How we calculate fence costs

We start from published data rather than a guess. The US Census Bureau’s 2022 Economic Census reports revenue and costs for NAICS 238990 — All Other Specialty Trade Contractors — the industry fence contractors are classified under, covering $82.8B across 42,325 establishments. Those ratios are where our structure comes from:

That last figure matters for what follows: only about 35.8% of what you pay — wages, their benefits, and subcontracted work — is bought in your local labour market. Everything else is bought at roughly national prices.

Construction wages vary enormously across the country — a crew costs about twice as much in Boston as in rural Mississippi. We measure that with Census County Business Patterns: construction payroll per employee in your county, against the wage where the median American lives. That covers 2,752 counties.

We then apply it only to the 35.8% that actually moves with local wages. Cedar and concrete cost about the same everywhere, so claiming a fence is 45% cheaper in a low-wage county would be false. And whatever the wage data says, we cap the adjustment at 15% below to 25% above the national rate, because a model that has never been checked against a real sale shouldn’t swing a number further than that.

If we can’t place your address, you get the unadjusted national estimate. A made-up adjustment would be worse than none.

These are our national installed rates per linear foot for a 6-foot fence, before the regional adjustment. Because we know materials are 31.2% of an installed price, we can work backwards and ask whether each rate actually buys the fence:

Every one of those implied material costs lands within about 10% of what the components actually cost at retail — pickets, rails, posts, concrete and fasteners priced up piece by piece. That check runs on demand, so a rate that stops buying the fence gets caught rather than quietly shipping.

It has never been checked against a real sale. The cost structure is what the industry as a whole spends, and the wage index is what crews as a whole earn. Neither tells us what a fence actually sold for on your street last month. No free public source does.

It doesn’t know your yard.Slope, rock, tree roots, tear-out of an old fence, gate hardware, permit rules and access all move a real quote, and some of them move it a lot. Our range exists to cover that — it isn’t a precision claim.

The material build-ups are ours.They’re assembled from retail component prices, and they’re good enough to catch a rate that’s wrong by a factor, not to price a job.

The thing that will eventually fix all of this is real prices from real contractors. Fence companies using our software set their own per-foot rates, and those are actual market prices rather than a model — as more of them come on, the model gets calibrated against reality instead of against public averages.

We're an independent fence-cost resource. We make money by connecting homeowners with local fence contractors — we don't sell or install fencing ourselves, so our ranges aren't inflated to close a sale, and there's no version of this where quoting you high helps us.