Piers bear on ground below the layer that moves, so the support itself is not the thing with a lifespan. What decides whether the house moves again is whether the moisture swing that caused the first movement was addressed.
What keeps moving under Houston after the piers go in
Up to 51% of the mapped soil here is clay and an ordinary two-year storm drops 5.1 inches in a day. Support reaches below that active layer; the ground around and between the piers does not stop responding to it. That is the whole argument for treating drainage as part of the repair rather than as a later improvement.
Why nearly flat ground decides how long it holds
Nothing about a steel or concrete column standing on competent ground wears out on a schedule, so the support itself has no expiry date. The perishable item is the assumption that the house has finished moving, because whatever moved it is still working under every square foot nobody supported.
The Harris County mapping this site reports puts 95.7 percent of mapped land on soil in hydrologic group C or D, and just 4.3 percent on group A or B. Across that county clip, very little ground drains freely. Soil holding water changes volume with the weather. Picture a house carried on new support along one side while the soil under the opposite side keeps cycling. It can finish further out of level than it began.
Durable results therefore arrive in pairs: columns under the part that already dropped, and water control so the remaining ground cycles less. That second half is harder here than it sounds, because the largest mapped unit in the county clip sits on 0 to 1 percent slopes. On ground that flat, water leaves only where somebody built it a fall. So grading and downspouts are deliberate construction, not gravity handling the problem unattended. They are also the cheapest half of the pairing and the half most often left off the quote entirely.
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