What pier and beam repair costs
Most homeowners pay $4,000 – $12,000 to repair a pier and beam foundation. The single most common invoice is much smaller than that: shimming a handful of settled piers runs $150 – $400 per pier, so a sagging corner is often a $400 – $1,600 afternoon.
The reason this foundation type prices so differently from a slab is access. Your house sits above a crawl space, which means the piers, the beams and the joists are all reachable with a flashlight and a bottle jack. A correction that requires excavating around a slab and driving steel to load-bearing soil is, on a pier and beam house, frequently a matter of adding steel or hardwood shims on top of an existing pier cap.
The range stays wide for one honest reason: nobody knows what the crawl space contains until they are in it. Moisture, rotted sill plates and a girder that has been quietly failing for a decade are all found rather than predicted. Bids written before someone crawled the full footprint are guesses.
Pier and beam repair cost by line item
| Line item | Typical range | Unit | What drives it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shim an existing pier | $150 – $400 | per pier | Crawl space clearance and pier condition |
| Concrete pressed piling under the beam | $900 – $1,700 | per pier | Depth to load-bearing soil |
| Helical pier under a perimeter footing | $1,400 – $3,100 | per pier | Torque depth, soil, equipment access |
| Full house releveling | $3,500 – $9,000 | per house | Footprint, pier count, how far out of level |
| Beam, girder or joist replacement | $1,500 – $6,000 | per run | Length of rot, span, temporary shoring |
| Crawl space vapor barrier | $1,200 – $4,000 | per crawl space | Square footage and moisture source |
| Cosmetic restoration after leveling | $1,000 – $5,000 | per house | Drywall, trim and paint — usually excluded from the bid |
| Structural engineer’s report | $450 – $600 | per visit | Independent of any contractor |
| Permit | $75 – $400 | per project | Municipality and whether structural review applies |
Source: Compiled from 2025–2026 residential foundation contractor pricing datasets and structural repair bid sheets, normalized to installed cost including labor, shoring and cleanup. · Last reviewed July 30, 2026 · Reference data · How we compile these figures
Two rows above cause most bid-to-bid confusion. Cosmetic restoration is excluded by the majority of foundation contractors, so a house that gets leveled for $7,000 can still need $1,000 – $5,000 of drywall, trim and paint afterward. And the engineer’s report is often quoted as an optional extra when it is the item that decides whether the rest of the list is even correct.
Cost by what you are actually seeing
Match your symptom to a row. If two rows could apply, budget for the more involved one and let the inspection move you down rather than up.
| What you are seeing | Typical cost | Crew time | What sets the number |
|---|---|---|---|
| One sagging corner, 2 – 4 piers shimmed | $400 – 1,600 | 1 day | Cheapest real repair in this category |
| Floors sloping along one side, 6 – 10 piers | $1,200 – 4,000 | 1 – 2 days | Shimming plus a few replaced pier caps |
| Bouncy floors from a failed girder | $1,500 – 6,000 | 2 – 4 days | Rot length and shoring the load while it is cut out |
| Whole-house releveling | $3,500 – 9,000 | 2 – 4 days | Pier count and how much of the house moved |
| Releveling plus beam and joist work | $5,000 – 15,000 | 4 – 8 days | Moisture damage found once the crawl space is open |
| Settled corner needing new deep piers | $5,000 – 14,000 | 3 – 5 days | 4 – 6 piers driven to load-bearing soil |
Source: Scope bands built from pier counts and crew days on typical residential pier and beam projects. Timelines assume dry weather and crawl space clearance above 24 inches. · Last reviewed July 30, 2026 · Reference data · How we compile these figures
Crawl space clearance moves labor more than homeowners expect. Under about 18 inches, a crew works on their backs dragging jacks through mud, and the same pier count can price 20 – 30% higher than it would in a 36-inch crawl space where a worker can kneel.
Why pier and beam costs less than slab work
On a slab home, the load path runs through concrete poured directly on the soil. When that soil moves, the only way to reach the load path is to dig alongside the footing and drive piers — $1,250 – $2,400 each for push piers, $1,400 – $3,100 for helical piers, and a settled corner needs four to six of them. That is why the same visible symptom can cost $10,000 – $30,000 on a slab.
On pier and beam, the load path is wood sitting on top of piers, in open air. Raising a low spot means jacking the beam and inserting shims. The materials cost almost nothing; you are paying for the diagnosis, the jacking sequence and the labor of doing it evenly across the house. Regional pricing tracks the same multipliers as the rest of the market — West Coast markets run about 22% above national, the Midwest about 8% below.
The trade-off runs the other way on moisture. A slab has no crawl space to stay wet, while a pier and beam house depends on ventilation and ground cover to keep its wood dry. Most large pier and beam bills start as water problems, not settlement problems.
When the honest answer is to spend nothing
Plenty of pier and beam houses that feel wrong underfoot need no structural work at all.
- An old house that is out of level and stable. A common industry threshold is about 1 inch of deflection over 20 feet. Many homes built before 1960 exceed that and have for decades. What matters is whether the number is still changing — a level, a chalk line and a calendar answer that for free.
- Seasonal door sticking. Wood swells in humid months and shrinks in dry ones. A door that binds every August and clears every January is telling you about humidity, and planing the edge costs an hour.
- One bouncy floor bay. Springiness in a single span is usually joist deflection rather than foundation movement. Sistering a joist or adding a mid-span support is a few hundred dollars of carpentry.
- Hairline drywall cracks that stay put. Mark both ends with a pencil and the date. Cracks that hold still through a full wet-and-dry season are finished moving, and patching is the whole repair.
Measure first, then decide. The measurement costs a level and twenty minutes, and it is the reason a large share of pier and beam quotes should end at zero.
Reading three bids on the same house
Above roughly $5,000, hire an independent structural engineer for $450 – $600 before you collect quotes. The engineer works for you, walks the crawl space, and writes down which piers move and how far. Contractors then bid against that document instead of against each other’s sales instincts, and the spread between quotes usually collapses.
When you compare bids, put four things side by side: the pier count and where each one goes, whether shimming or new piers are specified, whether beam and joist repair is included or listed as a contingency, and whether cosmetic restoration is in scope. Ask each contractor to price the same pier count. Two bids $6,000 apart usually turn out to describe two different jobs.
Ask about the warranty in writing as well — a transferable lifetime warranty on piers is standard in this trade, while shimming is typically warranted for a much shorter term because shims can be adjusted again later. That difference is reasonable, and worth knowing before you read it as a red flag.
Where to go next
- Foundation repair cost — every repair type in one itemized table.
- House leveling cost — pricing for the full releveling job by foundation type.
- Underpinning cost — what per-pier pricing covers when shimming is no longer enough.
- Signs of foundation problems — the symptoms that matter and the ones that look worse than they are.
- Cost calculator — run your own numbers, free and without an email address.