Below grade / member by member
What Termite Damage Repair Really Costs
The honest answer is a range wide enough to drive a truck through. Here is why, and how to keep the repair from becoming a rerun.
A very wide range
Nationally: a few hundred dollars for small repairs, low thousands for most homeowner invoices, well into five figures for a structural rebuild under a bearing wall.
That spread is not vagueness. It is the honest shape of the work.
Nobody can price termite damage over the phone, and anyone who tries is quoting their imagination. Be suspicious of the opposite, too. A contractor who names a firm price before anyone has been under the house is either averaging you against worse houses or planning to discover the real scope after the deposit clears.
Termite repair is priced from what the framing actually shows, which is why the range only narrows once someone is lying on your dirt with a flashlight and a moisture meter.
The range narrows in exactly one place: under your house.
A sistered joist is not a sill run
The small end of the range looks like sistering: fastening new lumber alongside a weakened joist to restore its strength. One accessible joist is a short visit with modest material. The far end is sill and band work, the horizontal members on top of the foundation wall that everything above bears on. Eastern subterranean termites, the species behind essentially all the structural damage in Hampton Roads, reach the sill first because it is the wood nearest their soil. Replacing a run of it means temporarily supporting the house while the member comes out. That is engineering, not carpentry with extra steps.
Grade level
Four things decide where your house lands in the range, and all four are read down here.
The four factors that move the number
Access
A repair you can reach on your knees costs less than the identical repair behind ductwork in a sixteen inch crawl.
Clearance
Span
Two damaged feet of one joist and twenty running feet of band board are different orders of job entirely.
Running feet
Load
Members under bathrooms, chimneys, and bearing walls need temporary support engineered before a saw comes out.
Shoring
What rides along
The moisture conditions that fed the colony usually need correction on the same visit, or the new lumber inherits the old future.
20%
That last figure is the wood moisture flag line. Framing reading at or above it keeps inviting termites and fungus, which is why repair estimates include moisture work more often than homeowners expect.
1 Sill and band 2 Joist bay - 1 Sill and band
- 2 Joist bay
- Flag line
- 20 percent
- Small end
- One sistered joist
- Far end
- A run of sill
Repair without treatment is a subscription
New lumber next to an untreated colony is a refill, and the colony does not honor your invoice. It fails the other way too: treatment stops the activity but restores nothing, and a joist eaten to half its section is still at half section after the chemical dries. Skipping either half is how houses end up on their second or third round of the same damage. Treatment and structural repair are one project wearing two line items, and the treatment side of the bill has its own breakdown in our termite treatment cost guide.
How we price it
We run a found-it-fix-it model: the company that discovers the damage during the inspection is the same one treating the colony and repairing the framing, so nothing gets lost between three different contractors. Homeowner inspections are free when a problem is suspected. The estimate is written from inside your crawl space, member by member, with photos, and qualifying liquid treatments carry our 10 year re-treatment guarantee so the repair you pay for is not one you buy twice. If a soft floor, a swarm, or a seller disclosure put this on your plate, call 757-583-4444 and trade the national range for real numbers.
New lumber beside an untreated colony is a refill, not a repair.
End of the descent
Found damage under the house?
Same-day appointments are often available across Hampton Roads. Call or send the form and we will confirm your time window.
Monday to Friday, 8 AM to 5 PM. Licensed and insured in Virginia.