Fence cost per foot

What "per foot" actually means

A fence is not built by the foot, it is built by the bay — the section between two posts. Everything real is per bay: two rails, a set of pickets, a share of a post, a share of a hole full of concrete. The per-foot figure is that bay cost divided by the bay width, and it is a reporting convention rather than how anything is bought.

That is why it moves so much. Change the post spacing and the per-foot number changes without a single price changing, because the same post is being spread over more or less fence.

The formula

Build a bay, then divide. For one bay at your spacing:

Sum the bay, divide by the bay width in feet, and you have a per-foot number that is actually yours. The fence cost calculator does exactly this arithmetic — you supply the six prices.

The post share is the part people miss

A post, its hole and its concrete are a fixed cost per bay. Spread over a 6-foot bay, that fixed cost lands on six feet of fence. Spread over an 8-foot bay, it lands on eight. Nothing about the post changed and the per-foot figure dropped by a quarter.

This cuts both ways. Wider spacing genuinely is cheaper per foot, but it also means longer rail spans, more sag over time, and more load on each post in wind. There is a real engineering limit and it is set by the rail stock and the fence height, not by the spreadsheet. Work it out on the post calculator rather than stretching the bays to make a number look good.

The same effect makes short runs expensive. A ten-foot fence between two buildings still needs two end posts, so its per-foot cost is far above the long run next to it — and a yard full of corners is a yard full of short runs.

Why two quotes differ

When per-foot quotes come back far apart, one of these is almost always the reason:

Different post spacing — see above; it moves the number without moving any price.

Different picket density — a privacy fence with boards butted tight uses considerably more board than a spaced picket over the same run, and shadowbox more again.

Gates folded in or not — one quote has spread the gates across the whole run, the other has them on their own line. This makes the honest quote look dearer.

Demolition folded in or not — same trick, same effect.

Different post depth — a contractor pricing to the frost line and one pricing to two feet are not quoting the same fence, and it is invisible in the per-foot number.

Using the number

Per foot is a good tool for two jobs: comparing your own options against each other — cedar against treated, six feet against four, 6-foot bays against 8 — and sanity-checking a quote once you know what is inside it.

It is a bad tool for planning a budget from someone else's article, because a figure without its assumptions is not a price, it is a rumour. Spend twenty minutes with your own yard's numbers and you will have something worth arguing from.