Fence Ledger guide
Every part of a fence just stands there except the gate, which swings, and that is why the gate is what goes wrong.
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The rest of a fence carries its weight straight down into the ground. A gate does not. Its weight hangs off one side, out at the end of an arm, and that arm is constantly trying to rotate the hinge post out of the ground and to pull the gate frame out of square.
Both failures happen at once and they compound. The post leans a degree, which drops the far corner of the gate; the gate racks slightly, which drops it further; the latch stops meeting the catch; someone lifts the gate to close it, which loads the hinges harder. Within a season it is scraping the ground.
A gate twice as wide is not twice as hard on its post. It is worse than that, because the weight has gone up and the distance that weight acts over has gone up with it. The load trying to rotate the post grows with both at once.
This is why a four-foot walk gate on a standard post is usually fine for decades and a twelve-foot drive gate on the same post is a problem from the first winter. It is also the argument for splitting a wide opening into two leaves that meet in the middle: each leaf is half the width, and the arithmetic improves much faster than the halving suggests.
It should be heavier than the line posts — a 6x6 where the fence uses 4x4 is the usual step. It should go deeper, and it should sit in a wider hole with more concrete, because the resistance to being rotated comes from the width of the footing more than its depth.
The post the gate latches onto matters less structurally but still wants to be stiff, because a latch post that flexes makes a gate feel loose even when the hinge side is perfect.
The calculators on this site count corner and gate posts separately from line posts for exactly this reason: they are not the same item, they should not be the same price on the shopping list, and treating them as interchangeable is how the gate ends up on the post that was left over.
A rectangle made of four boards is not rigid; it folds into a parallelogram, which is exactly what a sagging gate has done. A diagonal across it triangulates the frame and stops that.
Direction matters, and it is the detail most often got backwards. A wooden brace works in compression, so it runs from the bottom corner on the hinge side up to the top corner on the latch side — it props the far corner up. A steel cable or rod does the opposite job, working in tension, so it runs the other way: from the top corner on the hinge side down to the bottom on the latch side, pulling the far corner up.
Fit a wooden brace the way a cable goes and it does nothing at all. The gate sags with a brace on it, which is a peculiarly annoying way to find out.
Gate hardware is one of the few places on a fence where the budget option reliably fails. Undersized hinges bend, plated screws rust, and short fixings pull out of the post under the constant pull the gate never stops applying.
Use three hinges rather than two on anything heavy, so the load is shared. Use fixings long enough to reach real wood, not just the face of it. Buy hardware rated above the gate you are hanging rather than at it. The whole upgrade is a small share of a fence bill and it is the difference between a gate that still latches in five years and one that does not.
Leave clearance at the bottom — enough that the gate still swings when the ground heaves in winter or a path settles a little. Ground moves; gates do not forgive it.
Leave a consistent gap on the latch side, and hang the gate with the latch side very slightly high rather than level. A gate will settle a little no matter how well it is built. Starting it a few millimetres proud means it settles into square instead of settling out of it.