Foundation repair is priced per support point, not per square foot. Two houses of the same area can need very different numbers of piers. A per-square-foot figure hides exactly the variable that decides the price.
Why the count varies so much across Houston
The mapped soil here is dominated by Clodine-Urban land complex, 0 to 1 percent slopes and runs to 51% clay, and it is not uniform street to street. Depth to competent ground sets the cost of each support point. It is measured during installation, not read off a table. That local variation is precisely what a per-square-foot figure averages away.
Why floor area is the wrong denominator here
The work does not scale with area. What gets installed is a set of individual points, and how many there are follows the pattern of movement and the load paths standing over it. Floor area appears nowhere in that calculation. A big house that dropped at one corner can take fewer points than a small one that sank along an entire flank.
Houston makes the mismatch worse than average. With a median year structure built of 1981, a great many houses here are not one structure but an original footprint plus whatever was added across the following decades, often on a separate slab poured at a different time. A rate per square foot counts that added area identically to the original, while the added slab may be moving independently or not moving at all. The denominator swallows the very thing that decides the price.
The rate persists because it makes two proposals look like they can be lined up, when lining them up is exactly what it prevents. Set two proposals carrying the same rate per foot beside each other and they can still contain wildly different point counts, the rate hiding the gap instead of exposing it. The four items to demand are the point count, the position of each, interior or perimeter for each, and the depth expected. Those four come out of an elevation survey. If a firm will price only by the foot, either nobody took readings at your house or the readings are not what the price came from.
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