What a wood fence actually costs in the GTA.

Nobody publishes fence prices, which is why every fence project starts with three quotes and a bad feeling. We’d rather explain the anatomy of the number than pretend it’s a secret. Here’s where the money goes on a wood fence in the Greater Toronto Area, and how to sanity-check a quote.

An installed fence quote is three costs wearing one number. Materials: pickets or panels, posts, concrete, hardware, gates. Labour: digging, setting, and either building the fence in place or hanging panels. Site: tearing out the old fence, hauling it away, and how hard it is to get an auger into your backyard. Materials are usually the smaller half. Labour and site conditions are where two quotes for the same fence diverge.

For orientation — and treat this as orientation, not gospel — most installed wood-fence quotes in the GTA in 2026 land somewhere between roughly $40 and $90 per linear foot: pressure-treated stick-built at the low end, Western Red Cedar with lattice tops and gates at the high end, and past $100 where access is bad or an old fence has to come out in pieces. Quotes move with lumber prices and with how busy crews are, so get three and compare the line items, not just the total.

The per-foot habit hides where the money actually sits. A privacy fence is priced by the foot, but the crew’s time is spent by the hole. Posts at 8-foot centres make a 100-foot run 13 or 14 holes, and each hole in GTA clay, dug to 48-inch frost depth, is real work even with a machine. That’s why short runs feel expensive per foot — the mobilization and the post holes don’t shrink with the fence.

Gates are the other quiet multiplier. A gate is a small door that lives outdoors in Canadian weather on two hinges — it’s the hardest-working part of the fence and it’s priced accordingly. One gate can carry the cost of several panels of fence; two gates on a small yard can be a third of the quote. If a quote looks high, check the gate count before assuming the per-foot rate is the problem.

If you’re buying panels and self-performing — or splitting the job, which is the move we see working: hire a crew for the holes and posts, hang the panels yourself — the arithmetic is short. One 8-foot section is one panel, one 10-foot 4×4 post, two to three bags of concrete, and hardware, plus one extra post to close the end of the run. Divide by eight for your per-foot material cost. Our current panel pricing is published on every product page — no price-sheet dance, and in-stock panels can be paid for online and picked up in Bolton.

Two honest footnotes. First, panels save labour, not lumber — if a stick-built quote and a panel quote show wildly different material costs for the same fence, one of them deserves a harder look. Second, the cheapest fence is the one you don’t rebuild: post depth and drainage decide a fence’s lifespan more than the panel does. That’s covered in the post-depth note — it’s the same guide we hand out at pickup.

We’re at 240 Ellwood Drive West in Bolton, and panels are picked up factory-direct — no yard markup in the middle. If you’re pricing a fence anywhere in the GTA, send the run length and we’ll quote it in panels the same day.