How much does a house pad cost in Louisiana?

Most of a house pad is dirt, and dirt is sold by the cubic yard. National cost guides put plain fill dirt at $5 to $25 a cubic yard delivered. Select or structural fill, the kind that goes under a slab, runs $10 to $30. A pad for a 40 by 60 slab, built up 2 feet, takes roughly 400 yards of fill. That is about $6,000 to $10,000 in dirt alone.

Add the site work and a pad like that lands near $8,000 to $15,000 on an easy lot. Those are market numbers, not our price list. Your number comes off your own lot. Pad height and haul distance move it more than anything else. The math below is the part you can do yourself.

Why does a house in northeast Louisiana sit on a dirt pad?

Three things stack up here. The ground is flat, the rain is heavy, and the clay will not drain.

Bastrop picks up 58.39 inches of rain in a normal year. That figure comes from the NOAA 1991 to 2020 climate normals. The biggest soil in Morehouse Parish is Perry clay. The USDA soil survey rates it poorly drained and puts it at 60 to 70 percent clay. Water does not soak into that. It sits on top.

The flood map sets the other half of it. Is your lot inside a special flood hazard area? Then the parish or city floodplain office sets the lowest floor height. FEMA calls the reference mark the base flood elevation. A licensed land surveyor prepares the elevation certificate. National guides put a land survey at $500 to $1,500 or more. Building the dirt up to that mark is house pad and site prep work.

How do you figure the cubic yards in a house pad?

Length times width times height, in feet, divided by 27. That is the whole formula. There are 27 cubic feet in one cubic yard.

Work a real one. Your slab is 40 by 60, so 2,400 square feet. The pad has to be bigger than the slab. The federal manufactured home standard asks for a half inch per foot of fall. That applies to the first ten feet out from the foundation. Ground that sheds water has to start past the building. Run the pad 5 feet past the slab on all four sides and you get 50 by 70.

Now the arithmetic. 50 times 70 times 2 is 7,000 cubic feet. Divide by 27 and you get 259 cubic yards. The sides of the pad slope down as well. At a 3 to 1 slope on a 2 foot pad, that skirt runs out 6 feet. It adds about 56 yards. Call it 315 yards sitting in the finished pad.

How much extra dirt does compaction take?

More than most people budget for. A yard of dirt in the truck is not a yard in the finished pad.

The Federal Highway Administration’s design manual says it plainly. For moderate soil the shrink runs 10 to 25 percent. For light soil, and for fill built on swampy ground, it runs 20 to 40 percent or more. Plenty of bottom ground around here is the second kind.

Run 315 yards through that and you order 350 to 420 yards. Round it to 400. A standard dump truck is commonly rated for 8 to 12 cubic yards. That works out to 35 to 50 loads of fill dirt hauled to the lot.

Louisiana’s own road spec says how fill is meant to go down. LA DOTD calls for layers no thicker than 12 uncompacted inches. Each layer gets compacted to 95 percent of maximum dry density before the next one. That is a highway spec, not a house rule. It is still the clearest published picture of how fill is placed in this state.

What does a house pad cost, line by line?

Put the example pad through it. 400 yards of select fill at $15 to $25 runs $6,000 to $10,000. Site work on a level home site adds $2,000 to $5,000. A wooded lot adds clearing on top. Every figure in that table is a published market range, not our price list.

How much is a house pad per square foot?

There is no honest per square foot price until you say how deep. A pad is a volume, not a surface.

On the example above, the dirt works out to about $1.70 to $2.90 per square foot of pad. That is at 2 feet of build-up. Cut the height to 1 foot and you cut the dirt roughly in half. Double the height and you double it. A calculator that asks only for square feet cannot give you a real number.

Is the house pad the same job as the slab?

No. They are two jobs done by two different contractors. We build the dirt pad. A concrete contractor pours the slab on top of it. When you search what a slab costs for a 1,500 square foot house, you are pricing concrete.

Whether a house sits on a slab or another kind of foundation is a question for your builder. Either way the ground underneath has to be right first. Bad fill under good concrete still moves.

Why do two pad prices on the same road come out different?

Because the dirt, the haul and the lot are all different. Louisiana’s own highway bid records show the spread. On a 2014 drainage job in West Carroll Parish, five contractors bid the same borrow dirt item. Their prices ran from $20 to $72 a cubic yard. Same dirt, same job, same day.

On your lot it comes down to pad height and haul distance. Soft ground underneath adds more, and so does the dirt work the lot needs first. A wet winter lot costs more than the same lot in September. If a drive has to go in too, gravel driveway pricing works the same way.

Some jobs add testing. One published engineering laboratory price list puts a standard Proctor compaction test near $100 a sample. An engineer may call for one before the concrete contractor starts.

What will a pad cost on your lot?

A pad price is arithmetic once somebody stands on the ground and measures. Dupree’s Dirt and Excavation builds house pads out of Bastrop. We come look at the lot, check the heights, and price the fill it actually takes. The estimate is free.

Call (318) 614-2073 and we will set a time. Read how we build a pad for what the work involves.