Fence Estimate Calculator: How to Bid a Fence Job, Worked Out

October 19, 2026 · Pricing a service business

To bid a fence job, build it up from the fence itself: count the posts, rails, pickets and concrete from the linear feet, price the crew hours from your own crew’s speed, cost the tear-out of any old fence, add a share of the year’s overhead, and divide the total by one minus the margin you want. Only then turn the bid into a price per linear foot. In the illustrative example below, 200 feet of six-foot privacy fence with one gate comes to $5,961.75 of cost and a $8,520 bid, which is $37.67 a foot for the new fence once removal is priced on its own. That per-foot figure only holds for a fence of this length.

None of the prices here are market prices. Lumber, concrete, dump fees and crew speeds all vary, and this post does not say what fencing sells for anywhere. These are made-up inputs run through the same steps you would run on your own.

The fence estimate formula

sections   = linear feet / post spacing, rounded up
posts      = sections + one per straight run + extra posts per gate
pickets    = linear feet x 12 / (picket width + gap) x (1 + waste), rounded up
crew-hours = layout + posts / posts per hour + feet / feet per hour + gates
full cost  = materials + labor + removal + permit and rental + overhead share
bid        = full cost / (1 - target margin)

Step 1: the materials takeoff

The example fence is 200 feet in 3 straight runs with posts every 8 feet, three rails per section, 5.5-inch pickets set tight with no gap, a 5% allowance for culls and cuts, and two bags of concrete per post. That is 25 sections and 30 posts: one post per section, plus one extra for each run, plus two for the gate.

That is $16.48 a foot in materials. Pickets are the biggest line, so measure the real width of the picket you are buying rather than the name on the board. A picket half an inch narrower, 5 inches, takes 504 pickets for the same fence, 45 more.

The same fence in pre-built 8-foot panels takes 25 panels and comes to $3,075.00 of materials, $221.75 less at these example prices. Materials are only half of that comparison: framing hours differ too.

Step 2: crew hours from your own production rates

Labor depends on how fast your own crew actually works. The example crew of 2 sets 3 posts an hour and frames and pickets 25 feet an hour. Those are the example’s rates, not anyone’s standard. Time your own crew on a real job; soil and rock change the post rate.

That is 3 crew days and 47.5 person-hours, or $1,425.00 at $30.00 per person-hour, wage plus payroll taxes and insurance. Post setting is the largest block, so the post rate is the first number to time.

Step 3: the old fence

Replacing a fence means tearing one out. The example removes 120 feet and 16 posts: 17.7 person-hours of tear-down, post pulling and hauling, plus 2 loads to the dump at $65 each and vehicle costs. Removal costs $690.00 before margin. If your area charges disposal by weight, the same logic as junk removal pricing applies: old concrete footings add weight and loads.

Step 4: how to bid a fence job from a target margin

Now add the costs that do not belong to any single fence: $150 for the permit, utility locate and auger rental on this job, and a share of a $24,000 year of overhead spread over 60 jobs.

Here is the insight the calculator pack is built on. A 30% margin means profit is 30% of the price. To get it you divide the cost by 0.70, which is the same as a 42.9% markup on cost. Adding 30% to cost instead gives a price of $7,750.28, which is only a 23.1% margin, and leaves $766.51 off this one bid. The difference between the two is laid out in the markup vs margin chart.

Fence cost per linear foot: what the bid implies

The $8,520 bid is $42.60 a foot all in. That figure mixes two jobs, though: building 200 feet of new fence and tearing out 120 feet of old. Price the removal on its own at the same margin, $985.71 or $8.21 per foot of old fence, and the new fence alone is $37.67 a linear foot.

The trouble starts when that per-foot figure becomes a price list. Some of the cost does not shrink with length. The permit, locate, rental and overhead share come to $550.00 whether the fence is long or short; the rest works out to $23.61 a foot. Quote $37.67 a foot on an 80-foot fence and the cost is $2,438.70 against a price of $3,013.71: a 19.1% margin, not 30%. That fence needs $43.55 a foot.

The shorter the fence, the more each foot has to carry. A per-foot price is honest only for fences close to the length it was built from, and the table assumes the gate scales with length too; a short fence with the same gate costs more per foot than this shows. If you quote by the foot, set a minimum job or a separate fixed charge, the same idea as break-even analysis: fixed costs have to be covered before any foot of fence makes money.

Step 5: check the job after it is built

The bid expected $2,558.15 of profit, a 30.0% margin, on 65.17 person-hours. The crew actually took 78 hours, 12.8 over, and materials and fees ran $183.25 over. Profit came in at $1,990.00, a 23.4% margin. Still a profit, but if that overrun repeats, the production rates are too fast: multiply future hour estimates by 1.20 or lower the rates.

How these were calculated

Sections are linear feet over post spacing, rounded up; posts are sections plus one per run plus the gate posts; pickets are linear feet times 12 over picket width plus gap, with the waste allowance, rounded up. Crew-hours are layout plus posts over the post rate plus feet over the framing rate plus gate hours, with setup and cleanup added per crew day; person-hours multiply by crew size. Removal is tear-down and post-pulling hours times crew, plus one driver’s dump trips, plus dump and vehicle costs per load. The bid is full cost divided by one minus the target margin, rounded up to ten dollars. The per-foot table treats overhead, permit and rental as fixed and everything else as scaling with length. Every figure was computed twice, by the code behind the product below and by an independent implementation, and the two agree to the cent. All prices, rates, fees and margins are illustrative inputs, not market or typical figures. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice.

To run this on your own fence, prices and crew, the pack below has seven linked calculators: picket and panel takeoffs, crew hours, removal, the bid, the per-foot price and the after-the-job check.