What are foundation and soil conditions in ZIP code 73142 (Oklahoma City)?

Reviewed by Preston · Updated 2026-11-12

In short: ZIP code 73142 is clay country: about 60% of the area is mapped in soils rated high shrink-swell ¹. The soil survey also maps bedrock within 40 inches under about 48% and occasional or frequent flooding on about 12% ¹.

What does the soil survey show for 73142?

ZIP code 73142 covers about 8 square miles of land and had 16,461 people in the 2020 Census ²; its center falls in Oklahoma City.

Which soils matter most for houses in 73142?

• Piedmont, about 23% of the area ¹: Moderately deep, well drained, very slowly permeable soils formed in material weathered from clayey and silty shale of Permian age ³.
• Renthin, about 18% of the area ¹: Deep, well drained, very slowly permeable soils formed in material weathered from clayey and silty shale of Permian age ⁴.
• Grainola, about 16% of the area ¹: Moderately deep, well drained soils that formed in material weathered from shale of Permian age ⁵.
• Ashport, about 8% of the area ¹: Very deep, well drained soils that formed in loamy alluvium of Holocene age ⁶.
• Lawrie, about 4% of the area ¹: Very deep, well drained, moderately permeable soils that formed in material weathered from loamy alluvium ⁷.
• Kirkland, about 7%, is land the survey does not rate as soil ¹.
• Water, about 3%, is open water ¹.
• Urban land, about 3%, is ground the survey maps as covered by buildings and pavement rather than classifying its soil ¹.

What does this mean for houses in 73142?

Clay that swells and shrinks. Where high shrink-swell soil sits under a house, wet spells lift the slab edges and drought drops them, and uneven watering does more harm than uniform change. See perimeter wetting heave, edge drop in drought and tree-root drying.

Shallow rock. Where bedrock is close to the surface, lots are often cut into rock on one side and built up with fill on the other, so fill settlement and slope creep matter more than clay swell, and piers can stop at very different depths across one house. See depth to rock from borings.

Flood-prone soils. Floodplain soils are layered stream deposits: softer, wetter and more variable than upland soils, and they flood. See soft soil consolidation and Quaternary alluvium and terraces.

Which soils cover 73142?

Looking for a foundation company near ZIP code 73142?

Companies that serve ZIP code 73142 can appear on the company map in the Homeowner Hub. Paid listings there are marked Sponsored; the library and the AI guide don't rank or recommend any of them.

Buying or selling a house in ZIP code 73142? Realtors who serve the area can be on the same map, also marked Sponsored, and for realtors covers the seller disclosure form, inspections and the sale timeline. Seeing cracks at home? Start with for homeowners.

How were these numbers measured?

We overlaid the ZIP code tabulation area (the Census approximation of a ZIP code) from the Census Bureau ² on the USDA soil survey's map units ¹ and added up the area of each soil. Where a map unit is a mix of soils, its area was split by the percentages the survey lists for its major soils, so shares leave out minor inclusions and do not add to 100%. Shrink-swell is rated by the linear extensibility of a soil's most expansive layer, the survey's measure of how much it changes length between wet and dry (6% or more is high). Water table, bedrock and flooding come from the survey's map-unit summaries: the shallowest water table in any month, the shallowest bedrock, and the most common flooding frequency. Bedrock here includes soft, weathered sandstone and shale that a pier can push through, so it is not the depth where piers stop. These are mapped averages, not a test of any one lot; fill, grading and the soil actually under a house can differ, which is why a site visit or soil boring still decides a repair.

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• Shrink-swell and the active zone