Fence Ledger
The calculators answer questions you already know how to ask. These are for the rest of it: what order the work happens in, which decisions are hard to undo, and where the site stops guessing and tells you to go and check.
A calculator is good at one thing: turning measurements you already have into quantities you can buy. It is useless for everything that happens before you have those measurements, and for the decisions that no arithmetic settles — which way to take a fence down a hill, whether the boundary is where the lawn stops, why the gate is the part that fails.
It is also useless for the questions that have a local answer rather than a right one. Frost depth, permit thresholds, height limits and setbacks all vary by county and sometimes by street. This site deliberately refuses to preset any of them, because a plausible-looking number on a screen reads as a checked one. The guides are where that refusal gets explained rather than just enacted — what the question actually is, why it matters, and who in your town can answer it in one phone call.
The whole job in order, with the decisions that are hard to undo marked out from the ones you can change your mind about.
6 sections · reviewed 2026-09-02
The common answer is a rule of thumb. The real answer is a local one, and this is how to find it.
8 sections · reviewed 2026-09-02
Three quotes that differ by thousands are usually three different jobs. Here is how to tell.
7 sections · reviewed 2026-09-02
Almost no yard is flat, and the two ways of dealing with that produce different-looking fences, different material lists and different amounts of swearing.
6 sections · reviewed 2026-09-26
The expensive fence mistakes are almost never about materials. They are about building in the wrong place, or without asking.
6 sections · reviewed 2026-09-26
Every part of a fence just stands there except the gate, which swings, and that is why the gate is what goes wrong.
6 sections · reviewed 2026-09-26
28 worked answers to the questions people actually type — how much fence an acre takes, how many posts a hundred feet needs, how many bags a post really uses. Each one is computed by the same engine the calculators run on rather than asserted in prose, and each carries the calculator itself so you can replace our assumptions with your own measurements and watch the number move.
Common fence questions