Excavation cost estimator

Each job starts from a published national range. Land clearing is priced by the acre, from HomeGuide's light, moderate or heavy range, and grading by the square foot. A driveway uses HomeGuide's rate for driveway grading and the size you pick: one, two or three cars. A foundation dig is priced by type: slab, crawl space or full basement. If you're not sure of the driveway size or the foundation type, we use a range that covers them all, which is much wider.

Then we apply multipliers for the site: steep ground ×1.25, clay soil ×1.35, rocky soil ×1.5 and tight access ×1.3. We also apply ×1.2 in a metro county. After that, we adjust for region, following published labor data that puts the Southeast lowest: ×0.9 in the Southeast, and ×1.1 in the Midwest and West. The Northeast, Delaware, Maryland, Texas and Oklahoma get no regional adjustment. Combined, the multipliers are held to ×1.9, since no published figure says how these conditions combine. That limit includes metro and region.

The steep and clay multipliers are worked out from government cost schedules: a Forest Service guide's slope factors for clearing, and a Natural Resources Conservation Service rate for difficult digging. We derived both, so neither is a published price. The rest are our planning assumptions, including our line that a county of 500,000 people or more counts as metro.

If you told us there's no access to the site yet, we add SiteX's published mobilization range for a rural job. We leave that out in metro counties, since the figure describes rural work.

For the published ranges behind each job, see the excavation cost guide, land clearing cost guide and grading cost guide.