

Open the calculator→

Cost to build a houseWage dataUS Census

The "average cost to build a house" you have read everywhere is the wrong average.

Open the calculator→