Fence installation cost dataset

Why the price per foot falls with length

A 6 ft wood privacy fence with 4 corners, 2 end posts and one walk gate. Nothing changes down this column except the length of the run, so every dollar of difference in the right-hand column is fixed cost being spread over more feet.

Three mechanisms produce that curve and all three are line items you can read below: the delivery of material, which barely changes between a short job and a long one; the crew mobilisation, which is loading, driving, running a string line and coming back; and the corner, end and gate posts, whose number follows the shape of the enclosure and not its size. Four corners are four corners at 40 ft and at 400.

The five materials over the same 150 feet

Same length, same 6 ft height, same 4 corners and same gate. The post spacing column is the reason two of these need more holes than the others: it comes from the panel width or the mesh span the material will carry, and it decides how much of the job is digging.

What one change to the job adds

Every row is the 150 ft fence above with exactly one answer changed, and every dollar in the right-hand column is the difference between two runs of the model rather than a figure anyone typed. The base is $6,655, in a range of $4,595 to $8,714.

Note what the two gate rows do to the fence itself: a gate opening is not fence. A walk gate takes 4 ft of line out of the run and a double takes 12 ft, so the material and the hanging hours are counted on what is left. The posts and the concrete are not reduced, because those posts exist and they are among the most expensive on the job.

Line items

Conditional lines appear only when the corresponding answer is yes. The five run lines are mutually exclusive, one per material, and they are priced per foot of run at four feet high and then scaled by height. Labour lines carry the trade whose published wage pays for them. Two units are worth reading before the numbers: the run lines are quoted in four-foot-equivalent feet, so a six-foot fence shows more of them than the fence is long, and terminal posts are counted in corner-post equivalents — a corner is 1, an end post 0.7 and each gate adds two at 1 — so that quantity is often fractional on purpose.

The reasoning behind each figure

Written out so a fence contractor can point at the exact assumption that is wrong. A number with no reasoning behind it cannot be corrected. Where a line touches a pool enclosure it prices work and nothing else: what a barrier has to be is set by your local code and answered by your local building department, and CPSC, Pools and Spas is linked as a federal publisher of guidance, not as the source of any figure here.

Material delivery and small-order freightestimated, ±51%

• Posts, rails, panels and concrete arrive on a flatbed or a lumber truck, and the charge for bringing them barely changes between a forty-foot job and a two-hundred-foot one.
• This is the first of the three mechanisms on this page that do not scale with length, and together they are why a short fence costs so much more per foot than a long one.
• The band is delivery distance and whether the yard treats it as a small order, which most of them do below a full truck. It is a supply-yard freight schedule, not a trade wage, so it carries no regional adjustment and will be wrong in both directions at the extremes.

Crew mobilisation: load, travel, set out the line, unload

• Four hours that happen on every job and on no invoice: loading the truck, driving out, walking the line with a tape and a string, pulling the string tight, unloading and coming back at the end.
• It is fixed, so on a forty-foot run it is a large share of the bill and on a two-hundred-foot run it disappears into the noise. That is the mechanism this calculator exists to show.
• The wage is official BLS data adjusted to your area, with one caveat this page will not hide: BLS publishes a fence erector wage (SOC 47-4031) for only 65 of the 530 areas in our index, so in most of the country this hour is priced from the broader construction and extraction group for your own area instead; the four hours are our estimate.

Second visit: come back once the post concrete has gone off

• A panel fence is two visits, not one: day one is the string line and the post concrete, day two is hanging the panels once the posts will not move when a panel is pushed against them.
• Three hours of loading, driving and setting out again. It is the same fixed cost as the first mobilisation and it lands on vinyl and ornamental aluminium, where the panel has to meet a post that is already set in the ground.
• A board fence can often be finished the same day with fast-setting mix, which is why this line is zero on wood and chain link. The wage is official BLS data adjusted to your area, with one caveat this page will not hide: BLS publishes a fence erector wage (SOC 47-4031) for only 65 of the 530 areas in our index, so in most of the country this hour is priced from the broader construction and extraction group for your own area instead; the three hours are our estimate.

Chain link fabric, line posts, top rail and fittingsestimated, ±36%

• Galvanised mesh, line posts, top rail, tension wire, tension bars and the bands that hold it all together. The terminal posts and the gates are their own lines below and are not counted twice here.
• The floor is counter arithmetic at four feet high: a fifty-foot roll of 11.5-gauge fabric is about 2.20 $ a foot, top rail about 1.05 $, a line post every ten feet about 1.40 $, ties and fittings about 0.40 $. The top is 9-gauge vinyl-coated fabric on heavier posts.
• Priced per foot of run at four feet high and scaled by height, because a six-foot fence is a foot and a half of material for every foot of a four-foot one. Both ends of the band are nationally shipped commodities and carry no regional adjustment.

Wood picket fence material: line posts, rails, pickets and fastenersestimated, ±37%

• Pressure-treated line posts, two or three rails and spaced pickets, with hot-dip galvanised or stainless fasteners because plain steel bleeds rust down a fence in one wet season.
• The band is species and grade: pressure-treated pine at the bottom, cedar or redwood at the top, which is roughly a doubling for the same fence.
• Priced per foot of run at four feet high and scaled by height. Terminal posts, gates and any kickboard are separate lines.

Wood privacy fence material: line posts, rails, boards and fastenersestimated, ±36%

• A solid board fence uses roughly twice the timber of a picket of the same height, because there are no gaps, and it usually carries a third rail so the boards do not cup.
• The band is species and grade, from pressure-treated pine to cedar, and whether the boards are dog-ear stock or a board-on-board layout that overlaps and uses a third again as much wood.
• Priced per foot of run at four feet high and scaled by height. Timber is a national commodity here; the labour that installs it is not, and it is on a separate line. Terminal posts, gates and any kickboard are separate lines too.

Vinyl privacy panels, line posts, rails and capsestimated, ±37%

• Extruded PVC panels that slot into routed posts, with caps and internal aluminium stiffeners in the bottom rail on the taller panels. Post caps come with the system, which is why there is no separate cap line on vinyl.
• The band is wall thickness and whether the vinyl carries a real UV package. The cheap end of this market goes chalky and brittle in about a decade in southern sun, which is the whole reason the band is this wide.
• Priced per foot of run at four feet high and scaled by height. Terminal posts and gates are separate lines.

Ornamental aluminium panels, line posts and bracketsestimated, ±33%

• Welded powder-coated panels in six-foot sections with routed or bracketed posts and caps included. Panels come in fixed lengths, so the posts land every six feet whether the run wants them there or not.
• The floor is counter arithmetic at four feet high: a six-foot residential section is 90 to 130 $, which is 15 to 22 $ a foot of panel alone, and a line post every six feet adds another 4 to 7 $ a foot. The top is heavy commercial grade with a long coating warranty.
• Priced per foot of run at four feet high and scaled by height. Terminal posts and gates are separate lines.

Rot board along the bottom and a cap rail along the topestimated, ±26%

• A pressure-treated 2x8 laid on edge along the ground under the boards and a 2x4 cap across the top. The rot board is what keeps the ends of the boards out of the wet soil, and it is the reason a fence built this way outlives one that is not.
• It is close to standard practice on solid board fences in the south-east, and it is one of the things that makes two quotes for the same fence differ by a quarter without either of them being wrong.
• The band is pressure-treated pine at the bottom and cedar at the top. It adds about nine per cent to the run labour as well, which is on the labour line rather than here.

Corner, end and gate posts: heavier section, bracing and capsestimated, ±68%

• A corner post is not a line post in a different place. It takes pull from two directions at once, so it is a heavier section, it gets a brace or a truss back to the next post, and it carries the bands, the caps and the hinge plates.
• Counted in corner-post equivalents, because an end post is not a corner: a corner counts 1 and braces in two planes, an end counts 0.7 and braces in one, and each gate adds two posts at 1. That count follows the SHAPE of the enclosure, not its length, which is why a forty-foot fence with four corners and a gate is not a fifth of a two-hundred-foot one.
• The band spans a treated 4x4x10 with a cap and a brace at 30 $ at the bottom and a routed vinyl or heavy aluminium gate post with a steel insert well past 150 $ at the top. The run lines above price line posts only, so nothing here is counted twice.

Fence erector: dig, plumb, brace and set the terminal posts

• Just under an hour per corner-post equivalent: a wider and deeper hole than a line post, the post plumbed in two planes rather than one, a temporary brace nailed on, and concrete mixed and placed before anything else can be pulled tight against it.
• An end post is quicker than a corner and counts 0.7 here for the same reason it does on the hardware line: one brace instead of two, and one direction of pull to fight.
• Difficult ground adds forty per cent to this line, because a terminal hole is the one you cannot move sideways to avoid a rock. The wage is official BLS data adjusted to your area, with one caveat this page will not hide: BLS publishes a fence erector wage (SOC 47-4031) for only 65 of the 530 areas in our index, so in most of the country this hour is priced from the broader construction and extraction group for your own area instead; the hours per post are our estimate.

Bagged concrete for the post holesestimated, ±29%

• Counted from hole volume, not from habit. A line post on a four-foot fence is an eight-inch hole two feet deep, which is 0.70 cubic feet less what the post itself displaces; a fifty-pound bag yields 0.375 cubic feet, so it is 1.3 bags. A terminal hole at the same height is ten inches by thirty and takes 2.4.
• Scaled by the square of the height, because a taller fence needs a hole that is both deeper and wider and volume goes with the diameter squared: a six-foot fence is 2.9 bags for a line post and 5.4 for a terminal, and a twenty-three-hole job like the default one is closer to ninety bags than to sixty.
• This is the line people forget when they price a fence themselves, and it is two tons of material that has to be carried from the truck to every hole. The band is bagged mix at a big-box price against a contractor yard price, plus fast-setting mix against standard, which costs more and lets the crew hang panels the same day. Watch the unit: the bag on this page is 50 lb, and the one stacked at a contractor yard is usually 60 or 80.

Post caps for a wood fenceestimated, ±50%

• A flat treated cap keeps water out of the end grain of a post, which is where a wood post rots first. Trivial money and the first line a homeowner compares between two quotes, which is why it is on the page instead of buried inside the run band.
• The band is a plain pressure-treated cap at the bottom and a copper or black-metal ball cap at the top, and it is the cheapest place on this page to spend money on how the fence looks.
• Zero on vinyl and ornamental aluminium, where the caps come with the system, and on chain link, where the fittings line already carries the bullet caps.

Fence erector: set line posts, hang the run and pull it true

• The part that does scale with length: hole after hole at the panel spacing, posts set to the string, rails cut and fixed, then boards, panels or mesh hung and pulled true. The gate openings are taken out of the length first, because there is no fence to hang across a gate.
• Rate per foot changes with the material — mesh goes up fastest, board-by-board privacy fence slowest — and rises about eight per cent for every foot of height above four. A kickboard and cap rail add about nine per cent.
• Difficult ground adds thirty per cent. The wage is official BLS data adjusted to your area, with one caveat this page will not hide: BLS publishes a fence erector wage (SOC 47-4031) for only 65 of the 530 areas in our index, so in most of the country this hour is priced from the broader construction and extraction group for your own area instead; the hours per foot are our estimate, and they are the number a homeowner doing it themselves would be replacing with their own weekends.

Labourer: spread or barrow away the spoil from the post holes

• Twenty-odd holes for a six-foot fence bring up something like a cubic yard and a half of soil, and once the concrete is in the hole the soil has nowhere to go back to.
• A few minutes a hole to barrow it to a corner of the plot and rake it out. Where it cannot be spread it goes in the trailer instead, which costs more than this line and is not modelled.
• The wage is official BLS data adjusted to your area, with one caveat this page will not hide: BLS publishes a fence erector wage (SOC 47-4031) for only 65 of the 530 areas in our index, so in most of the country this hour is priced from the broader construction and extraction group for your own area instead; the minutes per hole are our estimate.

Powered auger on a skid steer, in rock or heavy roots

• Machine rates are FEMA cost codes 8541 and 8280, which exclude the operator. The operator is the next line, priced from BLS wage data instead of hidden inside the machine rate.
• Only where the ground defeats a two-man auger: rock, hardpan, old roots or a slope that has to be benched. On normal soil this line is zero and the holes come out of the run labour above.
• Charged with a floor of eight machine-hours because nobody rents a skid steer for four: a half day is the smallest unit the hire market sells, and a job that augers for four hours still pays for the half day.

Fence erector operating the auger

• Roughly one machine-hour for every five holes, which is the pace once the machine has been floated in and walked round the line.
• These are the hours somebody is actually stood on the machine, and they are fewer than the hours the machine is on hire: the half-day minimum on the line above is a rental term, not work.
• The wage is official BLS data adjusted to your area, with one caveat this page will not hide: BLS publishes a fence erector wage (SOC 47-4031) for only 65 of the 530 areas in our index, so in most of the country this hour is priced from the broader construction and extraction group for your own area instead; the pace is our estimate.

Float the machine in and outestimated, ±39%

• A skid steer does not drive itself to a back garden: it arrives on a trailer behind a truck and it leaves the same way, and the round trip is a line on every hire invoice.
• The band is distance from the yard and whether the hire company delivers or the contractor owns the trailer. It is charged once per job, not per hour, which is another of the reasons a short fence costs more per foot.
• Only in difficult ground, which is the only case on this page that brings a machine to the site at all.

Walk gate leaf, hinges and latchestimated, ±60%

• A single-leaf gate is a fixed price per unit and it is worth more than twenty feet of plain fence. It is the part that moves, so it is the part with a frame, diagonal bracing, hinges and a latch.
• The band is material and frame: a framed chain-link gate with hardware does not come in under 190 $, and a six-foot cedar leaf with a reinforced frame or a steel-cored vinyl one runs to 750 $.
• The four feet of line this gate occupies are taken out of the fence run rather than charged twice. Hinges and latch are included here; self-closing pool hardware is a separate line because it is a different specification, not an upgrade.

Double drive gate: two leaves, drop rod and heavy hardwareestimated, ±67%

• Two leaves spanning ten to sixteen feet, with a drop rod into a sleeve in the ground, heavy hinges and a cane bolt. Everything about it is bigger, including the posts it hangs from.
• The band is span and material, and the top of it is a welded ornamental pair wide enough for a truck, which is a 2,500 to 3,500 $ item today and not the 2,100 $ this line used to say.
• The twelve feet of line it occupies are taken out of the fence run rather than charged twice. Automation is not included: an operator, a safety loop and the power to reach it are a separate job and a separate trade.

Fence erector: hang and adjust the gates

• Two and a half hours for a walk gate and five for a double, which is time spent making something swing straight and latch every time rather than time spent installing it.
• A gate that drops half an inch in its first summer is the single most common complaint about a new fence, and it is nearly always hinge adjustment rather than a bad gate.
• Self-closing pool hardware adds a little over half an hour per gate, because tensioned hinges have to be set and the latch adjusted until it catches every time.
• The wage is official BLS data adjusted to your area, with one caveat this page will not hide: BLS publishes a fence erector wage (SOC 47-4031) for only 65 of the 530 areas in our index, so in most of the country this hour is priced from the broader construction and extraction group for your own area instead; the hours per gate are our estimate.

Closing the gaps to pool-barrier spacingestimated, ±64%

• A fence that encloses a pool is not quoted like a garden fence, and one of the things that changes is how much gap the barrier is allowed to have. On a picket fence closing it up is close to doubling the number of pickets; on chain link it is a tighter fabric, which means a different roll; on ornamental aluminium it is not infill at all but a different panel, with closer pickets or an added bottom rail.
• That spread is the whole band: 2.50 to 5 $ a foot of extra pickets in treated pine, 6 to 8 $ in cedar, and 6 to 12 $ a foot for the panel change on aluminium.
• Solid privacy fences have no gaps to close, so this line is zero on wood privacy and vinyl. That is one of the few places where the more expensive fence is the cheaper answer.
• What your local pool barrier code requires — height, spacing, ground clearance, gate specification — is set by your jurisdiction and answered by your local building department, before you build. This line prices work; it does not tell you what your code says or whether what you build will pass.

Self-closing hinges and self-latching gate hardwareestimated, ±46%

• Gate hardware is one of the things a pool barrier code deals with, and what is priced here is the product sold for it: a self-latching catch and hinges that pull the leaf shut on their own. It is a different specification from a garden gate latch, not a better version of one.
• One set per gate, and the floor is what the parts actually cost: a magnetic self-latching catch is 75 to 110 $ on its own and it needs two tensioned self-closing hinges at 30 to 45 $ each, so a set that works starts around 130 $. The top of the band is a key-lockable set with an alarm contact.
• It is one of the cheaper lines on this page and the only one whose failure mode is not financial. Whether your barrier and its gate satisfy your local code is a question for your local building department, and this page does not answer it.

Labourer: pull the old fence and dig out the post footings

• Taking a fence down is quick; getting the old concrete footings out of the ground is not, and it is the part that decides how long this takes. A rotted wood post snaps off and leaves a lump of concrete exactly where the new post wants to go.
• So it is counted the way it happens: two hours to set up, about two and a half minutes per foot of dismantling, and around twenty-five minutes per old footing dug out with a bar and a chain. On a hundred and fifty feet with twenty-odd posts that is the best part of two days for one man, and the earlier version of this line said ten hours.
• This is hours, not a haulage price: the wage is official BLS data adjusted to your metropolitan area. Loading the trailer, driving it and the tipping charge are the two lines below.

Dump truck and driver: haul the old fence to the transfer station

• FEMA cost code 8720, a Freightliner M2 class dump truck. The FEMA rate explicitly excludes the operator, so the driver hours are added separately from BLS wage data rather than hidden inside the machine rate.
• Three hours for the round trip of a single load: pull out, drive, queue, weigh, tip and come back. Broken fence with concrete footings on it fills a load about every two hundred and fifty feet.
• Driving is a local service and it moves with your metropolitan area, which is exactly why it is hours of a named occupation here and not a flat dollar figure. The gate fee itself is the next line.

Landfill tipping fee for the old fenceestimated, ±45%

• What the transfer station charges at the gate, priced per foot of old fence because that is what predicts the weight: a hundred and fifty feet of board fence with twenty concrete footings on it weighs two to three tons.
• At 50 to 95 $ a ton that is 0.65 to 1.90 $ a foot, and the floor is above the arithmetic because almost every site charges a one-ton minimum load whether you bring one ton or half of it. The top adds the surcharge where pressure-treated timber has to go to a separate stream.
• The tipping fee is genuinely local and this band is national: it is the least regionally honest number on the page, and it is the one to check against your own county before you trust the removal total. The driving that gets it there is priced as hours on the line above, where the regional index does reach it.

Stain or penetrating sealer for a wood fenceestimated, ±61%

• Both faces of the fence, so the quantity is length times height times two. A privacy fence has a back that faces someone else and it weathers at the same rate as the front.
• The floor is a clear water repellent at 30 $ a gallon covering 250 sq ft, which is 0.12 $ a foot. The top is a pigmented semi-transparent stain at 48 to 70 $ a gallon covering 125 to 175 sq ft, because sawn fence timber drinks it: that is 0.32 to 0.50 $ a foot, and on 1,800 sq ft of face the difference between the two ends of this band is several hundred dollars.
• Pigment is what stops ultraviolet light breaking down the surface fibres, so the expensive end lasts roughly twice as long. New pressure-treated timber often has to dry for weeks before it will take anything, so this is a separate visit and the setting-up time for it is on the labour line below.

Painter: mask, apply and back-brush the finish

• About two hundred square feet of fence face an hour: spray and then back-brush, because sprayed stain that is not brushed in sits on the surface and lifts off in the first hard rain.
• Plus an hour and a half for the visit itself, because staining happens weeks after the fence goes up and it is its own trip, its own set-up and its own masking of whatever is behind the fence — which on a boundary is usually someone else garden, and is the reason this is slower than painting a wall.
• The wage is official BLS data adjusted to your area, with one caveat this page will not hide: BLS publishes a fence erector wage (SOC 47-4031) for only 65 of the 530 areas in our index, so in most of the country this hour is priced from the broader construction and extraction group for your own area instead; the coverage rate and the set-up time are our estimate.

Not included in this dataset

Permit fees and homeowner association approval

Most jurisdictions require a permit for a fence over a certain height, and many enforce a setback from the property line, a maximum height at the front of the lot and a rule about which side the finished face has to point. An association may add its own approval on top. Fees and rules vary with no national source and are excluded rather than averaged.

A property line survey

A fence built six inches over the line is a fence that comes down, and the only thing that establishes where the line is, is a licensed survey. It is a professional service priced by the local market and by how bad the existing records are, and it is not something a postcode predicts.

Whether your pool barrier complies

This page prices the extra work and the extra hardware a pool enclosure needs. It does not tell you what your code requires. Height, spacing between elements, ground clearance and gate specification are set by your local code and answered by your local building department, and they are the only authority on whether what you build passes. The CPSC publishes guidance on residential pool barriers and it is linked on this page as a starting point, not as the source of any figure here.

Locating buried utilities

Every post hole is a hole in ground that may have a gas line, a service lateral or an irrigation main in it. The public locate call is free in most of the country and is not a cost line, but it is not optional either, and no figure on this page assumes anyone skipped it.

Clearing the fence line

Removing trees, grinding stumps, cutting back a hedge or moving a shed so the crew can get a truck and a string line down the boundary is separate work. Difficult ground on this page means what is under the surface, not what is standing on it.

Retaining walls and regrading

Where the ground falls steeply the fence either steps down or racks with the slope, and sometimes the real answer is a retaining wall first. That is structural work priced by the square foot of wall, not the foot of fence.

Gate automation and electricity

An operator for a drive gate, its safety loop, its keypad and the power to reach the end of a driveway are a separate trade and a separate permit. The drive gate line here prices a gate that a person opens.

Hauling the hole spoil away

The soil that comes out of the post holes is modelled as being spread on the plot, which is what happens on most jobs. Where there is nowhere to put it, it goes in a trailer and out to a fill site, and that is a haulage cost this page does not carry.