How we research, write and check what we publish
Every page here makes claims about money, building codes or the law. This is the standard we hold them to, and the way to hold us to it.
Who writes and who reviews
Pages are written by the FoundationMatch editorial team, and each one is checked against the sources listed at its foot before it goes live.
A page can carry a reviewer's name only when a real, licensed reviewer has read it and agreed to be named. Until one is appointed, no page claims to be reviewed by an engineer or a contractor, and the reviewer slot stays empty.
Where the numbers come from
| Figure | Source | How often it is checked |
|---|---|---|
| Population, housing age, home value | U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey five-year estimates 2023 (tables B01003, B25034, B25077) | Each ACS release |
| Worker wages | U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data, republished by the U.S. Department of Labor's O*NET OnLine, for construction laborers, cement masons, carpenters and civil engineers. These are wages paid to workers, not prices charged to homeowners, and no wage category covers a foundation crew exactly. | Each release |
| Permit fees | The city's own published fee schedule where we could read it. Where we could not read one, we print no fee. | When the city adopts a new schedule |
| Codes, permits and licensing | State statutes, administrative rules and agency pages, building code text, and city permit pages, each linked on the page that uses it | When a rule changes or a reader reports one |
| Soil, water and radon | Federal and state agency pages and university extension pages, named as such. Where a source comes from another state, the page says so. | Each review |
| Estimated ranges | Our own model: published national ranges times the state's wage ratio, described under How we estimate costs. Labeled as estimates on every page. | When BLS data or a fee schedule changes |
| Third-party cost guides | Published national ranges are inputs to the estimate model only. We do not cite one as a local price or copy one onto a page. | Not applicable |
The rules every page follows
- 1A fact we cannot source is left out. A fact we could only read through a summary stays in only if the sentence says so. We do not guess a code rule or a permit fee from memory.
- 2Every cost figure is labeled an estimate and shows how it was built. We never present a range as a quote, and we never copy a price from a competitor.
- 3Pages say when you do not need a contractor, and when you need an engineer first. If a gutter extension or a clogged drain explains the wet wall, the page says so before the form.
- 4We do not publish reviews, rankings or "best of" lists. We have no basis for ranking companies we do not inspect.
- 5Referral income never changes what a page recommends. Companies that pay for requests do not see pages before publication and cannot edit them.
- 6Each page shows the date it was last reviewed and, where it quotes prices, the date those prices are as of.
- 7Pages may be drafted with software help. A person reads each one, and every factual claim has to trace to a source we list, or it comes out.
How we estimate costs
The ranges on this site are estimates, not quotes. Each one is a model. We take published national cost ranges from third-party cost guides, which we have not verified and never cite as local prices, and adjust them by the state's wage ratio to the US for the nearest federal occupation, using U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data republished by O*NET OnLine. The wage rows on a page are what workers are paid, not what customers are charged. The permit rows come from the city building permit fee schedules we could read, and any price range a government agency itself publishes, such as EGLE's radon ranges, appears in its own rows.
We have not collected customer quotes or invoices from contractors, and we found no foundation company that publishes a price we could count. If we collect quotes, we will say how many and from when. Soil, water and the repair method can put a real quote outside any range. Your actual price depends on your home, your soil and water conditions, the work and the contractor you choose.
Corrections
If something on this site is wrong, tell us which page, which number or rule, and what you saw instead, with a link if you have one. We check it against the source. If you are right we fix the page, write the date of the fix at the foot of that page and add a line to the log below.
- Oct 19, 2026: Launch. No corrections yet.
Money and independence
Foundation companies pay FoundationMatch for the requests we send them. That is why we write, in the tools and the guides, that the engineer or second opinion you get should come from someone with nothing to sell. We cannot claim to be independent of the companies that pay us. We can show our sources and let you check them.