How much does fence installation cost?

Price a fence by material and length, then hold it against two numbers somebody actually measured: what US households told the Census a completed fencing job cost, and what two state transportation departments paid, per linear foot, for the chain link they buy by the mile.

§ 01 Your numbers

Change anything. The answer updates as you type.

Fence material and height

Picking a material sets the two lines below, which are what the estimate is actually built from.

Those two lines are our own build-up rather than a published price. There is a published price to check the total against, and it is on this page: Florida and Texas DOT both pay about $21 a linear foot for installed six-foot chain link, on awarded contracts. Ours prices a lighter four-foot fence, so it should land below that. Chain link is the cheapest thing here and the most searched.

Fence length in linear feet

Pace it out. Three sides of a typical suburban back yard runs roughly 140 to 160 feet. A full acre perimeter is about 835 feet.

Materials per linear foot

Set by the material above, and it is our estimate rather than a statistic.

The producer price index tells you the industry that makes chain link fencing has raised its prices 30% since 2021; it can never tell you what a foot of it costs. Replace this with a real supplier quote if you have one, and the total will move with it.

Installation labor per linear foot

Set by the material above. This is the one modeled line with a measured rate behind it: about 0.09 crew-hours a foot for chain link at the $116 per field hour the Economic Census says NAICS 238990 firms actually bill. The crew-hours are ours; the rate is not.

Gates

Walk gates. A gate is the part people forget, and it costs many times what the same span of plain fence costs.

Cost per gate

Set by the material above. Covers the gate, its posts and hardware, and about an hour of hanging it. A double driveway gate runs roughly twice this.

Old fence to take out?

AHS calls this job 'added or replaced' fencing, and a great many are replacements. Tearing out old posts and paying the dump is real money.

Ground conditions

The single biggest thing that blows up a fence quote. Post holes are the job, and rock does not care about your estimate.

Estimated cost

$2,850

Typical range $2,138 – $4,133

Fence materials$990
Installation labor, overhead and profit$1,560
Gates$300
Total$2,850

See next steps →

Two state transportation departments publish what they actually pay for six-foot chain link, and they are TWICE APART. Florida DOT prices it at $21.54 a linear foot in its statewide 12-month report, across 8 awarded contracts and 14,034 feet. Texas DOT's current median winning bid for the same item is $45.00, across 43 winning bids covering 17,051 feet, let between 2024-07 and 2026-07. Wood fence up to five feet runs $19.52 in Florida. These are competitively bid prices actually paid, so they already carry the contractor's overhead and profit, and two governments buying the same fence in bulk still cannot agree on what it costs within a factor of two. THIS PAGE USED TO SAY THOSE TWO NUMBERS AGREED TO WITHIN 1.7%, AND THAT WAS OUR OWN MISTAKE, NOT A FINDING. The Texas figure we were quoting, $45.0, came off a TxDOT web page whose footer reads "Last Update: Thursday, August 08, 2024". The PERIOD HEADER on the same table, three inches above the numbers, reads "December 31, 2016". We read the timestamp on the drawer instead of the label on the folder, and we then presented a nine-year-old price agreeing with a current one as though two agencies had independently confirmed each other. They had not. Two stale numbers landing on top of each other is not corroboration, and the real answer is more useful than the false one: even a government buying fence by the mile does not get a stable price.

We used to tell you that number had never been measured by anyone. The loudest sentence on this page said nobody measures what the fence industry sells you, and that every per-foot figure you had read was somebody's model. It was false. We had searched Census, BLS and DOE exhaustively and simply never thought to ask a transportation agency, and the Florida workbook was already sitting in our own cache, downloaded for a different page. Now the caveat, and it is a real one. A DOT buys highway right-of-way fence on a public-works contract: a heavier specification, prevailing-wage labour on federal-aid jobs, and traffic control billed as a separate item. It is not a back-yard fence, and the low-quantity lines in that report are noise rather than prices. Read it as a floor and a sanity check, not as your quote. It is also an installed price, so it cannot be split into material and labour, which is why the material line in this calculator is still ours. And what households actually paid is measured too. The Census American Housing Survey asks them, and among fencing jobs done by someone other than the household the median is $4,349. A quarter came in under $2,175. Only 14% reached $10,000.

§ 02 What Americans actually paid

US median, hired out (Census, 2025 $)$4,349

Half of hired jobs land between$2,175 and $7,611

US median, done yourself (Census, 2025 $)$1,041

Your labor line$1,560

AHS fuses fencing with WALLS in a single code, so retaining walls and garden walls sit in the same bucket as a chain link run and we cannot separate them. Costs are self-reported and recalled up to two years later, and the survey records no length, no height and no material. That is why it is a reality check on your total and never a price per foot.

Where the money goes

Fence materials$990

Installation labor, overhead and profit$1,560

Gates$300

By the numbers

Census American Housing Survey (2023): the median fencing job done by a contractor cost $4,349 in 2025 dollars.
More
A quarter cost less than $2,175, three quarters less than $7,611, and only 14.3% reached $10,000. Our extraction reproduces Census's own published table C-16-OO to the dollar, so this is their number, not our reading of it.
Census AHS: the mean contractor-hired fencing job is $5,808, which is 1.34x the median.
More
Every average you have seen quoted is inflated by that gap. Fencing is actually one of the less skewed home improvements, and it is still enough to mislead you by a third.
Census AHS: 42% of US fencing jobs are done by the household itself, and their median spend was $1,041 against $4,349 for hiring it out.
More
That DIY rate is not unusual, roughly matching kitchens (41%) and bathrooms (43%), and the survey explicitly excludes the value of your own time, so $1,041 is the materials bill, not the true cost of your weekends.
Census AHS: 82.9% of households paid for their fence out of cash from savings. Just 1.6% used contractor-arranged financing, which is the option a salesperson will push hardest. A fence is a cash job for almost everybody who does one.
2022 Economic Census: fence installation is NAICS 238990, and firms in it bill about $116 per field hour in 2025 dollars while paying the workers on site about $32 an hour.
More
The 3.6x gap is not greed, it is payroll tax, workers comp, liability, trucks, augers, the office and profit. But it does mean labor is the majority of a chain link fence, not the fence.
Census AHS: a fencing job in the Northeast has a median of $5,437 against $3,837 in the South and the West, a 42% spread for the same category of work. Region moves this number more than most people expect.

Which half of this page is a statistic, and which half is ours. Sourced: everything about what Americans actually paid. The median, the quartiles, the do-it-yourself gap, the regional spread and the way people paid all come from the Census American Housing Survey, and our extraction reproduces Census's own published table C-16-OO to the dollar.

You can re-check it in their Table Creator. Also sourced, and it is the number this page used to insist could not be had: an INSTALLED price per linear foot. Florida and Texas DOT both publish what they actually paid for chain link on awarded contracts, and they DISAGREE by a factor of two: $21.54 in Florida against $45.00 in Texas. We used to say they agreed to within 1.7%, which was our own error, not a finding: the Texas number was nine years old and we had read the page's footer instead of its period header. Ours: the material price per foot and the crew hours per foot. AHS records one number per job with no length and no scope, so it cannot give a unit price, and a DOT bid price is installed and cannot be split into material and labour, so it cannot give a material price either. And a gap we are pointing at rather than papering over: the Economic Census products file publishes the tonnage and the dollar value of steel wire fencing and fence gates, so a factory-gate material price for steel fence IS derivable, from a file we already hold and read for four other pages. We have not built it into our data yet, so it is not on this page, and we would rather tell you that than let "we could not find one" stand where "we did not open it" is the truth. Those two modeled lines are estimates and are exactly why they are yours to overwrite. The one modeled input that is not a guess is the labor rate: $116 per field hour, measured from the Economic Census for the NAICS code that Census's own index file assigns to fence installation. Read the total as a way to judge your quotes, not as a quote.

Where every number above comes from

US Census

US Census Bureau / HUD, American Housing Survey (2023 national PUF)
census.gov
US Census

Census AHS Table Creator (check us yourself)
census.gov
US Census

US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, Construction sector (the billed rate)
census.gov
US Census

US Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS index file (fence installation is 238990)
census.gov
Highway bids

Florida DOT, Historical Item Average Cost, statewide 12-month report (the installed price per linear foot: FENCING, TYPE B)
fdot.gov
Highway bids

Florida DOT, Standard Specification 550 Fencing (which says Type B is chain link, and that fence is paid by length)
fdotwww.blob.core.windows.net
Highway bids

Texas DOT, Average Low Bid Unit Price, Construction, Statewide (item 550 6001, chain link fence installed)
dot.state.tx.us
Wage data

BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (wages, not billed rates)
bls.gov
BLS Producer Price Index by Industry: Other Fabricated Wire Product Manufacturing, NAICS 332618, the industry Census's index file puts chain link fencing in (change, not level)
fred.stlouisfed.org
BEA, residential improvements price index (deflator to 2025 dollars)
fred.stlouisfed.org

What this assumes, and where it could be wrong

Every one of these is a place the number could be off. They are here because you should be able to check our working, not because we are hedging.

A NAICS CODE IS A BUCKET, NOT A JOB, AND THE RATE ON THIS PAGE IS THE BUCKET'S. Fence construction is 17.1% of that bucket.

NAICS 238990 is titled 'All other specialty trade contractors', and only 17.1% of that class's receipts are fence construction contractor. The largest single slice, 24.2%, is asphalt, concrete, and brick paving contractor, resident. So the billed rate here is the CLASS's rate, measured from real firms doing real work, and it is the measured figure we have for this job. It is not a rate for specialists in this job specifically, and we have four times called a class rate something it was not. We would rather show you the composition than let you assume it away.

WHERE WE LOOKED, HOW BIG EACH PLACE IS, AND WHAT WE HAVE NOT LOOKED AT.

A refusal is a claim, so here are the universes rather than a wave at them. The state DOT reports: Florida's statewide 12-month item averages, all 1,959 priced pay items read, of which 25 are fence per linear foot; Texas DOT's statewide average low bid list, where item 550 6001 is six-foot chain link installed. DOE and NREL's measures database: 93 sheets across two workbooks, whose RSMeans unit-cost tables come to exactly four (siding, roof insulation, duct insulation, pipe insulation) and carry no fence line at all. The American Housing Survey: 37 named improvement job types, all read, and fencing is one of them but it records no length and no scope. The Economic Census construction file: it gives NAICS 238990 receipts and construction-worker hours, which is why we can measure a billed rate, but it carries no quantities, so it cannot yield a price per foot. AND WHAT WE HAVE NOT READ, which we would rather say than imply: the other 48 or so state DOTs.

WE SAID WE WERE 'NOT ENTITLED TO TELL YOU' WHAT THE CENSUS PRODUCTS FILE CONTAINS FOR FENCE. IT WAS ALREADY ON OUR DISK, AND IT PRICES STEEL FENCE.

This paragraph used to say we had pulled the Economic Census products file for roofing sheet, carpet, windows and concrete but never for fence, so we could not say what was in it. That is a refusal wearing humility as a disguise. It is one file, EC2200NAPCSINDPRD, we had already downloaded it for those other pages, and it has a line reading 'Manufacturing of steel wire fencing and fence gates' whose shipped tonnage and dollar value are BOTH published, with no suppression flag on either. Divide one by the other and you have a factory-gate price for steel fence material. It exists. We have not yet built it into our data files, so we are not going to print a hand-typed number here that nothing checks, and you should read that as a gap in THIS PAGE rather than a gap in the data. Two things stay true even once it is built. The Census unit is short TONS, and turning tons into linear feet needs the weight of a foot of a particular fabric gauge, height and mesh, which is a manufacturer's spec and not a federal figure, so a material price per FOOT is still not on offer. And the aluminium fencing line on the same file IS withheld, so this would reach steel and stop. The honest headline: we told you we had not looked, when what we had actually done was not open a file we were already holding.

The headline comparison figures are sourced.

The Census American Housing Survey (2023) asks households what a completed fencing job actually cost: median $4,349 hired out and $1,041 done yourself, in 2025 dollars, with jobs deflated from their own completion year using the BEA price index for residential improvements.

THE REFUSAL THIS PAGE WAS BUILT ON WAS FALSE, AND THIS IS THE RETRACTION.

We told you nobody measures a fence price per foot, and that every per-foot figure you had read was somebody's model. State DOTs measure it. They buy right-of-way fence by the mile and publish the weighted average unit price they actually paid, per linear foot, by type and height, from awarded competitive bids: Florida DOT at $21.54 for six-foot chain link and Texas DOT at $45.0 for the same thing. How we got it wrong is worth knowing, because it is the same way every time: we searched Census, BLS and DOE thoroughly and never asked a transportation agency. Being exhaustive in one place feels, from the inside, exactly like being thorough. The Florida workbook was already in our cache, pulled for another page and never opened for this one. That makes fourteen times we have turned 'we could not find it' into 'it does not exist', and it is why this page now names its universes and their sizes above.

The cost per linear foot is our model, and it is the part to be sceptical of.

It is built up, not looked up: chain link at $17 a foot installed is $6.60 of materials plus about 0.09 crew-hours of labor, which at the measured billed rate is $10.40. Wood privacy is $28, vinyl privacy $41, aluminum ornamental $49, on the same method. We have not found a source that publishes a fence MATERIAL price per LINEAR FOOT, so the material figure and the crew-hours are our estimates. Read that adjective carefully, because we used to leave it out and the sentence was false without it: the Economic Census DOES publish a factory-gate price for steel fence material, by the ton, and the paragraph above explains why we are not yet printing it. A DOT bid price cannot fill the gap either, because it is an installed price and does not separate material from labour. Both lines are separate inputs and you can overwrite either, and the total moves with them. What the DOT prices DO give you is a check on the total: our four-foot chain link at $17 a foot should, and does, sit below the $21.54 Florida pays for a six-foot one.

The labor rate is measured, not assumed.

The 2022 Economic Census says firms in NAICS 238990, the code Census's own index file assigns to fence installation, bill about $116 per field hour in 2025 dollars against about $32 an hour paid to the crew. We use the billed rate, because a wage is not a price.

Because we price materials at retail and then add the full billed rate on top, the model slightly double-counts the contractor's markup on materials.

We would rather say that than hide it. It is also why the model is cross-checked against what people actually paid instead of being trusted on its own.

The low-to-high band is roughly how far three quotes on the same fence tend to spread.

It is not a statistical confidence interval, and it does not cover a rock shelf, a survey dispute or a permit you did not know you needed.

Gates, tear-out and ground conditions are separate lines because they are the three things that quietly move a fence quote. Post holes are the job, and rock does not care about your estimate.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a chain link fence cost to install?

On our build-up, about $17 per linear foot installed, so a typical 150 foot run with one gate lands near $2,850. That is the cheapest option on this page, and it is worth knowing where it sits: against what Americans actually paid a contractor for a fencing job, $2,850 is well below the median of $4,349 and lands between the 30th and 35th percentile. The thing most people search for is also the thing that costs least.

How much does a fence cost per linear foot?

It depends far more than anyone wants to admit, and the two governments that publish what they actually paid do not agree: Florida DOT pays $21.54 a foot for six-foot chain link and Texas DOT pays $45.00, on competitively bid contracts, for the same fence. That is a measured number rather than a model. State transportation departments buy right-of-way fence by the mile and publish the weighted average price they actually paid. Florida DOT prices its Type B fence, which its own specification defines as chain link, at $21.54 a linear foot for the 5 to 6 foot height, across 8 awarded contracts and 14,034 feet. Texas DOT's current median winning bid for six-foot chain link installed is $45.00, across 43 winning bids. Two agencies, two states, nothing in common methodologically, and TWICE APART. We used to print 1.7% apart here, because the Texas number we were using was from December 2016 and we had read the page's footer instead of its period header. Florida also prices wood fence up to five feet at $19.52 a foot. Two honest caveats. A highway fence is not a garden fence: heavier specification, prevailing-wage labour, and the small-quantity lines in those reports swing wildly because a contractor bidding 200 feet of fence prices it like an afterthought. And it is an installed price, so it will not tell you what the material alone costs, which is why the material line above is still our estimate. Use it as a floor and a sanity check on your quote.

Why is your fence cost lower than Angi or HomeAdvisor?

Because those are contractor lead-generation businesses, not statistical agencies. They earn money when you request a quote, so a bigger, more daunting number serves them. We are not accusing anyone of lying, but the incentive is real and it points one way. The Census American Housing Survey has no such incentive: it records 1,838 fencing jobs, 1,792 of them with a reported cost, and the median hired-out answer is $4,349, with only 14% of jobs reaching $10,000.

Should I install a fence myself?

42% of American households do, and their median spend was $1,041 against $4,349 for hiring it out. That is not a special property of fencing, it runs about the same as kitchens and bathrooms. Two honest caveats: the survey excludes the value of your own time, so $1,041 is the materials bill and not the true cost, and the hardest part is not the fence but the post holes. If your ground is rock, roots or a slope, the saving shrinks fast.

Does the AHS number really mean a fence?

Not purely, and we would rather flag it than let you find out later. The Census job code is 'added or replaced fencing or walls', so retaining walls, garden walls and masonry sit in the same bucket, and there is no way to pull them apart. The survey also records no length, no height and no material: 30 feet along a side yard and 800 feet of pasture fence are both one record. It is an excellent reality check on a total and a useless guide to a unit price, so that is exactly how we use it.

Why does a gate cost so much more than the fence?

A gate is a moving part. It needs heavier posts set deeper, a frame that will not sag, hinges and a latch that survive a decade of being kicked open, and roughly an hour of somebody's time to hang it so it still closes next winter. Budget $300 for chain link and up to $600 for aluminum, and about double that for a driveway gate wide enough for a car.

How much does a fence add to my home's value?

We do not publish a figure, because we could not find a credible free one. The resale-value numbers that circulate for fencing come from trade-media surveys of contractors and estate agents rather than from recorded sale prices, and we are not willing to launder those into a citation. A fence is bought for dogs, children, privacy and neighbors. Those are good reasons. Treat any promised return on it as marketing.

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