Foundation trouble in Montgomery County? Get matched with a local pro.

What we are, plainly

Montgomery County Foundation Repair is a free matching service for homeowners. We are not a construction company. We do not own equipment, hold a construction license, or send anyone to your property. What we do is take your description of the problem and route it to a foundation repair contractor covering your area so you can have a real conversation with someone who does the work.

There is no charge to you for the match, and you are under no obligation to hire anyone who contacts you.

Why foundations move in Montgomery County

This county sits on unusually varied ground. The U.S. Geological Survey describes Montgomery County as spanning four divisions of the Coastal Plain at once: Pleistocene river terraces from the ancestral Alabama River across the north, the Black Prairie belt, the Chunnenuggee Hills to the south, and the floodplains of the Alabama and Tallapoosa. Underneath sit Late Cretaceous formations including the Mooreville and Demopolis chalks and the Ripley Formation and Providence sand of the Selma Group.

Where those chalk-derived clays are at the surface, they are rich in expanding smectite. The Alabama Cooperative Extension System describes them without embellishment: they shrink and crack when dry, and swell when wet. Combine that with roughly 52 inches of rain a year, no true dry season, and a late-summer drying stretch that usually peaks in September and October, and you get soil that moves against footings on an annual cycle.

But it is not uniform, and that is the part most foundation content gets wrong. A house on terrace sand north of downtown, a house on prairie clay southwest toward Hope Hull, and a house on Fall Line Hills gravel up in Elmore County have three different problems. A contractor who understands that will diagnose before proposing.

Three regions, three different diagnoses

The Black Belt, west and south. Lowndes County, much of Macon County and the southwest side of Montgomery County sit on heavy calcareous clays weathered from Selma Group chalk, many of them classified by the USDA as Vertisols. Series names recur across the region: Sumter, Houston, Oktibbeha, Vaiden, Demopolis. Houston and Okolona soils are described as having very high shrink-swell potential. Here the story is seasonal movement, heave as often as settlement, and pier depth that has to reach past the active zone to mean anything.

The river terraces and the city. Much of northern Montgomery County, including a large share of the older city, sits on Pleistocene sand and gravel terraces left by the ancestral Alabama River. This ground behaves quite differently: less seasonal swelling, more vulnerability to erosion and to poorly compacted fill. The same generic advice about expansive clay simply does not apply here.

Fall Line Hills, north of the river. Elmore County towns including Millbrook, Wetumpka, Coosada, Elmore and Deatsville sit in a district the Encyclopedia of Alabama describes as rounded hills cut by valleys, underlain by sands and gravels, clays and beds of fossil oyster shells. Slope, runoff and erosion dominate. Around Wetumpka, the eroded rim of a Late Cretaceous meteorite impact structure adds genuine lot-to-lot variability on top of that.

Structure or water? Usually water

Foundation work splits into two halves. One half holds the house up: piers, beams, joists, slab lifting, crack reinforcement. The other half controls the water that moved the house in the first place: grading, gutters, drains, vapor barriers, waterproofing.

Buying only the first half is the most common expensive mistake in this market. Piers can stabilize a house sitting in soil that is still cycling wet and dry every year, or still eroding, but the surrounding conditions keep doing what they were doing. A proposal that addresses structure and says nothing about water is incomplete, and it is fair to ask why.

How the match works

1. You describe the problem. Call, or fill out the form with what you are seeing and where the property is.
2. We route it. Your details go to a foundation repair contractor covering that part of the River Region.
3. They contact you. You talk directly with the contractor about scheduling, scope and cost. We are not part of that conversation and we do not set their prices.

What to have ready before that call

The more specific you can be, the more useful the first conversation is. Know roughly when the house was built and whether it is a slab, a crawl space or a basement. Note what you are actually observing rather than what you think it means: which cracks, where, how wide, whether doors stick and in which season. Note whether anything changed around the property in the last few years, since new construction uphill, a regraded driveway or a removed tree all change how water moves.

Photographs help enormously, especially with a coin or tape measure in frame for scale and a date attached. If you can, walk the perimeter during the next hard rain and photograph where water stands. That single observation is often worth more to a diagnosis than anything else you can supply.

Before you hire anyone in Alabama

Alabama regulates residential construction through the Home Builders Licensure Board under Title 34, Chapter 14A of the Code of Alabama. A residential home builder license is required for the construction, remodeling, repair, improvement or reimprovement of a residence when the cost of the undertaking exceeds ten thousand dollars. Commercial and industrial work falls under a separate body, the Alabama Licensing Board for General Contractors, where the threshold was raised from fifty thousand to one hundred thousand dollars effective October 1, 2024.

Most residential foundation repair lands over that ten thousand dollar residential threshold. Ask to see the license, confirm it directly with the board rather than taking a photograph of a card at face value, and get the scope in writing before work begins. Holding a license with one board does not authorize work under the other, so a search that comes up empty may simply mean you checked the wrong one. We have written a short guide to doing that on the FAQ page.