<p>Breaking away from conventional pad footing designs, stepped and sloped footings provide an innovative approach to isolated footing design. These alternative footings showcase a novel configuration that emphasizes eco-efficiency, surpassing traditional isolated pad footings in terms of sustainable and economical construction. Yet, optimization-based research on these designs remains nonexistent. This study aims to fill that gap by focusing on stepped footing optimization. A meta-heuristic genetic algorithm is used to optimize the design of isolated footings using this previously unexplored stepped footing approach, with the goal of maximizing cost savings. Two case studies from the literature are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the adopted methodology. A comparative analysis is performed between the conventional designs and their respective optimized pad and stepped footing designs. The results show that the stepped footing optimization led to a significant reduction in concrete and reinforcement, resulting in an up to 16.24% more economical section than the optimized pad footing design. Apart from cost, two environmental factors, namely carbon emissions and embodied energy, have also been included as objective functions. It is revealed that the traditionally used carbon objective results in increased emissions and higher costs compared to the superior embodied energy objective.</p>