Crawl Space Bid Checker

Work through a crawl space quote against what Oregon and Washington law require the paperwork to contain, what the scope should name, and where the total sits. We are not the contractor, which is exactly why we can publish this.

Start the Check (503) 210-5062

A homeowner comparing two crawl space bids is usually comparing two documents that describe different work in similar language. One quotes encapsulation with drainage; the other quotes encapsulation and mentions drainage nowhere, because drainage is not in it. The gap does not appear until the crew is under the house.

If you are holding one bid rather than two, the gap this tool measures is harder to see. A second contractor looking at the same crawl space is the fastest way to find it — what a crawl space inspection covers, and how to get a useful second opinion explains how to ask for one without anchoring it to the first quote.

This tool does three separate checks and keeps them separate, because they rest on very different footings. Step 1 is law — statutes and administrative rules, each cited and linked, read at the Legislature and the Secretary of State rather than at anyone's summary of them. Step 2 is editorial — what a bid for a given service normally covers in this market. Step 3 is the weakest and says so: it compares your total to modelled estimates, not to a database of real quotes, because this site does not have one.

The obvious disclosure. This site earns money referring homeowners to licensed contractors. That is a reason to read Step 2 and Step 3 critically. It is also why Step 1 exists at all: we have no bid in this comparison, so we can publish the statutory requirements a contractor writing about contractor bids would struggle to publish credibly.

Project

What is being reviewed

Optional, and only used on this page. Filling these in labels the printed worksheet so it is still identifiable once it is one sheet among several. Nothing here is stored or sent anywhere.

Both the licence number and the business name on the bid are checkable against the state register in about two minutes. How to run that check.

Step 1

Every item below is a provision of state law, named and linked. This is the part of a bid that is not a matter of opinion — either the document contains what the statute says it must, or it does not. Tick what you can find in the paperwork you were given.

  1. ORS 701.305(1)

    A contractor may not perform work to construct, improve or repair a residential structure for a property owner without a written contract if the aggregate contract price exceeds $2,000. If a contract started under $2,000 and grows past it, the contractor has five days from when they knew or should reasonably have known to deliver a written one.

    Limit: The statute also says failure to have a written contract does not void the contract. A missing contract is a licensing problem for the contractor, not an escape hatch from the deal.

    Almost every crawl space scope on this site clears $2,000, so a verbal price or a one-line emailed figure is below what the statute contemplates for the job.

  2. OAR 812-012-0110(1)

    Where ORS 701.305 requires a written contract, the contract or an attached addendum must contain: the contractor’s name, address, phone number and CCB licence number as shown on board records; acknowledgement of a written warranty offer where ORS 701.320 requires one, showing acceptance or rejection; a conspicuous explanation of the property owner’s rights under the contract, including the ability to file a complaint with the board and the existence of any mediation or arbitration provision; the customer’s name and address; the address where the work is performed; a description of the work; and price and payment terms. All of it legible and in dark ink.

    The licence number is the item most often missing or stale. It must match board records — a number that no longer resolves on the CCB register is the check worth doing first.

  3. OAR 812-012-0130; ORS 701.330; ORS 87.093

    A contractor required to have a written contract must deliver the Consumer Protection Notice, the Notice of Procedure, and the Information Notice to Owner About Construction Liens on or before the date the contract is entered into, and must keep proof of delivery for two years.

    These are three separate CCB-issued forms with signature lines, not paragraphs inside the contract — though the rule does allow the notices to be contained in the contract itself, in which case they are still identifiable as the forms.

  4. ORS 87.093(2), (4)

    The original contractor must deliver the Information Notice to Owner at the time of signing a residential construction or improvement contract. A contractor who fails to deliver it may not claim a construction lien on the property for labour, services or materials provided under that contract.

    Limit: It removes the original contractor’s own lien right under that contract. Subcontractors and material suppliers have separate lien rights with their own notice rules.

    This is the notice most worth keeping a dated copy of. Its absence is the single largest practical consequence in this list.

  5. ORS 701.310

    A property owner who enters into an initial written contract for the construction, improvement or repair of a residential structure they own may cancel it by delivering written notice of cancellation any time before 12 midnight at the end of the next business day. The notice can be in any written form, including email.

    Limit: It does not apply if both parties agreed work would begin before the cancellation period expired, after the contractor has substantially begun the work, or when an initial contract is being modified after the cancellation period has already run.

    This matters most for the classic crawl space sale: a free inspection, a crew already under the house, and a contract signed on the spot. Agreeing to an immediate start is one of the three things that removes the right.

  6. ORS 701.315

    A contract for work on a residential structure may not contain a provision limiting a person’s right to file a complaint with the Construction Contractors Board. The same section expressly permits a contract to require mediation or arbitration of disputes.

    A clause waiving board complaints is not enforceable under this section; an arbitration clause is a normal and lawful term. Both are worth reading before signing, for different reasons.

  7. ORS 701.312

    Where a contractor offers to perform a home improvement, accepts a deposit of more than 50 percent of the total contract price, and then fails to perform diligently and per the contract specifications — or fails to perform and fails to return the deposit within 10 days of a reasonable demand — the CCB may place the contractor on probation.

    The statute does not cap deposits. It attaches a board consequence to large ones that go wrong, which is a different and narrower thing than a limit.

This reports what the named provisions say and links each one so you can read it yourself. It is not legal advice, and this site is not a law firm or a contractor. For a dispute, the Construction Contractors Board and Washington L&I both take complaints directly, and both registers are free to search.

Step 2

What the bid should name

Pick the service the bid is for. The two most common reasons Portland crawl space bids differ by thousands are that they are not quoting the same square footage and not quoting the same work — and the second one is usually invisible until you list the line items side by side. Unlike Step 1, this is editorial: it is what a bid in this market normally covers, not a legal requirement.

Choose a service to see the line items a bid at the typical price normally includes, and the work that is normally billed separately.

Step 3

Where the total sits (optional)

Optional, and the weakest of the three checks. The ranges this compares against are modelled estimates of the Portland-metro market, not a dataset of real quotes — this site does not hold one and does not claim to. A total outside the range is a reason to ask which part of the scope explains it, and nothing more than that.

Enter a total once you have picked a service above.

Every range describes one reference project: 1,200 to 1,500 square feet of crawl space floor, damp but without standing water at the time of the quote, a standard exterior or interior hatch with roughly 3 feet of working clearance, on a single-family home on a continuous perimeter foundation, in the Portland/Vancouver metro, priced in 2026 dollars. The further your crawl space is from that description, the less the comparison means.

Step 4

Questions worth asking about any crawl space bid

These are not service-specific. Each one exists because the answer changes what two bids mean when you put them next to each other. Tick the ones your paperwork already answers.

  • Everything under a house is priced by area. Two bids quoting different square footage are not two prices for one job, and the difference is usually the whole gap.

  • Remediation, insulation and a vapor barrier all fail again on a schedule if the source is untouched. This is the most expensive omission available and it is rarely stated as an exclusion.

  • A sump that pumps to an approved point 60 feet downhill and one that pumps to the foundation edge cost very different amounts and are described with the same sentence.

  • Permit thresholds for crawl space work vary by jurisdiction across the metro. The fee is normally billed at cost, so a bid that is silent on it is a bid that is not final.

  • Structural repair is excluded from essentially every crawl space quote. The useful answer is not that it is excluded — it is how it gets priced and approved when it appears.

  • A materials warranty from a liner manufacturer and a workmanship warranty from the installer are different products. Transferability is what makes it worth anything to a homeowner who sells in four years.

  • Oregon requires the contractor to keep a list of subcontractors with licence numbers and produce it to the board on request (ORS 701.345). Asking is normal.

  • Required as a contract term in Oregon. A deposit over half the price is the threshold the CCB attaches a probation consequence to when the job then goes wrong.

Excluded from every range on this site, without exception
  • Permit fees, which vary by jurisdiction and are usually billed at cost
  • Structural repair of framing found to be rotten once the space is opened up
  • Asbestos or lead abatement, which requires separately licensed contractors
  • Electrical service upgrades where an existing panel cannot carry new equipment
  • Landscape or hardscape restoration after exterior excavation

Your open items

Nothing ticked yet — everything above is still open.

Send this to the contractor as it stands. A contractor who answers all of it in writing has given you something you can compare against another bid; one who will not is telling you something too.

Share this with a client

Home inspectors are asked whether a repair quote is reasonable on almost every wet crawl space, and the professional standards that keep inspectors out of repair work and out of endorsing contractors are the same standards that make the question awkward to answer. Agents hit it mid-transaction, when a crawl space finding lands during the repair-negotiation window and nobody has time to become an expert. Property managers, landlords and HOA boards compare bids across buildings as routine work.

This page is written to be handed over. It names no contractor, recommends no company, and every legal item on it points at the statute rather than at us. Link it, print it, or paste the Step 4 output into a report — no attribution required, though a link is appreciated.

If the bid came out of a transaction rather than out of a homeowner's own project, three companion guides cover the stages either side of this one: reading the inspection finding that produced the bid, bounding the exposure as a buyer, and deciding what to repair and document before listing.

Three ways to pass it on

  • Print or save as PDF. The Print / Save as PDF button at the top of the tool produces a clean worksheet: the site navigation, the calls to action and the interactive controls are stripped, and what remains is the project header, the checklist with your ticks, the statutory citations with their URLs printed in full, the review date and the disclosure. Blank, it is a worksheet to fill in at the property. Filled in, it is a record of one bid review.
  • Copy the link. The Copy link button copies the page URL. On a phone, Share opens the operating system's own share sheet where the browser supports it.
  • Quote it. The legal layer is server-rendered and will be in the page whether or not scripts run, so it can be quoted from the source, cited, or reproduced in a report.

To be explicit about what this is not. This tool is published by Portland Crawlspace Pros, a contractor-matching and marketing service operated by H. Mae LLC. It is not endorsed by, affiliated with or approved by the Construction Contractors Board, the Oregon Real Estate Agency, Washington L&I, any Realtor association, or any home inspection association. Where it states what the law requires, it cites the provision so you can confirm it yourself rather than take our word for it. If something on it is wrong or has been superseded, we would rather hear about it than not — tell us, and we publish what changed.

How current this is

The legal provisions on this page were last read at their source on August 21, 2026, and are scheduled for re-reading by September 1, 2027 — set to follow the 2027 Oregon legislative session, which is the event most likely to move any of them. Oregon Revised Statutes are republished after each session and administrative rules are amended on the board's own schedule, so every citation below links to the provision itself rather than to a quotation of it. Check it against the current text before relying on it for anything that matters.

The price ranges in Step 3 are governed separately and change on their own schedule; the cost methodology page publishes the revision log for those, including what changed and when.

About the printed version

The Print / Save as PDF button opens your browser's own print dialog, where every desktop and mobile browser offers “Save as PDF” as a destination. There is deliberately no separate downloadable worksheet and no PDF-generating library on this page. A second document would have to be kept in step with the checklist by hand, and the first time it fell behind it would be a sheet of paper stating superseded law with our name on it. Generating one in the browser instead would mean shipping hundreds of kilobytes of JavaScript to a page whose entire proposition is that it is fast, private and free of dependencies.

What prints is a worksheet: a title block, the project details you entered, the checklist with your ticks, each statutory citation with its full URL printed alongside it, the modelled price context, the review date and the disclosure. Requirements are kept whole across page breaks, so no citation is ever separated from the requirement it supports. It is laid out for Letter and A4 and reads the same on both.

Sources

Step 1 of this tool rests entirely on the first six documents below, each read at the publisher rather than at a summary. The two registers at the end are where a licence claim on a bid is actually verified. Nothing on this page rests on a trade association's restatement of a rule or on another contractor's blog.

  1. Oregon Legislative Assembly, ORS Chapter 701 — Construction Contractors and Contracts (Oregon Revised Statutes, 2023 edition as published online) Checked

    ORS 701.305, which requires a written contract once the aggregate price of residential work exceeds $2,000; ORS 701.310, the right to cancel an initial written contract until midnight at the end of the next business day and the three circumstances that remove it; ORS 701.312, the deposit-over-50-percent probation ground; ORS 701.315, which bars a contract from limiting the right to file a CCB complaint while permitting mediation or arbitration clauses; and ORS 701.330, the consumer notice and notice of procedure forms.

    Note: The Oregon Revised Statutes are republished after each legislative session and section text can change. The edition linked is the one currently posted by the Legislature; check the section itself rather than relying on a quotation of it.

  2. Oregon Secretary of State, OAR 812-012-0110 — Terms of Written Contract (Oregon Administrative Rules, last amended CCB 6-2013, effective January 1, 2014) Checked

    The seven items a written residential construction contract must contain: the contractor’s name, address, phone number and CCB licence number; acknowledgement of the warranty offer where ORS 701.320 requires one; a conspicuous explanation of the property owner’s rights including the ability to complain to the board and the existence of any mediation or arbitration clause; the customer’s name and address; the address where the work is performed; a description of the work; and price and payment terms.

  3. Oregon Secretary of State, OAR 812-012-0130 — Delivery and Proof of Delivery of Consumer Notice (Oregon Administrative Rules) Checked

    That a contractor required to have a written contract under ORS 701.305 must deliver the Consumer Protection Notice, the Notice of Procedure, and the ORS 87.093 Information Notice to Owner on or before the date the contract is entered into, and must keep proof of delivery for two years.

  4. Oregon Legislative Assembly, ORS Chapter 87 — Statutory Liens (Oregon Revised Statutes, 2023 edition as published online) Checked

    ORS 87.093, the Information Notice to Owner About Construction Liens: what the form must explain, that the original contractor must deliver it at the time of signing a residential construction or improvement contract, and that a contractor who fails to deliver it may not claim a construction lien on the property under that contract.

    Note: Same republication caveat as ORS chapter 701.

  5. Oregon Construction Contractors Board, CCB Residential Construction Contract Checklist Explanatory summary, not the governing text Checked

    The CCB’s own plain-language restatement of the contract requirements, published for contractors to check their paperwork against. Useful as corroboration and as something to hand a contractor; the governing text is ORS 701.305 and OAR 812-012-0110.

    Note: A compliance aid published by the board, not the rule itself. Where the checklist and the rule appear to differ, the rule governs.

  6. Washington State Legislature, RCW 18.27.114 — Disclosure statement required; prerequisite to lien claim Checked

    The Washington equivalent of Oregon’s notice requirements, which is what applies in Vancouver and the rest of Clark County: a contractor working on four or fewer residential units must hand the customer the statutory NOTICE TO CUSTOMER disclosure before starting work once the bid or contract price totals $1,000 or more, and cannot maintain a lien claim without proof the customer received it.

    Note: Washington sets no equivalent of Oregon’s $2,000 written-contract requirement or its next-business-day cancellation right. Do not assume an Oregon protection crosses the river.

  7. Washington State Department of Labor & Industries, Verify a Contractor, Tradesperson or Business Checked

    The official Washington register: registration status, bond, workers compensation account standing, and lawsuits filed against the bond.

Sources last checked between and ; the date beside each one is when it was last opened. Where a figure comes from a document that is revised on a schedule, the edition or version is named above so you can confirm it against the current one yourself.

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