What a Fence Costs in the Seattle Area

Cedar privacy fencing in the Seattle area runs $40–$70 per linear foot installed. Horizontal, board-on-board and composite run $65–$110. A standard 150-foot backyard lands roughly $6,000–$10,500 in cedar.

Those ranges are wide for a reason, and the reasons are not the boards.

What actually moves the number

• Post setting. The biggest difference between a cheap quote and a good one. Posts on a drained gravel base with ground-contact-rated stock and concrete crowned to shed water cost more and last roughly twice as long as posts dropped into a sealed concrete socket.
• Slope. A run that steps down a hillside needs each panel cut and set individually. Flat ground is production work; a Bothell or Mukilteo hillside is not.
• Gates. Every gate is a small piece of joinery with hardware that has to stay square for years. Budget $400–$1,200 each depending on width and whether it is double.
• Access. A crew that can back a truck to the line builds faster than one carrying every post through a side gate.
• Removal. Taking out and hauling an old fence is real labour and disposal cost, commonly $5–$12 per foot.

Cedar, composite and the twenty-year view

Western red cedar is the regional default: naturally rot-resistant, locally available, and it greys gracefully if you leave it. Expect fifteen to twenty-five years when the posts are set properly, and longer on a stain cycle.

Composite and vinyl cost more up front and want essentially nothing afterwards. Over twenty years the totals land close enough that the honest question is not which is cheaper but whether you want a maintenance task on the calendar.

Hog wire or cable panels in a cedar frame cost more per foot than solid cedar but keep a view, which is worth real money on the water-facing lots through Mukilteo and Edmonds.

Where cheap fences fail

At the ground, almost always. A post set directly in concrete with no drainage sits in a bowl of water through eight wet months, and the wood gives out at grade while the boards above it still look fine. That is why so many fences here lean before they weather.

The second failure is cutting posts too short for the span — a six-foot fence on posts set two feet deep moves in a November storm in a way the same fence on properly embedded posts does not.

Before anyone digs

Settle two things. Where the property line runs — not where the old fence sits, which is frequently not the same place; on an unclear boundary a survey is cheap against moving a built fence. And height, which most Washington cities cap around six feet in rear and side yards with lower limits in front and sight-triangle rules at corners.

Get a number for your line

We build fences across Snohomish and King County, and the free estimate walks the run, the slope and the access before it prices anything. If the garden is the bigger project, the deck cost guide covers the other half.

Get a fencing estimate →