How to Price a French Drain Job: A Contractor's Breakdown

Search "French drain cost" and you get twenty articles written for homeowners. National averages, wide ranges, a calculator that spits out $4,000 to $12,000 and helps nobody. None of them tell you what you need to know, which is what the job costs you and what you have to charge to still be in business in November.

This is the other version. Below is every cost bucket in a drainage bid, a real 148-foot job priced line by line, and the arithmetic that decides whether that job pays for your truck payment or quietly eats it.

One warning before the numbers: the figures here are from one market, one crew, and one soil type. Use the structure, not the totals. Your loaded labor rate and your dirt are not mine.

Why per-linear-foot pricing is how contractors go broke

Almost every drainage contractor starts by quoting a number per linear foot. It's fast, homeowners understand it, and it feels defensible.

It's also the reason a lot of drainage contractors work a full season and end up with nothing.

A per-foot number assumes every foot costs the same. On a drainage job, it never does. The first 30 feet along an open side yard and the last 30 feet threading between a deck footing and a fence line are not the same work. One is machine time. The other is three guys with shovels and a wheelbarrow, and it can burn half a day.

Per-foot pricing is a presentation format. It's a fine way to show a customer the number. It's a terrible way to arrive at it.

Build the price from the bottom — costs, overhead, profit — then divide by the footage if you want to show a per-foot figure on the proposal. Never the other way around.

The five cost buckets in a drainage bid

Every drainage job, from a 40-foot downspout tie-in to a full rear-yard system, breaks into the same five buckets. Miss one and it comes directly out of your profit.

1. Labor, at a loaded rate

Not the hourly wage. The loaded rate — wage plus payroll taxes, workers' comp, insurance, and the non-billable time you actually pay for. For most small crews that's the base wage plus somewhere around 35% to 50%.

Estimate labor in man-hours, not days. "Two days" hides the third guy you brought on day two.

2. Equipment

Mini-excavator, trencher, skid steer, trailer, plate compactor. Whether you rent or own, the job pays for it. If you own the machine, charge the job an internal rate that covers payments, fuel, maintenance and the hours between jobs. A machine that only earns money on rental invoices is a machine your jobs are getting for free — which means your jobs look more profitable than they are.

3. Materials

Pipe, fabric, washed stone, basins, fittings, outlets, emitters, glue, sod staples. Price stone by weight or volume delivered, not by the bag, and pad for the 10% you always over-order.

4. Disposal and access

Spoils haul-off is the line most bids forget. A 148-foot trench at 12 inches wide by 22 inches deep generates roughly 10 to 15 cubic yards of wet clay you now own. That's a dump trailer, multiple trips, and a tipping fee.

Access belongs here too. A gate under 36 inches means the machine doesn't go in the back yard. That single fact can double the labor line.

5. Restoration

The part homeowners judge you on and contractors chronically under-price. Sod, seed, straw, mulch, re-setting stepping stones, repairing the irrigation line you cut. If the yard looks worse than when you started, the customer remembers that, not the drainage.

A real job, priced line by line

Here's a rear-yard system on a suburban lot: 148 linear feet of perforated pipe in washed stone, two catch basins, a daylight outlet at the property line, moderate slope, red clay soil, and a 48-inch gate the mini-excavator fits through.

Direct costs

That $8,194 is what the job costs to perform. It is not a price, and a contractor who adds "a little" to it and calls it a bid is guessing.

From cost to price

Two things still have to be covered: overhead and profit.

Overhead is everything that doesn't touch this job but has to be paid anyway — the truck payment, the phone, insurance, the office person, the software, your own salary if you're not swinging a shovel. Add up last year's overhead, divide by last year's revenue, and you get the percentage every job has to carry. For a lot of small drainage and landscape companies, that's 20% to 25%.

Profit is what's left over, and it's not optional. It's what buys the next machine and covers the job that goes wrong.

Divide by 148 feet and you can tell the homeowner it's about $89 a foot. But notice the direction. The per-foot number came out of the estimate. It didn't go into it.

If you'd started at "$80 a foot because that's what I usually charge," you'd have bid $11,840 — and handed over $1,290 of profit without ever knowing you did it.

What actually moves the number

Two jobs with identical footage can differ by 40%. These are the variables worth pricing separately instead of burying in a per-foot average:

• Soil. Southeast red clay digs slow, weighs more, and hauls heavier than sandy loam. Wet clay is worse. If you work Georgia or Carolina clay, your per-foot labor is not comparable to a contractor in a sand market.
• Rock. Hitting rock at 20 inches can turn a two-day job into a four-day job. Price it as a change-order trigger, in writing, before you dig.
• Access. Gate width, slope, and how far the spoils have to travel to the trailer. Measure the gate on the site visit. Every time.
• Depth and fall. A run that needs 1% fall over 148 feet gets deep at the outlet end. Depth drives excavation time and spoils volume together.
• Utilities. Irrigation, low-voltage lighting, invisible fence, gas lines to the grill. Call it in, and price the repair time you know you'll need.
• Restoration standard. Seed and straw is not sod. Establish which one you bid, in writing, or you'll be sodding for free.
• Outlet situation. Daylight at the property line is cheap. A pop-up in the middle of a flat yard, or tying into an existing system, is not.

Build it once, reuse it forever

Here's the part that pays for itself. The line items above don't change from job to job. Only the quantities do.

The contractors who price fast and consistently aren't better at math. They built the estimate once, as a template with sections and line items, and now they change quantities instead of rebuilding from a blank page. Fifteen minutes instead of an hour, and no forgotten haul-off line at 9 p.m.

That's exactly what estimate templates in ScapesHQ are for — sections, line items, and saved templates that carry straight into the proposal the homeowner sees. Same numbers, no retyping, and the scope you priced is the scope you send.

If you're rebuilding the same drainage estimate from scratch every week, that's not diligence. That's unpaid overhead.

Show the price in options, not as a single number

One number invites one decision: yes or no. Two or three options change the question from "should I do this?" to "which one?"

For a drainage job that usually looks like:

1. Full system — the complete fix, priced as above.
2. Primary run only — solve the worst area now, leave the secondary run scoped for phase two.
3. Full system plus upgrades — added basins, upgraded outlet, extended restoration.

Homeowners pick the middle more often than you'd expect, and the ones who were going to say no now have somewhere to land that isn't a competitor. More on structuring that in the anatomy of a drainage proposal that gets signed.

FAQ

What should I charge per linear foot for a French drain?

There is no correct per-foot number, and anyone who gives you one doesn't know your costs. Build the price from direct costs plus overhead plus profit, then divide by footage if you want to present it that way. In the example above, $13,130 across 148 feet works out to roughly $89 a foot — but that figure is the output of the estimate, not the input.

How do I account for hitting rock or buried utilities?

Price the job for expected conditions and define the exception in writing before you dig. Specify what triggers a change order (rock above a stated depth, unmarked utilities, saturated ground) and the rate that applies. Contractors who eat these costs do it because the conversation never happened up front, not because the customer refused.

Should I charge for the site visit?

If your estimates take real time — measuring, checking grade, scoping the outlet — charging a diagnostic fee filters out shoppers and gets you paid for expertise. Many contractors credit the fee toward the job if it's accepted. On simple jobs in a competitive market, a free estimate may still be the right call.

What margin should a drainage job carry?

Cover your actual overhead percentage first, then set a net profit target. The example above runs 22% overhead and about 15% net. If you don't know your real overhead percentage, that's the first number to go find — everything else is guessing.

How do I explain a $13,000 price to a homeowner who expected $5,000?

Show the scope, not the total. Walk them through the volume of dirt leaving the property, the machine time, the restoration, and what happens if the fall is wrong. Homeowners rarely object to a price they understand; they object to a number with nothing behind it.

The short version

Price from the bottom up. Cost the five buckets honestly, add real overhead, take real profit, and let the per-foot figure fall out at the end. Build the estimate once as a template so the fifteenth drainage job takes fifteen minutes. Then present it in options, with the scope visible, so the customer is choosing between versions of yes.

ScapesHQ was built inside a working drainage company for exactly this reason — estimates with sections and line items, templates you reuse, and proposals homeowners sign online. Book a walkthrough and we'll price a real job of yours end to end.