Hillside Lift Cost

Think of a hillside elevator as a small car that travels up and down a slope. It moves people, and often bags or gear too, between a house and a lake, a beach, or a yard farther down the hill. Under the national elevator code, these machines count as inclined elevators, which just means the car travels at an angle instead of straight up.

One installer describes two main designs:

• Cable lift: a cable supported by two anchors holds the car above the slope.
• Track lift: a track attached to the slope guides the car along the ground.

Cars start as small as a 3-by-3-foot platform and go up to 5 by 8 feet. Open and enclosed cars are both available.

Companies use plenty of names for this same machine. One manufacturer treats its easy climber elevator as identical to an inclined elevator, a hillside lift, a hill tram, or a lake tram. So when you compare quotes, you can treat these names as one product.

This table gathers published prices for lifts that carry people up a slope or between outdoor levels.

Those hillside numbers come from a homeowner forum post about a tram built to carry as many as four riders, or a load of 800 pounds. That $60,000 starting point comes from the Journal of Light Construction. For the stairs lift, the source is HomeGuide, and a dealer supplied the outdoor elevator figure.

Distance drives the cost more than anything else. One manufacturer states that how far the car must climb and how long the track must be matter most. That manufacturer has no public price list, so your own slope will need its own quote.

How steep the slope is counts too. Another manufacturer explains that a steeper slope makes the job harder, and the firm has fitted lifts on slopes as sharp as an 80-degree pitch. One job involved a lift that ran more than 200 feet on a 57-degree grade.

Cars range from a small 3-by-3-foot open platform to an enclosed 5-by-8-foot cabin, so ask each company to price the size you actually need.

Once the lift is installed, plan on yearly upkeep. The building journal puts hillside lift maintenance and inspection at about $500 a year. Angi reports $300 to $760 a year for home elevators generally, averaging $510.

Stairs built down a slope run roughly one-third to one-half of what a hillside elevator costs. They do not last as long either.

For every kind of home elevator, this site gathers the price ranges that sources publish. We line up all the published low prices and take the middle one, do the same with the high prices, and round both to the nearest $500. The full home elevator range rests on 51 published ranges. Hillside lift prices come directly from the sources linked on this page.

For home elevators, platform lifts usually cost the least, about $5,000 to $20,000 installed. On a slope, a lift running along stairs you already have undercuts a full hillside tram in price.

An inclined elevator is the code name for a hillside lift, so the prices are the same: a simple lift with 100 feet of track starts at about $60,000, and one homeowner's quotes for a four-person tram ran $50,000 to $90,000. A platform lift that rides along an outdoor staircase costs less, about $15,000 to $35,000.

Often, yes. Manufacturers sell slope lifts as an easy climber elevator, a hill tram or a lake tram, and all of them climb a rail or cable up the hill. A stair lift also climbs, but on a rail fixed to the stairs inside the house; the stair lift and home elevator comparison prices that one.

A home elevator serving two floors usually lands in the $30,000 to $50,000 range, installed. Each floor beyond two adds about $9,000 to $15,000.