How Much Does Mudjacking Cost?

How much does mudjacking cost? National cost guides put a typical job between roughly $600 and $2,500, with per-square-foot pricing around $3 to $8 for traditional mud and more for polyurethane foam, and most single-slab driveway or patio lifts landing near the low end of that band. Before the details, the disclosure that makes this page unusual: Motmot does not offer mudjacking or concrete leveling, and nothing here ends in us quoting you one. We repair house foundations. We wrote this anyway because sunken concrete is one of the most common reasons people call us, and the caller usually needs one question answered before any price matters: is the sunken concrete a piece of flatwork, which a leveling company can lift for hundreds, or is it the edge of the house, which no amount of foam will fix? This page gives you the honest prices, the mud-versus-poly comparison, and that one distinction, which is worth more than every number on it.

What mudjacking is

Mudjacking, also called slabjacking or concrete leveling, lifts a sunken slab from below. The crew drills a pattern of holes through the concrete, each about the size of a coffee-cup rim, and pumps a slurry of sand, soil, water, and cement under pressure. The slurry fills the void that let the slab drop, then keeps coming until hydraulic pressure floats the slab back to grade. The holes get patched, the slurry cures over a day or two, and the driveway that used to catch your toe is flat again. Polyjacking is the same idea with different chemistry: two-part polyurethane foam injected through much smaller holes, expanding to fill the void and lift the slab, cured in minutes and light enough that it adds almost no new weight to the soil below. Both methods are legitimate, both are mature trades, and both live or die on the same fine print: they restore elevation, and they do nothing about whatever stole the elevation in the first place.

The prices, attributed

These are national ranges from published cost guides, not Motmot quotes; Central Texas jobs tend to land inside them, and every market has outliers.

Two buying notes from the sidelines. First, get the void explained as well as the lift priced: a good estimator tells you why the slab sank, because a lift over an unexplained washout is a subscription, not a repair. Second, fix the water first; a $150 downspout extension protects a $1,500 lift better than any material upgrade does.

The distinction that matters: flatwork versus foundation

Here is the paragraph this page exists for. Mudjacking lifts slabs-on-dirt: driveways, patios, sidewalks, pool decks, porch caps. Those slabs are flat pours resting on grade with nothing on top of them, and when the dirt under one erodes or compacts, the slab follows it down. Lifting it back is low-stakes and sensible. A house foundation is a different object in every way that matters. It is a structural plate with grade beams, carrying the entire weight of the building, and when it settles on Central Texas clay the cause is soil moisture cycling several feet deep, not a surface void. Pumping slurry or foam under a settled house edge presses against the very soil layer that failed, adds real weight in the slurry case, and holds only until the clay's next dry cycle takes the support away again. That is why the trades split the way they do: leveling companies lift flatwork, and foundation companies fix structure by reaching past the problem soil entirely, driving steel piers down to refusal at load-bearing strata and resting the house on those. The difference in stakes shows up in the difference in price, and the honest comparison is in our foundation repair cost guide; the middle-ground option of pinning a house where it sits is covered in what is foundation stabilization. Any bid that proposes foam as a repair for a moving house foundation deserves the same skepticism as a bid proposing piers for a sunken sidewalk.

How to tell which problem you have

Walk the joint where the sunken concrete meets the house and read which side moved. Flatwork sinking away from the house leaves the house edge high and quiet: the brick line above stays straight, doors nearby work, and the gap opens at the bottom of the flatwork slab as it rotates away. A moving foundation tells the opposite story: the house edge drops toward the flatwork, and it brings witnesses, stair-step cracks in the brick above that corner, a door inside that quit latching, a floor slope you can feel. The garage makes a good tiebreaker, since its floor and the house slab meet in plain view; we wrote that specific read up in garage floor slope versus foundation movement. If everything points at the flatwork, hire a leveling outfit with a clear conscience, or, if the concrete is shattered beyond lifting, price a fresh pour on our concrete flatwork page, which is the one corner of this topic we do work in. If anything points at the house, get the elevations measured before anyone drills holes: the inspection is free, it maps the slab in tenths of an inch, and about a third of the time it ends with no repair needed, which is a much better outcome than foam under the wrong slab.