Red Flags When Getting Fence Quotes

Why are fence quotes so different in price?

The distance between a $4,000 bid and a $7,000 bid on the same backyard is usually depth, not greed. One crew is augering past the frost line and packing each post in concrete. The other is dropping posts into 18 inch holes of tamped dirt and calling it done by lunch. Both fences look identical the afternoon the crew pulls out. Only one of them is still plumb after five winters.

Read a fence quote right and it tells you two things: how much fence goes up in the air, and how much labor and concrete goes down in the ground. When the total drops, one of those two shrank. The rest of this page is the teardown. Where the money goes missing, roughly what each missing piece is worth, and the question that drags it back onto the page.

The number that should make you stop and ask

You don't need a price list to spot a suspicious bid. You need a floor. From what we see, an installed bid below these rough thresholds almost never covers a complete job in that material, and it earns a question before anything else does:

• Wood under about $20 a foot.
• Vinyl under about $30 a foot.
• Chain-link under about $10 a foot.
• Aluminum under about $25 a foot.

None of those numbers are illegal to charge. They just leave a contractor almost nowhere honest to go. Under the floor usually means thinner material, fewer posts, shallower holes, or scope that comes back as a change order once the old fence is already down. The floors move, too: an 8 foot fence, hard clay, a steep yard, or a tear-out all push a legitimate bid well above them, while a flat run of plain 4 foot chain-link can sit near the bottom and be perfectly real. And they don't apply at all to a repair, a short partial run, or a job where you buy the material yourself. If you want the full range for your material and height, that is the job of our fence cost guide, not this page.

Where a cheap fence bid finds its savings

When a bid comes in short, the money didn't vanish. It got left off the page. Here is where it hides, and roughly what each piece is worth:

• Post depth and setting method. A quote that says "set posts" and never says how deep or in what. This is the biggest hiding place on the page, because the evidence is underground by dinnertime.
• Concrete. A 50 pound bag runs about $5 to $7 and a typical post takes two to three bags, so a crew that tamps dirt instead of setting in concrete keeps $12 to $25 a post. On a 20 post yard that is $250 to $500 of savings you cannot see and cannot inspect. Gate and corner holes are wider and eat more, so the gap grows with every gate.
• Post spacing. Stretching posts from 7 feet apart to 8 feet cuts 10 to 15 percent of the posts out of the job. Cheaper today, saggier in five years, and worse the more wind and the heavier the panel.
• Gate hardware. Hinges and a latch that will actually hold a sagging gate run $75 to $200 for the hardware alone. The thin bid budgets $25 to $50, or nothing, and hopes you upgrade later.
• Gate count. Walk your line and count the openings you actually need, then count the openings on the bid. A cheap quote prices one gate and treats the second as a change order, which is a conversation you get to have after the crew is already in your yard. The cost guide prices an opening; on the bid, the only question is whether every opening you asked for is written on it.
• Old-fence tear-out and haul-away. The quietest way to shave a bid is to assume you are dealing with the old fence yourself and never write that assumption down. Pulling chain-link set in concrete, or a run swallowed by ivy, is real hours. Tipping over a rotted wood fence is not. Our cost guide prices the removal line; what matters on the bid is whether the line exists at all.
• Disposal. Dumpster and dump fees run about $300 to $700 on a full tear-out. A complete bid usually folds that inside the tear-out line. Ask which yours does, because if the dumpster sits on top of the per-foot number you need to know that now and not the morning the crew shows up.
• Permit and inspection. Small money, but somebody has to file it. If the bid never says who, ask.
• Property line. "We will just follow the old fence" is not the same as knowing where your line is. Old fences sit off the line more often than people think, and a fence built over it comes down at your expense. A pin-find visit runs $150 to $300, a full survey $400 and up.
• Slope and grading. A bid priced as if your yard were a pool table. Slope means extra posts, stepped or racked panels, and pickets cut one at a time, and it costs real money that our cost guide puts a number on. On the bid, the tell is simpler: if nobody walked the slope, nobody priced it.

On the permit line, the dollar amount is the least interesting thing about it. Nobody prices fence permits nationally, your city sets its own and publishes it, and it is small money either way. What the bid has to carry is a name. Who walks the fee down to the counter, and who wears the fine or the stop-work order if nobody does. A silent bid means you, and you will find that out at the worst possible moment, which is after the posts are in the ground. What the fee actually runs, with real published examples, is in our fence cost guide.

Line those items up across your bids and most of your price gap will be sitting right there, in the rows the cheap quote never wrote.

What your quote has to say about the posts

Your bid needs to answer three questions in writing about what goes in the ground: how deep the hole is, whether that depth clears your local frost line, and what the posts are set in, concrete or gravel or tamped dirt. Miss any one of the three and it is not a finished quote yet, because those are the lines that keep the fence standing and the only ones you can never check once the crew has packed up. Be careful of a contractor who waves a building code at you here, too. No code commands a fence post depth. The frost number people work from is the one your own building department publishes for building footings, and fence crews borrow it. This page is about the paperwork. If you want the depth itself, our install guide covers how deep a fence post actually goes.

Red flags in the contractor, not just the quote

Some tells show up before anybody writes a number. None of these on its own means run. Find three of them sitting together, though, and you have your answer:

• A price far below every other bid, with no explanation of what makes it cheaper.
• A door-to-door pitch, or "today only" pricing. Fence demand does not expire at midnight.
• An estimate quoted over the phone or off a satellite photo, with nobody ever walking your yard.
• No photos of past work, no local references, nothing nearby you can go and look at.
• No mention of calling 811 before anybody digs.

That last one is not a nicety, and on this page it is a bidding problem before it is a safety one. A quote that never names the utility locate is an incomplete quote. Somebody has to make the call, and whoever owns the call owns the bill when an auger finds the gas service, because a fence line is two or three dozen holes marching down the exact strip where the gas, the cable, and the irrigation were buried. An installer who never brings it up is telling you how much of that he plans to leave sitting with you. The law behind the locate, and why it lands on homeowners too, is laid out where we cover digging the holes.

Notice what is not on that list: the deposit, the payment schedule, the license and insurance, the written warranty. Those all matter, and they live in the contract rather than the estimate, which is why they get a page of their own. The deposit caps, the warranty wording, and the lien traps are all in our fence contract walkthrough, and you want that read done before you sign.

How do I compare fence quotes?

Spread the bids out and force them onto the same job before you look at a single total. Most of the gap turns out to be sitting in the lines one bid named and another one did not.

1. 1Match the material and the grade. Cedar and pressure-treated pine are both "wood" and they are not the same fence.
2. 2Match the height and the measured footage. A bid figured on 180 feet looks cheaper than one figured on 200 feet, and it isn't.
3. 3Match post size, post spacing, hole depth, and what the posts are set in. This is the buried money, and it is where the widest gaps live.
4. 4Count the gate openings on each bid, then check the hardware grade on each gate.
5. 5Go line by line through the scope: tear-out, haul-away, dumpster, permit, 811 locate, slope work, property line. Each bid either includes an item or it does not. There is no middle.
6. 6Only now, at the very end, look at the totals.

Then do the thing almost nobody does. Take the missing items back to the low bidder and ask for a revised quote with every one of them written in. An honest cheap bid comes back with a number that is still competitive and now complete, and you may well hire them. The other kind gets vague, or quietly shrinks the scope somewhere else so the total can hold. Either way you just learned which one you were dealing with, and it cost you one email.