Your front steps are the first thing a visitor sees, and when they start to sink, tilt, or pull away from the house, it stands out. It's also a trip hazard right at your front door. The good news is that sinking steps can almost always be lifted back where they belong, instead of torn out and rebuilt.
The question worth answering first is whether the steps are dropping on their own or whether the house is going with them. Those are two different problems, and you can get most of the way to the answer yourself.
Front steps sink because they were built on fill dirt pushed back against the house, not on the house's own footing, so they settle while the house stays put and a seam opens where they meet. Cracks inside the house on that side, or a floor running downhill, point to something deeper than the steps.
Your steps are probably not sitting on your foundation
This is the part almost nobody knows about their own house, and it explains everything else.
When your house was built, the foundation went in first. Then the dirt that came out of that hole got pushed back against the wall, and the entry got built on top of it. Asked what makes these calls happen, the owner doesn't hesitate: "Backfill. Backfill, yep, that's exactly what it is, it's all backfill, that's what they built it on. They didn't properly mount it into the foundation."
There's a standard for that dirt, and it's a number worth knowing: "They don't reach a 95% compaction, which is industry standard to build on. What an engineer would sign off on that's buildable." Packing fill to 95% takes time and passes with a machine. The schedule usually wins instead. In his words, "they'll take the dozer and just backfill it up."
Built the way it should be, per the same conversation, the entry "should be compacted, and it should be rebarred into the foundation properly, with a proper footing, to code." Tied in like that, your steps ride with the house. Sitting loose on fill, they ride with the dirt.
So the thing you're looking at is usually not a failure. It's the entry finally finding the bottom of ground that was never packed under it.
Are the steps dropping, or is the house dropping too?
Here's the fork. Work through it before anyone comes out, because the answer changes the repair.
The seam where the entry meets the brick
Stand to the side and look at the joint between the stoop and the house wall. When the steps are settling by themselves, that seam opens like a wedge, widest at the outside edge, and everything above it stays square. Window frames still look right, the brick course above the door still runs level, the mortar joints on the wall aren't stepping.
That's the steps telling on themselves. The house held its line and the entry left without it.
The hole nobody looks for
Walk around to the side of the steps and look at the ground right against them. The owner describes the classic find: "if you look up beside the steps, you got a hole that's going 5 foot back, and that's, like, 2 foot deep."
That hollow is the fill that used to be under your steps, gone down or washed out. He carries it one step further, because it rarely stops at the steps: "it creates that big old cavity, and then you lose your steps, and then your sidewalk as well." If the first slab of your front walk has tipped toward the yard, that's the same void talking.
Inside the house, on the same side
Go in the front door and look at the room behind the entry. Diagonal cracks at door and window corners, a door that stopped latching, a floor that feels like it runs toward that wall. Any of those, on the same side of the house as the steps, moves the problem off the entry and under the house.
The clean version is easy to remember. A seam outside with a square house behind it is a step problem. A seam outside with drywall cracking inside is a foundation question, and it gets answered before anything else.
When it's both
Sometimes it is. Ground that undermined an entryway can run under the corner of the house next to it, and then you have two repairs that happen to be next to each other. That's worth knowing so the estimate makes sense to you, not something to lose sleep over.
What your stoop tells you that your steps don't
Here's a detail that reads like a puzzle until somebody explains it. The steps have dropped, but the stoop above them hasn't moved at all.
The owner's explanation: "sometimes you'll have the steps sinking, but your stoop ain't moved none because it's sitting on the wing wall." A wing wall is a short masonry wall built off the foundation to carry the landing. Anything sitting on it is on the house. Anything sitting beside it is on fill.
So a landing that stayed level while the steps in front of it went down isn't a mystery, it's a map. One of those is on something solid, the other never was. It's also why the gap often shows up between the top step and the landing rather than at the door.
Why entryways go before the rest of the house here
You'll read on nearly every foundation site in Georgia that our red clay swells and shrinks and shoves houses around. The USDA soil survey doesn't back that up for metro Atlanta. It rates the clay under most of the metro low for exactly that kind of seasonal movement. Dense, yes. Busy, no.
What moves things here is water and what the ground was made of before the concrete went on it. Fill that was packed on top and fluffy underneath. A grade that tips back toward the house. A downspout emptying next to the entry, or a driveway and a front walk that both shed into the same few feet of dirt. Four inches of rain in a weekend and that water has to go somewhere.
Your entry gets hit first because it is standing on the loosest ground on the property and collecting the most water on it. That's not your maintenance. That's where the dozer stopped.
Can they be lifted instead of rebuilt?
Usually, yes, and that's the answer people are actually looking for.
Steel piers go down beside the entry until they hit ground that holds, the structure gets brought back toward where it started, and the masonry gets closed up afterward. The brickwork and the lift are the same crew, which is why the seam gets mortared rather than left for somebody else. What it takes on your entry, and what that runs, is on the step and stoop repair page.
A customer describing the version of this most people are hoping for:
"Anglins repaired my front brick stoop that was pulling away from the foundation, leaving a wide gap. They utilized two piers to lift the brick structure back into it's proper place and the bricks should no longer be able to sink with the piers in place. They also removed several of the perimeter bricks that were not level and neatly mortared the joints as well as mortaring around the original gap."
Elynn Carbone, 5 stars
Badly undermined entries on thin slabs are the exception, and those do get rebuilt. That's a call somebody makes standing in front of it.
Four things to look at on your own front walk
None of these cost anything, and they're the same things you'll be asked about:
- Measure the seam at the top and the bottom. A gap that's wider at the outer edge than at the house means the entry is tipping away, not just dropping straight down.
- Set a level on the landing and then on a tread. If the landing reads true and the steps don't, you've probably found a wing wall.
- Look down the side of the steps for a hollow and probe it with a stick or a piece of rebar to see how far back it goes.
- Stand out there during the next hard rain and watch where the downspout, the driveway and the walk send the water.
Write the date on what you find and photograph it for yourself. In a month you'll know whether it's still moving, which is worth more than any single measurement.
Frequently asked questions about sinking front steps
Do sinking front steps mean I have a foundation problem?
Often they don't. Steps and stoops are usually built on fill beside the foundation rather than tied into it, so they can settle on their own while the house stays exactly where it is. The thing that changes the answer is what's happening indoors, so look for cracks at door corners and a sloping floor on the same side of the house before assuming the worst.
Why is there a gap between my front steps and the house?
Because the two are standing on different things. The house sits on a footing dug to solid ground, and the entry sits on dirt that was pushed back against that footing after it was poured. When the fill compresses or washes out, the entry goes down and the house doesn't, and the joint between them opens up. The width of that seam is a decent measure of how far it's moved.
My steps were lifted years ago and they have dropped again. What happened?
That usually means the lift was carried by the same loose fill that let go the first time, rather than by something reaching ground that holds. Adding weight on top of soft soil buys a few years, and then a run of heavy rain finds it again. A lift that lands on bearing soil is a different proposition, which is why what the support reaches matters more than what the entry looked like the week after.
Is a sinking stoop dangerous?
It's a trip hazard before it's a structural one. An uneven riser at a front door is the kind of thing guests and delivery drivers find with their toes, and a railing post set into a moving structure works loose over time. The masonry itself deserves attention rather than alarm, though the open seam does let water run straight into the void that caused it, which keeps the problem growing.
My porch roofline is dipping too. Is that the same thing?
It's the same cause under a different structure. When the fill under a porch column gives way, the footing, the column and the roof above it all come down together, and that's repaired at the column rather than at the steps. The porch column repair page covers that one.
Will the brick still match after the repair?
That's the part you live with, so it's a fair question. Your original brick is what goes back, reset and repointed, rather than replaced with whatever the supply house carries now. Mortar gets matched to the joints around it, which matters more than people expect, because a bright new joint line across an old stoop is its own kind of eyesore.
Find out which one your entry is doing
You shouldn't have to guess at this from your own front walk. Somebody can stand at your steps, look at where the seam runs, check whether the landing moved with them, and tell you plainly whether the entry settled on its own or the ground under the house did too.
Anglin's has been repairing Atlanta masonry and foundations since 1930. If the cracks turn out to run past the steps and into the house, signs of foundation problems covers what else to look for.
Call 770-422-2924 for a free look.