French Drains & Yard Drainage in Houston, TX

Why Houston yards flood when others don't

Two things work against you here. The first is the soil - Houston's clay expands when wet and contracts when dry, and it does not drain. Water that hits saturated clay has nowhere to go but sideways across the surface. The second is grade. Most of the Houston area is close to flat, so there's little natural fall to carry water away from the house. Add roof runoff dumping at the foundation from undersized or disconnected downspouts, and you get standing water, soggy low spots that never dry out, and water working against the slab. This is why drainage problems here don't fix themselves the way they might elsewhere.

What we install

French drains: a gravel-filled trench with perforated pipe that collects water below grade and carries it to a discharge point away from the house. The right answer when water is saturating an area rather than pooling in one spot.

Catch basins and surface drains: a grated box set at the low point that captures pooling surface water and pipes it out. Better than a French drain when the water collects in one identifiable place.

Downspout tie-ins: connecting roof runoff into buried pipe so it discharges away from the foundation instead of at it. Often the cheapest fix that solves the actual problem, and the first thing we check.

Regrading: reshaping the yard so the fall runs away from the house. This is the more involved option and it prices higher than a drain line, but on some lots it's the only thing that actually works.

What drainage costs in Houston

French drains in the Houston market generally run $20 to $40 per linear foot installed. That puts a typical 60 to 100 foot run somewhere in the $1,200 to $4,000 range on most residential jobs. Catch basins and downspout tie-ins are usually less. Regrading sits at the higher end because it's more excavation, more material, and more restoration afterward.

What moves your number: trench depth, how far the water has to travel to a legal discharge point, whether we're working around existing irrigation, utilities, tree roots, or hardscape, how much sod or landscaping has to be restored, and site access. A backyard we can get a small machine into costs less than one we're carrying material into by hand.

These are ranges, not quotes. We give you a real number after we walk the property.

How we approach the job

We walk the property and look for where the water is coming from, not just where it's ending up. That means checking roof runoff and downspout discharge points, the fall of the yard relative to the slab, where water enters the property from neighbors or the street, and whether there's an existing system that's failed or clogged.

Then we size the system to the water. Drain runs are set to fall consistently toward the discharge point - a drain that doesn't run downhill the whole way holds water instead of moving it. The discharge point matters as much as the drain: water released too close to the foundation defeats the entire system.

We tell you when the cheap fix is the right fix. If your problem is a downspout dumping 400 square feet of roof at the corner of your slab, you don't need 80 feet of French drain.

Where drainage work goes wrong

The most common failures we see on existing systems: drain lines installed without consistent fall, so they hold standing water; discharge points too close to the house; solid pipe used where perforated was needed or the reverse; no filter fabric, so the gravel silts up with clay and the system stops draining within a few seasons; and catch basins set above the actual low point, so water pools around them instead of entering. All of these look fine the day they're finished and fail quietly a year or two later.