Fence Ledger
What a wood fence costs, as a range with its sources attached — and what to enter if you want a figure specific to your own supplier.
These are typical values, not requirements. Post depth in particular is governed by your local frost line and building code — check before you dig.
National planning ranges compiled from published US construction cost guides, last checked September 2026 (confidence: medium). Prices vary sharply by region, season and contractor. These are estimates for planning, not quotes.
Sources: homeguide.com, calcsummit.com, latestcost.com, angi.com, ergeon.com, homewyse.com, fenceadvisors.com
| Material | Size | Quantity |
|---|---|---|
| Posts | 4x4 | 21 |
| Rails incl. waste | 2x4 | 63 |
| Pickets incl. waste | 1x6 | 336 |
| Concrete mix | 35bags | |
| Gravel | 8bags | |
| Exterior screws | ≈2,200 | |
| Walk gate kit | 1 |
Published sources for installed wood fence disagree by roughly three to one, and they are not wrong. A single number would be easier to read and would be a fiction.
The figures here come from independent US cost guides, and each one carries its sources and collection date on the page. Two readings were excluded and the reasons recorded rather than averaged away: one guide prices across cheaper fence styles instead of isolating privacy fence, and one is an installation company quoting its own service rather than surveying the market.
What took longer to see is that most of the remaining spread is not noise. It is three specific things, each of which you can pin down for your own project — and the rest of this page is about all three.
The choice between pressure-treated pine and cedar moves the per-foot figure more than region, more than crew, more than anything else you can name. Pine is the volume product and sits at the bottom of every range; cedar carries a premium for its natural rot resistance and the way it weathers.
Two independent sources put cedar at roughly 1.4 to 1.9 times pine. They disagree on the absolute dollars — one reads considerably lower than the other on both woods — so the ratio is the part worth trusting, and it is why the calculator above offers the choice rather than averaging the two into one meaningless band.
A third guide inverts the relationship entirely, putting cedar below pine. It also contradicts its own privacy-fence figure on the same page, so it is excluded from the species data while its height figures are still used. That is recorded in the price data, not decided quietly here.
A taller fence is not simply more boards. It needs another rail to stop the pickets bowing, longer posts, deeper holes and more concrete in each one, and it catches enough more wind that the whole assembly has to be stiffer. The cost does not scale with the height; it scales faster.
One guide puts the step from a four-foot fence to a six-foot one at 30 to 50 percent. Another quotes eight-foot privacy fence at roughly one and a half to twice its own six-foot figure.
Almost everything published quotes six feet, because that is what most people build. So the calculator prices six and eight feet from real sources, and where you ask for a height nobody quotes, it says so beside the number instead of passing the six-foot rate off as an answer.
Labour runs somewhere around five to twenty-five dollars a linear foot, which on a typical job is a comparable amount to everything you would buy. That gap is the whole of the DIY saving, and it looks better on paper than it feels in a garden.
The honest way to read the two numbers is as a wage: divide the difference by the days it will take you. Many people do the panels themselves and pay someone with an auger to set the posts, which is where most of the labour actually is.
Three sources say the Northeast and West Coast run above the Midwest and South. That much is consistent, and it matches what anyone who has priced building work in both places would expect.
How much above is another matter. One puts it at five to fifteen percent. One implies about fifty. The third lands between them. That is an order of magnitude of disagreement about the same effect.
So this site publishes the direction and refuses to publish a multiplier. A regional adjustment factor would look like precision and would be a coin toss. If you want your own number, the fastest route is two quotes from local contractors, which also tells you what the ranges here cannot.
Removing an existing fence is quoted anywhere from three to twenty dollars a foot. The floor is agreed by every source; the ceiling is not, and the reason is worth knowing — the high figures include hauling the old fence away and the tip fees, and the low ones do not. That is a difference in what is being bought, not a difference of opinion about price. Ask which one you are being quoted.
Stain or sealer is the other line that vanishes from comparisons, at roughly a dollar fifty to three dollars a foot. Both are switches on the calculator above rather than assumptions baked into the headline, so you can see exactly what each one adds.
National ranges cannot know what your merchant charges this week. Every material on the shopping list accepts your own unit price, and anything you enter takes precedence over our figures.
That is the version worth taking to a quote conversation: a full material list, priced at what your supplier actually charges, with the labour left as a range.