Fence Ledger guide
The expensive fence mistakes are almost never about materials. They are about building in the wrong place, or without asking.
Last reviewed
Mowing patterns, old hedges, a previous owner’s fence and the neighbour’s flower bed are all evidence of habit, not of ownership. They drift over decades, and they drift in whichever direction somebody was more diligent.
Your deed and the plat map give the dimensions. What they do not give is where those dimensions sit on the actual ground, which is what a survey is for: a surveyor finds or re-sets the physical pins at the corners. On a suburban lot this is a few hundred dollars and a morning.
Whether it is worth it depends on what a mistake would cost. A fence built a foot inside your line quietly gives away a strip of land the width of a path along the whole boundary. A fence built a foot over it can be ordered removed — sometimes years later, when the neighbour sells and a buyer’s survey turns it up — and the cost of that is the whole fence, twice.
Owning the land up to the line does not always mean being allowed to build up to it. Many municipalities require fences to sit back from the boundary, from the sidewalk, or from a corner where sightlines matter for traffic. Corner lots attract the strictest versions of these rules.
Front yards are frequently treated differently from back yards: lower maximum heights, sometimes a requirement that the fence be open in style rather than solid. A six-foot privacy fence that is fine along the back boundary can be disallowed along the street frontage of the same property.
None of this is guessable from the outside, and it changes between neighbouring towns.
The common triggers are height, location and material. A fence above some local height threshold usually needs one; so, often, does anything on a corner lot, anything near a right-of-way, and anything that involves a retaining element.
The thing to understand is that the permit is not the hard part. A permit application that is refused costs you a form. A fence built without one that should have had one can be ordered down at your expense, and it becomes a disclosure problem when you sell.
The convention across most of the United States is that the finished side faces your neighbour and the rails face you. Some municipalities and many homeowners associations make that a requirement rather than a courtesy.
A good-neighbour or board-on-board design sidesteps the question by putting pickets on both faces, alternating along the rails. It uses noticeably more timber — there is no way around that, the boards are genuinely there — and it looks the same from both gardens, which on a shared boundary is sometimes worth the difference on its own.
Not for permission, if the fence is entirely on your land. For three practical reasons.
The first is that they may want to share the cost, and a shared boundary fence is one of the few home improvements where that conversation is normal. The second is that they may know where the pins are, or have a survey in a drawer. The third is that a fence appearing without warning on a shared line is how boundary arguments start, and boundary arguments outlast fences.
In some places the conversation is not optional — a few jurisdictions have specific rules about boundary fences, cost-sharing, or notice. That is another question for the building department rather than for a website.
Every figure in this paragraph would be wrong for most readers: the permit threshold, the maximum height, the setback distance, whether notice is required. They vary by state, by county, by town and sometimes by street, and they change.
A calculator that printed a plausible number for any of them would be worse than one that stayed silent, because a number on a screen looks checked. So the tools here compute quantities — which are geometry and have a right answer — and stop at the point where the answer becomes local. That boundary is deliberate, and this page is what sits on the other side of it.