Pier and Beam Foundation Repair in McKinney, TX

Pier and beam foundation repair McKinney homeowners search for applies to houses that stand on posts and wood beams over a crawl space rather than on a concrete slab. These are the older homes in the city, the Victorian, Craftsman and bungalow houses around the historic downtown square that Dustin Pitts Realty dates to the late 1800s and early 1900s, and repair means bringing a floor that has sagged or tilted back to level and making the structure under it sound again. The work is done from the crawl space: shimming piers that have sunk, replacing piers that have failed, sistering or replacing beams and joists that have rotted or split, and fixing the drainage that let the wood get wet. If your floors slope or bounce, doors have gone out of square, or you can see a pier leaning under the house, this page explains what a crew does about it.

Estimates are free and written. Call (972) 555-0100 and a licensed and insured local crew will schedule a same-week inspection, take floor elevations from above and check every pier from below, and hand you a written estimate that lists each pier and beam separately. Every job carries a written warranty.

Signs you need pier and beam foundation repair in McKinney

• A floor that slopes toward one wall or one corner, which you can check with a marble or a four foot level.
• Floors that bounce or feel soft when you walk across them, or furniture that rocks on a spot that used to be flat.
• Doors that no longer latch or that swing on their own, with the gap at the top of the door wider on one side.
• A gap between the baseboard and the floor, or between the floor and an interior wall.
• Cracks in plaster or drywall running at an angle from door and window corners.
• Piers that lean, crack or sit on soil that has washed out, visible through a vent or the access hatch.
• A musty smell in the house or wet, dark wood on the beams when you look underneath.

Two or more of these together on the same side of the house mean that side has moved. A foundation inspection sorts out whether the cause is the piers, the wood or the soil.

What pier and beam foundation repair involves in McKinney

Day one is measurement and a full crawl. From above, the crew takes floor elevations with a laser level or a manometer to map how far each part of the floor has dropped. From below, they check each pier, which is the post that carries the floor load to the ground, each beam, which is the heavy timber that spans between piers, and each joist, which is one of the smaller boards laid across the beams that the subfloor is nailed to. They probe the wood for rot and read its moisture content.

The repair itself uses three tools. Shimming is the lightest: steel shims are added on top of a pier to close the gap between the pier and the beam and bring the floor up. It works when the pier is sound and has settled only a little. Sistering is next: a new length of lumber is bolted alongside a beam or joist that has sagged or partly rotted, so the new piece carries the load. Pier replacement is the heaviest: the crew jacks the beam, removes a pier that has sunk, cracked or was never on a proper footing, pours or sets a new concrete pier on a wider base, and lowers the beam onto it. Where a section of the house has dropped several inches, the crew may add piers between the old ones to shorten the span so the beam stops sagging. Jacking is done in small steps over hours or days so the plaster, brick and plumbing above are not shocked.

Moisture is fixed in the same visit or the estimate is not complete. Wet clay under a house swells, dry clay shrinks, and piers sitting on it ride up and down with it. The USDA NRCS describes Houston Black clay, the soil under much of Collin County, as 40 to 60 percent clay with high shrink-swell potential, and its fact sheet notes that water enters it rapidly when it is dry and cracked and very slowly when it is moist. Regrading the crawl space soil, adding a vapor barrier and directing roof water away from the house are covered under crawl space repair and foundation drainage.

A permit is required. The City of McKinney Building Inspections office states in its General Guidelines for Foundation Repair that any foundation leveling, pier or footing replacement, shimming or floor system replacement on a pier and beam foundation needs a permit, that the application must include an engineer’s letter and drawings showing the affected areas and whether plumbing will need testing, and that the foundation must be engineered by a licensed professional registered in Texas. The city closes the permit only after the final engineer’s report is uploaded. The contractor pulls the permit and books the engineer, and both should appear on your estimate.

What pier and beam foundation repair costs in McKinney

Modernize’s 2026 pier and beam guide puts the national average at $6,500 with a typical range of $3,000 to $9,500, with minor reshimming starting near $1,000 and major structural work running $10,000 or more. Fixr’s 2026 foundation repair guide gives a wider $2,000 to $15,000 for pier and beam homes, and its high end covers full underpinning with many new piers. Modernize’s main 2026 foundation guide lists pier and beam at $2,500 to $8,000.

Estimates are free and written, and the pier and beam foundation repair cost page prints every line item from those guides side by side.

Pier and beam foundation repair McKinney options: shims, sistered beams or new piers

Modernize’s 2026 guide sorts the work into three tiers by severity: minor at $1,000 to $3,500, moderate at $3,000 to $8,000, and severe at $8,000 to $15,000 or more. The tiers line up with the three tools. Reshimming alone is $1,000 to $3,500 per job in that guide. Beam replacement runs $400 to $1,200 per beam and joist replacement $350 to $1,000 per joist in Modernize’s 2026 guide, while HomeAdvisor’s 2026 guide puts a beam replacement job at $1,500 to $5,000. Pier replacement is the big number at $2,500 to $6,000 per pier in Modernize’s 2026 guide, and crawl space support beam repair runs $1,500 to $6,000 per job.

What decides the tier is how long the problem has been left. A pier that settled last summer under a sound beam is a shim job. A pier that settled and let the beam sit wet for a few seasons is a sistering job. Piers set on dirt with no footing under a beam that has rotted through is a pier replacement job across that whole side. Access height sets the labor too, because a crew that can kneel works faster than one that has to lie on its back.

The drought record shows why McKinney homes move in steps rather than gradually. The Texas Comptroller reports that in early October 2011 all of Texas was affected by drought and nearly 88 percent was in exceptional drought, and that 2022 brought the worst drought after 2011 with about 68 percent of the state in extreme drought in mid-August. Each of those summers pulled the clay away from piers across the city, and each wet spring that followed pushed it back. A home near the square has been through many of those cycles, which is why the US Census Bureau’s median year built of 2007 for McKinney housing, from the ACS 2024 one-year estimate via Census Reporter, understates how old the pier and beam stock is. Those houses predate that median by a century and their piers were set before engineered footings were standard.

Related services

Pier and beam work connects to several other pages. House leveling covers the measured lift itself on both slab and pier and beam homes. Sagging floors starts from the symptom and works back to the cause. Crawl space repair covers the moisture, vapor barrier and drainage side of the same space. If you are not sure what kind of foundation you have, or the house is a slab addition on a pier and beam original, the foundation repair page lays out both. Crews also cover Plano and Lucas.

The pier and beam foundation repair McKinney older homes need is shims, sistered lumber or new concrete piers set from the crawl space, permitted by the city and signed off by a Texas engineer. Call (972) 555-0100 for a free on-site estimate this week.