Mobile Home Leveling in McAllen, TX

McAllen is the largest city in Hidalgo County and the west end of our daily run, about ten miles and seventeen minutes from Edinburg down US 281 to the I-2 interchange in Pharr and west along the expressway. It was founded in 1904, counted 142,210 people in the 2020 census, and calls itself the City of Palms. Relevels run $450 to $800 for singlewides and $750 to $1,400 for doublewides, pier-and-beam house leveling starts at $1,500, level checks are free, and the price is written at the home before any jack goes under the frame.

Where the homes are

McAllen is a big city with manufactured housing spread through it rather than concentrated in a handful of resorts the way Weslaco or Donna are. Homes sit on owned lots in the older grid north and south of Business 83, on rural acreage north of the city toward the Edinburg line, and in parks and rental communities along the expressway corridor. We do not publish a list of McAllen parks because we have not verified one; if yours is a park home, tell us the park and the crew will know the access rules.

The other half of the call volume is the older townsite housing. A city founded in 1904 and incorporated in 1911 has a great deal of site-built pier-and-beam stock, wood floors on wood beams on concrete piers, and those houses go out of level on the same ground for the same reasons. That is house leveling, a different job with different prices, and we do both.

What the ground does here

The NRCS soil map north of McAllen reads Hidalgo sandy clay loam, the most extensive soil in the county. It is well drained with a low shrink-swell rating, which is good ground for a pier as Valley soils go. Its weakness is water. A footing the size of a doormat carrying a few thousand pounds presses into loam that has been saturated for a week, and McAllen gets saturated.

The McAllen Miller International Airport station is the county’s climate record. The 1991 to 2020 normals put annual rainfall at 24.17 inches, with September the wettest month at 4.61 inches and the August high at 99.6 degrees. That average hides the events. The Great June Flood of 2018 dropped 11.36 inches on McAllen and put water inside an estimated 2,700 residences and businesses in McAllen and Mission. Hanna in July 2020 dropped 12.66 inches at a gauge northeast of the city and gusted to 60 mph at the airport. Dolly in 2008 put 8.59 inches on a gauge northwest of town and a 52 mph gust on the airport.

Every one of those events did the same thing under a manufactured home: the crawl filled, footings pressed in, straps went slack, and the belly got wet. Then it dried out and the doors stuck. Cause and symptom are months apart, which is why owners blame the wrong week’s weather. Our water under the home page covers what to look for.

What we do in McAllen

Mobile home leveling. Every pier shot with a water level off a datum, the frame lifted on twenty-ton jacks carried by cribbing, low piers reshimmed inside the one-inch limit in the Texas rules or rebuilt where they have dropped past it. Most singlewides in a morning, doublewides in a day.

Pier and pad repair. Footings pressed into wet loam get replaced with larger ones sized to the soil, not stacked taller. $75 to $150 to reset a pier, $150 to $400 to rebuild one.

Tie-downs and anchors. Hidalgo County is Wind Zone I, and the Texas table in 10 TAC 80.24 still wants a strap within two feet of each end of each I-beam and spacing no wider than 10 feet on a 14-wide with a 30 to 40 inch vertical distance. Re-tensioning is included with a relevel; a full retrofit runs $600 to $3,500.

House leveling. Pier-and-beam houses in the older grid: survey the floor, jack the beams, new concrete piers, sistered joists, shims. $1,500 to $4,500 for a typical house.

Pre-sale leveling inspection. A written level, support, and tie-down report for a park, lender, or buyer, $150 to $350, credited toward any work found.

Permits and licences

Manufactured home leveling, blocking, and anchoring is licensed installation work under Chapter 1201 of the Texas Occupations Code, and every crew arranged through us holds a TDHCA installer’s licence you can verify online. A home inside McAllen city limits asks the city’s own building office about any local permit; a home in the unincorporated county outside the city asks the Hidalgo County Planning Department at 2818 S. Business Hwy 281 in Edinburg. We will tell you straight which applies.

Getting a level check

Tell us what you are seeing, the home’s size, and whether it is a manufactured home or a site-built house, and a crew comes out from Edinburg, shoots every pier, and writes the price at the home. The cost calculator gives you a range now from the same table as the pricing page. We also cover Mission next door to the west and Pharr and San Juan to the east.