Why fence customers compare per foot, but you can't price that way
Customers shop fence by the linear foot, so you will always end up quoting a per-foot number. The mistake is starting there. A per-foot guess is a ballpark, and a fence business can't run on ballparks. Some farm fence owners build every job from the posts, labour, hotel and miles up, with no footage price in the sheet at all.
The per-foot price should fall out of the math at the end. A 50 ft run and a 300 ft run of the same style need very different per-foot prices, because the measure visit, the layout, the gate and the drive don't get shorter with the fence.
What does 150 ft of cedar privacy fence come to?
About $8,201 before tax in our example, or $54.70 a foot. The job: tear out an old 150 ft fence, then set 4x4 wood posts 2 ft deep in concrete, hang 2x4 rails, screw on cedar pickets (no nails), build one 4 ft walk gate and haul the old fence away.
Pickets show how the count works. 150 ft is 1,800 inches, and at 5.5 inches a picket that's 327 pickets. Order about 10% more for cracked and discolored boards, so the order is 360. Posts follow your spacing (8 ft on center is common for cedar), plus corners and two gate posts, then concrete by the hole.
| A | B | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Part of the price | Amount |
| 2 | Materials with waste | $2,547.19 |
| 3 | Labour and equipment (about 46 crew hours on site) | $2,747.67 |
| 4 | Dump fee and permit | $195.00 |
| 5 | The don't-forget list | $467.19 |
| 6 | Markup, cushion and profit | $2,244.13 |
| 7 | Price before tax | $8,201.18 |
The company keeps $2,244.13 over cost, 27% of the price. Spread over every labour hour, including the measure visit and the drive, that's $96.83 an hour against a $55.27 break-even. Sales tax goes on top and varies by state.
Pricing a fence step by step
Walk the line, count, put hours on each stage, then add the trips and the profit. This is the order the example follows.
- Walk the line with the customerMark corners, gates and anything in the way: trees, slopes, old footings. Ask about every gate, including the ones already there.
- Count the materialsPosts at your spacing, concrete by the hole, two rails per section on a 6 ft fence, pickets plus 10%, screws, gate hinges and latch.
- Put crew hours on each stageTear-out, digging and setting posts, rails, pickets, the gate and clean-up. Price the hours at your break-even rate.
- Add the outside costsThe dump fee and the permit go in with a small markup for handling them.
- Answer the don't-forget listThe measure visit, the trip back after the concrete cures, the drive and the dump run.
- Add markup and profit, then divide by the footageCheck the per-foot number against what you know sells in your area, but don't let it set the price.
Is $55 an hour enough to cover a fence crew?
It's the floor for our example company, not a target. An owner who also measures and quotes, a lead installer and a helper, carrying about $41,000 a year of overhead (yard rent for lumber, $1M liability insurance, trucks, marketing), need $55.27 for every hour spent building fence just to break even.
That's well above the common shortcut of a $25 installer wage times 1.5. The difference is the time nobody pays for: yard runs, measure visits and the owner's evenings of quoting. The fencing hourly rate page shows where the $55.27 comes from, and the free true hourly rate calculator does it for your own crew.
What fence owners charge per foot
Installed wood fence prices owners have given run from $25 to $125 a foot, depending on height and material. Each row is one owner's example, not an average.
| A | B | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fence | Per foot |
| 2 | Basic pine, installed, tear-out included | $25 to $40 |
| 3 | Cedar pickets stained both sides | $45 to $60 |
| 4 | 50 ft of 6 ft solid wood ($2,435 total) | about $48.70 |
| 5 | 150 ft cedar privacy, our example | about $54.70 |
The $2,435 short run was $822 of materials marked up by half, plus 2 men for 2 days at $25 an hour times 1.5. That builds in a healthy materials markup but a thin labour line, which only works if the crew really finishes in two days.
Staining both sides adds about $5 to $10 a foot. The example sits inside the $45 to $60 cedar range, a little above the 50 ft short run.
The second trip after the concrete cures, and other hours fence quotes miss
On the example job, the don't-forget list added $467.19 of cost before markup. None of it is posts or pickets. It's the hours and trips around the fence.
- The return trip. Posts set in concrete need to cure before rails go on, often the rest of that day and the next, so a one-day fence is really two or three.
- Crew drive time. A 3-person crew in the truck, both ways, every day of the job. A contractor who drives far will charge for the drive and fuel somewhere in the invoice, and you should too.
- The measure visit. Some fence companies charge a small fee just to come out and verify measurements. Check the county assessor's website too, so the customer's idea of the property line matches the records.
- Lumber yard runs. A crew member and a truck for part of a morning, loading posts, rails and bags of concrete that never show up on site as work.
- The dump run. Loading the old fence, the drive to the transfer station, and the fee at the gate.
- Measuring wheels, bits and auger wear. A busy estimator can wear out several measuring wheels a year, on top of layout paint and flags.
- Hotel and miles on far jobs. A farm fence job 500 miles out can mean 10 hotel nights, and the hotel and truck miles get a markup too, because arranging them is work.
Time the measure visit, the yard run and the tear-out on your next three jobs, and you'll have your own numbers instead of these.
Gates, hard holes and dump fees: where fence jobs turn into arguments
Most fence disputes come from something the quote didn't say. Three come up again and again.
The gate nobody mentioned is the classic one. A customer has an old fence with a gate replaced and never tells the contractor the gate is part of it. Ask about every gate on the walk, and write that added gates or length are priced before you build them.
Hard holes are the second: rock, old footings from the last fence, or roots. Set your own hard hole charge and cover it with a per-hole change order instead of padding every quote.
Third, haul-away. Dump fees are often assumed but not always included, so list tear-out, the dump run and the fee on their own lines. Taking a deposit once the old fence is down, around a third of the price, covers the lumber order. When a tree has grown into the old line, box the new fence around it, which adds posts and cuts a straight-line measurement misses.
Chain link, vinyl, farm fence and repairs: what we don't cover
The owner prices we found are for wood fence, so we don't quote a per-foot number for anything else. We found no chain link, vinyl or repair price we could check, and farm fence is usually priced from its costs, not per foot.
The method still works. Price one typical job of each style you sell in full, divide by its footage, and keep a small-job minimum so a 30 ft repair still pays for the truck, the measure visit and the dump run. Re-run your per-foot numbers when your lumber yard's prices move.
Building your own per-foot price list
Start from one fully priced job per style, then check each one after it's built. The Fence Pricing Calculator does the pricing in Excel or Google Sheets, with a don't-forget list for the trips above, and its Job Log compares quoted hours with what the crew actually took. For how to read that comparison, see job costing. The true hourly rate guide covers the theory behind the break-even number if you want it.