Foundation repair permit costs across Dallas–Fort Worth

What the table shows

The spread between neighboring cities is real

Garland charges $45, and only above a $2,000 threshold. Mansfield charges $150 plus a separate $100 plan review fee that is due at application and is non-refundable — so $250 before anyone touches the house, and the plan review portion does not come back if the job falls through. Those two cities are a half-hour apart. Allen and Frisco sit at a flat $75, Denton and Flower Mound at $100, and Irving prices per building at $125, or $160 for a single-family home on a single lot.

The permit trigger matters more than the fee

3 of the 36 cities set a threshold below which no permit is needed, and both are worth understanding before you read a proposal. Richardson draws the line at four or more piers, which means a proposal for exactly three piers lands one pier short of the paperwork. Garland draws it at $2,000 of repair value — and with pressed concrete piers running roughly $300 to $700 each in this market, three to six piers clears it. In practice almost any real underpinning job in Garland is a permitted job.

At the other end, McKinney writes the widest definition in the metroplex. Leveling, pier replacement, footings, shimming, or replacing any part of the floor system all require a permit, on slab-on-grade and pier and beam alike. Shimming a pier-and-beam floor is a modest job most homeowners would never think of as permitted work.

A missing fee is not a missing requirement

This is the most common way homeowners get this wrong. Fort Worth requires a permit and engineered plans for all residential foundation repair but publishes no fee line — the absence of a number says nothing about whether you need the permit. Rockwall is the sharpest case: foundation repair does not appear on the city’s list of projects requiring a permit, and no fee appears in its schedule. That is a gap in published material rather than a permission slip. A contractor quoting a Rockwall foundation permit fee, or telling you no permit is needed there, is going beyond what the city has actually put in writing.

In 13 cities, the engineer is the requirement

Texas licenses professional engineers. It does not license foundation repair as a trade. That gap is why so many DFW cities route the whole process through a sealed engineer design: it is the only state-backed credential available in the transaction. Mesquite takes this furthest — the city has chosen not to inspect foundation repairs since 2002 and accepts the engineer’s approval letter in place of a municipal inspection. The permit is still mandatory, and working without one carries a double fee plus a citation to Municipal Court.

Plano runs its permit through plan review rather than as a counter transaction, and explicitly rejects drawings labelled “not for construction” or “for pricing only” — which rules out submitting the sketch a salesperson left on the kitchen table. North Richland Hills publishes a Foundation Open Pier Inspection Waiver Letter, a form most cities do not have, implying the default expectation is that piers get looked at while the holes are still open.

How to use this before you sign

Ask the contractor which permit they will pull and what it costs, then check it against the row for your city. If the fee they quote is well above the published figure, the difference is their markup, not the city’s charge. If your city requires sealed engineering, ask who the engineer is and whether the fee sits inside or outside the bid — an independent inspection with an elevation survey runs roughly $350 to $1,000 in this market, and it is the single most useful thing you can buy before comparing proposals. Our cost calculator keeps the permit and engineer lines separate from the pier cost so you can see each one.

How this table was built

This is original research rather than a summary of someone else’s list, so the method and its limits belong on the page.

Sources

Every figure comes from the city’s own published material — its fee schedule, its permit or handout page, or its municipal code — and the exact document is linked in the Source column of each row. No aggregator sites, contractor price lists or phone quotes were used, because none of those are the authority on what a city charges. Where a city publishes nothing, the table says “Not published” rather than carrying an estimate.

Scope

The table covers 36 cities across 9 counties. 20 of them are covered in depth elsewhere on this site with their own detail page; the other 16 were researched for permit coverage and appear in this table only. The unit is the city, not the county, because the permit, the fee and the engineering requirement are all set at city level — two houses a mile apart in the same county can sit under different rules.

Widening the set changed one of the headline findings, which is worth stating plainly rather than quietly restating the number. Across the first twenty cities — the largest in the metroplex — twelve required a sealed engineer design. Across the sixteen added later, mostly smaller cities and outlying county seats, only Bedford did. The sealed-engineer requirement is concentrated in the big cities, and a homeowner in a smaller town is far more likely to find that their city has published nothing at all about who must design the repair.

Decisions that affect the counts

The headline “13 of 36 publish a dollar figure” counts only cities publishing a fixed amount a homeowner can look up in advance. North Richland Hills is valuation-driven but is counted, because its published ceiling of “not to exceed $100.00” for 1- and 2-family dwellings does give a homeowner a number to check a proposal against. That is the line between the two cases: a published ceiling counts, an open-ended valuation formula does not. Mansfield appears as $250 because that is the real cost of getting to a permit — a $150 permit fee plus a separate, non-refundable $100 plan review due at application — and splitting them would understate it.

Arlington moved across that line during this research, and the change is worth recording rather than quietly editing. The city’s foundation repair technical bulletin says permit fees “are based on the construction valuation of the job,” and an earlier version of this table therefore carried Arlington as valuation-based with no published figure. Arlington’s adopted Planning & Development Services fee schedule, effective June 1, 2026 under Resolution 26-151, lists residential “Foundation repair… $200.00” as a flat amount and keeps valuation pricing only for commercial work. Arlington is now counted among the cities that publish a figure, and $200 is the residential number.

Weatherford is the clearest illustration of where that line falls. The city publishes no foundation repair fee, but its own monthly issued-permit reports list two residential foundation repair permits, each charged exactly $100.00. That tells you what Weatherford charged in February 2025. It does not give a homeowner a figure to look up before calling, which is what this count measures, so Weatherford is recorded as “Confirm with city” with the observed amount noted in its row rather than counted among the cities that publish a number.

Dallas is worth naming specifically: it publishes no residential foundation repair fee, so no figure appears here. Numbers circulating elsewhere for a Dallas foundation permit do not trace to a published city source that we could find.

What this table cannot tell you

A missing fee is not a missing requirement, and the Rockwall row is a gap in published material rather than evidence that no permit is needed. Cities revise fee schedules without announcement, and several of these sources are PDFs that change address when updated, so a link that worked at compilation may move. Per-row re-verification dates are not tracked, so treat the linked document as the current authority and this table as a map to it.

Some gaps are in the retrieval rather than the city. Terrell publishes a foundation repair permit requirement but keeps its amounts in a code appendix that would not load, and Little Elm’s fee chart sends residential foundation repair to a “Table 1B” that does not appear anywhere in the document. Two further cities, Waxahachie and Granbury, were researched and deliberately left out entirely because their construction fee schedules sit in code chapters or script-driven portals that could not be read. An omitted city is a more honest outcome than an inferred one.

Dates

The original twenty cities were compiled in August 2026, and the Mesquite inspection policy was re-read on September 22, 2026. Sixteen further cities were researched and added on September 22, 2026, extending the table into Ellis, Johnson, Kaufman and Parker counties. Rows are not individually re-verified after the date they were added, so the linked document remains the authority.

Using this data

Reporters, engineers, inspectors and agents are welcome to reuse this research. You may reproduce the table, or any individual figure from it, in your own reporting or writing, with credit and a link to this page. No permission request is necessary.

The full table is available as a spreadsheet, including the source URL for every row, on request at lavorgna3@gmail.com. If a city has changed its fee or you find a row that no longer matches its source document, that correction is genuinely welcome at the same address.