The ten most common inspection repairs cost less than buyers fear

Five of the ten items I see most often on Central Texas inspection reports add up to somewhere between $1,310 and $5,321, using the low and high ends of HomeAdvisor’s normal ranges as of June 2026. On a $525,000 house, which was the median sold price in Travis County this past July, that is a quarter of one percent to just over one percent of what you are paying. Sounds like nothing right. And yet I have watched buyers walk away from houses over exactly that list.

Those home inspection repair costs come from HomeAdvisor’s True Cost Guide, which publishes a “normal range” for each project and stamps the date it was last updated. Every repair price in this post comes from one of those guides, all of them updated between June 17 and June 20 of 2026, and I am linking each one so you can go read the page yourself. The median sold prices are ours, out of our own MLS data. The contract language, and the one contract threshold I quote, come straight off the TREC forms.

So here is the thing I have learned in the years since 2009, and it took me longer than it should have. Buyers are not scared of the repairs. They are scared of the report. Forty pages of red text does something to a person, and the reason has almost nothing to do with what is actually wrong with the house.

Why your inspection report looks so much worse than your house

Go read the first page of the form your inspector is legally required to use. It is TREC form REI 7-6, and Texas inspectors do not get to design their own. Buried in the “responsibility of the inspector” section is the sentence that explains your entire panic attack.

The inspector is not required to “prioritize or emphasize the importance of one deficiency over another.”

So a missing $138 outlet and a foundation problem that needs a structural engineer get flagged the same way, with the same checkbox, in the same font. Your inspector does not have to tell you which one is the emergency, and the form does not ask them to. That is not a knock on inspectors, it is the form doing exactly what the form is supposed to do, and honestly I would rather have it this way than have an inspector guessing at what matters to me.

It gets better. The same form requires inspectors to flag conditions that were completely legal when your house was built. REI 7-6 names nine examples out loud, and these five are the ones I run into on Central Texas reports: missing or malfunctioning ground fault and arc fault protection, ordinary glass where modern construction would call for safety glass, smoke alarms that do not work, excessive spacing between stair balusters, and gas piping that was never bonded. The form says these conditions “may not be required to be updated to meet current code requirements” and then says the potential for harm is significant enough to require inspectors to report them as Deficient anyway.

So a perfectly normal 1998 house in Austin gets written up for a stack of things that were built to code, passed inspection, and have not hurt anybody in 28 years. (My own house would light that report up like a Christmas tree, and I live there on purpose.)

Dan Ariely makes the point in Predictably Irrational that we almost never evaluate anything on its own. We judge it against whatever is sitting next to it. Put a $320 fix on the same page as an $8,133 fix, in identical formatting, and your brain files both of them under “problem.” That is the inspection report in one sentence.

What those ten inspection repairs actually cost

Here is the table. I anchored each row to the section of REI 7-6 where it shows up, because that is the order your report is in and it makes the thing easier to read side by side.

One caveat before you scroll, and I want to be straight about it. These are the ten items I see most often on Central Texas reports. I do not have a national dataset that ranks home inspection findings by frequency and I am not going to invent one to sound more authoritative. The costs are sourced and linked. Which ten made the list, and the order they are in, is my experience.

Six of those ten rows top out at $2,000 or less. Not the average, the top of the normal range. (The grading row is an hourly rate rather than a project total, so I left it out of that count.)

The math nobody does before they panic

Take the five flat-cost rows that top out under $2,000. Outlets, plumbing service, water heater fittings, wood rot, roof repair. Add the low ends and you get $1,310. Add the high ends and you get $5,321. That counts one outlet, by the way, so if your report flags four of them go ahead and add three more.

Against a $525,000 Travis County median, that top number is 1.01% of the purchase price. Against the $577,250 median inside the Austin city limits this July, it is 0.92%. You are going to spend more than that on the movers, the first insurance premium and the stuff you buy at Lowe’s the first month, and nobody has a panic attack about the Lowe’s number.

And lets be honest about which direction the risk actually runs. It is not the cheap rows at the top of the table. It is the bottom three, the panel, the foundation, and the end of life systems. Those are the ones to slow down on, and they are the easiest to skim right past, because the report gave them the same checkbox as the outlet.

What the Texas contract actually says about repairs

This is the part that surprises almost every buyer I work with, so lets go slow.

Nothing on your inspection report obligates anybody to do anything. That is not my opinion, it is printed on the form. REI 7-6 says items identified as Deficient “DO NOT obligate any party to make repairs or take other actions” and that the decision “is left up to the parties to the contract.”

Meanwhile the standard TREC contract you signed, form 20-19, has you buying the house “As Is” in Paragraph 7D. As Is means, in the contract’s own words, “the present condition of the Property with any and all defects and without warranty except for the warranties of title and the warranties in this contract.”

Ok, that sounds bad. It is not, and here is why. The same paragraph says agreeing to As Is “does not preclude Buyer from inspecting the Property under Paragraph 7A, from negotiating repairs or treatments in a subsequent amendment, or from terminating this contract during the Option Period, if any.”

So you are buying it as is, and you are also free to go ask for whatever you want, and free to leave during your option period. Those are not in tension. As Is is the default the contract falls back to, not a promise you made to never bring anything up. If you want the seller to fix specific things, Paragraph 7D box (2) is where they get written in, and the form itself warns you not to insert general phrases “such as ‘subject to inspections’ that do not identify specific repairs and treatments.” Vague asks do not survive contact with a title company.

There is exactly one place the standard contract puts a dollar threshold on repairs, and I want to be precise about it because the scope matters. Paragraph 7E says that if the cost of lender required repairs exceeds 5% of the sales price, the buyer may terminate and get the earnest money back. That is lender required repairs only. It is not a threshold on your inspection list, and your inspection report does not trigger it. I bring it up purely for scale. On a $525,000 house, 5% is $26,250, and those same five under-$2,000 rows at their absolute worst come to about a fifth of that. Different mechanism entirely, but it does put the size of the number in perspective.

Repair, credit, or nothing

When something on the list is genuinely worth raising, you have three moves. Weigh all three before you pick, because asking the seller to fix it is the obvious move and it is not automatically the best of the three.

Ask the seller to repair it. This sounds like the safe choice and it is the one of the three with the most strings attached. Paragraph 7F says that unless the two of you agree otherwise in writing, the seller has to finish the work before closing, pull any required permits, use somebody licensed or commercially engaged in that trade, hand you documentation showing the scope of the work and proof of payment, and arrange the transfer of any transferable warranties to you at closing. That is a real standard, and it protects you. It also means the seller is picking the contractor, and a seller who has already mentally moved to Colorado is optimizing for cheap and fast, not for the guy you would have hired. If they blow the deadline, 7F lets you use your Paragraph 15 remedies or push closing up to 5 days.

Ask for a credit or a price reduction instead. You pick the contractor. You decide whether to do it at all. You control the timing. The tradeoff is that you are now paying for it out of your own pocket, after closing, which is not usually when a buyer is feeling flush.

Do nothing. For the six rows I told you to ignore, meaning outlets, plumbing, water heater fittings, grading, wood rot and roof repair, this is usually the right answer in the negotiation, and it is the answer that keeps your credibility intact for the rows that actually move money. But doing nothing in the deal is not the same as doing nothing ever, and the grading row is the one to watch there. Do not spend a repair request on it. Then go fix it your first month anyway, because water sitting against a slab in this soil is how the expensive row further down that table gets started. A repair request with fourteen line items on it tells a seller you are nervous. A repair request with one line item on it, backed by a structural engineer’s letter, tells a seller you are serious.

I do not have a rule for picking between those three that works on every deal. What I have is a habit: I get a real bid on the expensive item before we ask for anything, and then we ask for one thing. That is not that hard right. But it takes a few days, which is why the option period exists and why I get twitchy when buyers spend the first four days of it deciding whether to schedule the inspection.

The three biggest numbers on that list

The panel I mentioned earlier is a safety call more than a money call, so it gets raised for a different reason. On pure dollars, these are the three that move a deal.

Foundation is the obvious one. Central Texas clay does what Central Texas clay does, and the range on that HomeAdvisor page runs $2,225 to $8,133 with the page’s own note that some jobs reach $16,000. The $340 to $780 you spend on a structural engineer is the best money you will spend in your option period, because an engineer will tell you whether you are looking at movement or at a slab that settled 20 years ago and stopped. REI 7-6 points you there itself. When further evaluation is needed, the form makes it the client’s responsibility to “obtain further evaluations and/or cost estimates from qualified service professionals” on items reported Deficient, and it recommends that happen “prior to the expiration of any contractual time limitations, such as option periods.” Once you own the place, watering your slab through the summer and getting the drainage right are two of the cheapest things you can do for it.

Roof is the second, and in this market it is tangled up with insurance in a way it was not five years ago. A roof at the end of its life is not just a $5,902 to $13,374 problem, it is a “will a carrier write this house at all” problem. That is its own conversation, and we wrote it up separately, because an insurance quote can end a purchase just as fast as a foundation can. If your quote comes back weird, understand why before your option period runs out. It is also worth reading what a post storm roof inspection actually gets you.

Air conditioning is the third, and in Austin it is not a comfort item. A 16 year old system that passes an inspection in March is a different animal in August. $3,887 to $8,073 for a replacement is real money, and a system near the end is one of the few things where I will push a buyer to ask, even if the inspector only wrote up a dirty condensate line. (Ask me how I know. Or better, do not, my wife still brings it up.)

What I actually tell buyers now

Read the report twice. First pass, do not make a list, do not add anything up, just read it. Second pass, sort every item into three buckets: safety, water, and money. Safety and water get a phone call to a trade. Money gets a bid. Everything else goes on a weekend list for after you move in, and if some of it never gets done, that is fine, because it was fine when the last owner lived there too.

Then go look at the number. Not the page count. The number. If you want a second read on a report before you make a decision, we went through the ten things that get flagged on almost every Texas report separately, and we have written up how to use AI to work through one and a longer Central Texas inspection checklist, plus a full guide to home inspections in Austin and one on choosing the inspector in the first place.

At Neuhaus Realty Group the repair conversation is most of what we do in the option period, whether the house is in Lakeway, Bee Cave, Dripping Springs or inside the city. Deciding between a repair, a credit and letting it go is a judgment call, and it is a lot easier to make when somebody has read a few hundred of these reports.

Bring me the report

If you are staring at forty pages of red text right now and trying to decide whether to ask, walk, or let it go, send it over. I would rather spend twenty minutes telling you the house is fine than watch you lose one you liked over the $1,310 at the cheap end of that table.

Get in touch with our team or reach Ed Neuhaus directly. Be safe, be good, and be nice to people.