How Much Does Fencing Cost in the UK? A 2026 Guide

For a standard 1.8 m panel fence with concrete posts and gravel boards, budget roughly £45–£55 per metre in materials in 2026. Fit it yourself and that's close to your all-in figure. Have it supplied and fitted, and labour typically adds £25–£45 per metre on straightforward ground, which puts a professionally installed fence in the region of £75–£100 per metre.

Those are middle-of-the-road figures for treated softwood. Cheaper overlap panels on timber posts pull it down; featheredge (closeboard) or composite fencing pushes it well up. The per-metre number is the one worth carrying around, because it scales cleanly: a 15 m boundary and a 40 m one cost roughly in proportion once you're past the fixed bits.

Takeaway: think in pounds per metre, not per panel — around £50/m in materials, £75–£100/m supplied and fitted.

Break a typical panel fence into its parts and the split is more even than most people expect. On a 1.8 m concrete-post fence, panels are usually a little under half the materials cost. Posts are the next biggest line, especially in concrete. Gravel boards and postmix each take a chunk that feels small per unit but adds up across a run, because there's one gravel board per bay and one or two bags of concrete per post.

That even split is why "the panels were only £30 each" is a misleading way to budget. A 20 m fence has eleven or twelve posts, eleven gravel boards and around twenty-four bags of postmix, none of which is on the panel price tag. It's also why the cheap-panel, timber-post build so often disappoints: the saving is real on day one and gone within a few winters when the posts rot at ground level.

Takeaway: panels are under half the cost — posts, boards and concrete make up the rest, so budget the whole bay, not the panel.

The two common timber choices sit at different price points for a reason. Panel fencing uses pre-made 1.83 m panels dropped between posts. It's fast, a two-person crew covers a lot of ground in a day, and it's the cheapest way to a finished boundary. Closeboard, also called featheredge, is built on site: vertical tapered boards nailed to horizontal arris rails, board by board.

Closeboard costs more, sometimes half again as much, and it's not the timber that does it — a single featheredge board is cheap. It's the count. A 125 mm board with a 25 mm overlap covers only about 100 mm of run, so a 1.8 m bay needs roughly eighteen boards plus three arris rails, and every one is hand-fixed. What you buy for that premium is durability and repairability: a closeboard fence takes a beating in wind, lasts longer, and when a board splits you replace the board, not a whole panel.

Takeaway: panels are cheaper and faster; closeboard costs more because of the parts count, and you're paying for a fence that lasts and repairs board by board.

Take a real job. A 20 m rear boundary, 1.8 m high, overlap panels, concrete posts, concrete gravel boards, fitted by the homeowner over a weekend.

Bays come out at 20 ÷ 1.93 = 10.4, so 11 panels and 12 posts. Gravel boards match the panels at 11. At two 20 kg bags of postmix per post, that's 24 bags.

Using typical 2026 merchant prices — £38 a panel, £22 a concrete post, £13 a gravel board, £7 a bag of postmix — the materials work out at roughly £418 for panels, £264 for posts, £143 for gravel boards and £168 for postmix. That's about £993 in materials, or just under £50 a metre. Bought as a job lot from a merchant like Travis Perkins or Jewson, with postmix from Screwfix or Wickes, you'd expect to land within ten per cent either way of that.

Now the same fence supplied and fitted. Add labour at £25–£45 a metre and you're looking at £500–£900 on top, for an installed total somewhere around £1,490–£1,890. That spread is almost entirely about ground and access: a flat, clear boundary with soft digging is the low end; clay, tree roots, a skip needed for the old fence and a wheelbarrow route through the house push it up.

Takeaway: a standard 20 m concrete-post fence is around £1,000 in materials, or £1,500–£1,900 supplied and fitted, with ground conditions driving most of the labour spread.

Three inputs swing the number more than the rest. Height is the obvious one: going from 1.2 m to 1.8 m lifts the panel price by half and takes you from one bag of postmix per post to two. Post material is the quiet one — concrete posts and gravel boards cost more up front than timber, but timber posts rot at the ground line and are the single most common reason a fence fails early, so the "cheaper" build is frequently the dearer one across ten years. And ground decides labour: rock, clay, roots or a tight access route can add as much to the bill as the materials did.

Season matters too. Fencing demand climbs through spring and peaks in summer, and installer availability tightens with it. If your fence isn't urgent, quoting in late autumn or winter often gets keener prices and quicker starts.

Takeaway: height, concrete-vs-timber and ground conditions move the cost far more than the panel style, and off-season quotes tend to come in lower.

In practice, most fencers order a spare post and a spare panel on any run over about 15 m. Ground is never as straight as the tape suggests, and one panel cracked on a windy delivery day otherwise stops the whole job while you drive back to the merchant. The good ones set the two end posts and a string line first, then space the intermediate posts to the panels they actually have in the van, because timber panels vary by a few millimetres and forcing them onto a theoretical 1.83 m grid is exactly how you end up ripping the last one down on a table saw.

The other quiet upgrade is gravel boards. They've gone from optional to near-standard on quality jobs because they keep the panel timber clear of wet soil, and they're the cheapest single thing you can do to add years to a fence. A concrete gravel board costs about the price of a couple of pints and saves a panel.

Takeaway: buy one spare of each, set your ends first, and never skip the gravel boards — they're the cheapest longevity you can buy.

Every fence is a slightly different length, height and spec, so the per-metre rule only gets you close. To get panel, post, gravel-board and postmix counts plus a materials total and a cost per metre for your exact boundary, use the Fencing Cost Calculator UK. For the ground either side of it, the Gravel Calculator UK sizes a sub-base or a gravelled strip, and the Decking Area Calculator handles the deck the fence encloses.