2025 Seattle Retaining Wall Pricing
The point of this blog post is to give you a starting point for figuring out pricing of your project. You can use the information in this blog post to understand how much your project might cost before you start getting bids and get more serious about picking a contractor for your project. Because bidding a project requires extensive experience from a professional who has to build the project in his/her mind’s eye and then put pen to paper to give you a price, you cannot use a basic square footage price for determining how much something will cost you. Also, keep in mind in construction there are 100 ways to do something, 3 that are good, and one that is right. Not all contractors will be a project the same so make sure you have trust in your contractor before starting the project because not all contractors are created equal. That being said let’s get into pricing.
A simple wall to price and install would be a slope cut and wall that hold backs the dirt cut. In the before pictures you can see a deck and let’s assume for pricing we are not including the demo. After the deck is removed we excavate about 5 cubic yards of dirt by hand, load it into trucks and then dump the dirt offsite, this took 2 guys working a full day and the cost of dumping the dirt. Because the wall is only 3 blocks high we didn’t excavate a trench to lay the retaining wall blocks in. So, in total about $1,000 - $2,000 to prep the site for installation. Then to install the wall without the decorative cap and lights we’re looking at about $30 - $40 a square foot to install the wall blocks. The blocks in the picture above are one of the most cost effective structural blocks we use which are manor stone available at most supply houses. I think the wall was about 30 feet long and just under 2 feet tall so the price was $2,000. Not very expensive and pretty simple to price out.
This wall is an example of one of the most simple we would install and you can use the information above as a starting point when pricing your wall. Three big factors that can dramatically effect the price of the wall are when they are over 4’ tall from the bottom of the footing, when alternative materials are used (like concrete) and when you start to terrace or stack one wall on top of another. You can find more information about walls from a previous post here.
