What's a Fair Day Rate is for Fencing? We Asked 44 Local Homeowners

Last month we ran a simple poll on Nextdoor: what would you expect to pay, per day, to have a fence put up?

First, a genuine thank you. 44 local homeowners took the time to respond, and that feedback did far more than give us a headline number — it helped us colour in a much bigger picture about how differently people think about tradesperson pricing. Without that response, we'd have nothing more than a guess.

We weren't expecting a definitive answer, nor have one as day rates for tradespeople are notoriously hard to pin down, and everyone's got a different frame of reference. However what we did uncover was a genuinely useful pattern , alongside a few gaps in our own question that are worth talking about. Here's what we found!

The Headline Number

Of the 44 responses, here's how the vote broke down:

At first glance, that's a wide spread — anywhere from £150 to £350+. But look closer and there's a clear cluster: the bottom three bands (£150–£300) account for 36 of the 44 responses, or 82%. That's a textbook Pareto split — the large majority of opinion sitting inside a fairly narrow band, with a smaller tail pulling the range wider.

How We Got to £190–£240/day

Rather than just quoting the widest range in that 82% cluster (which would be £150–£300 — technically true, but not very precise), we took a weighted approach: using the low edge of each band for a lower estimate, and the high edge of each band for an upper estimate, weighted by how many people voted for each.

• Lower estimate: (15 × £150) + (13 × £200) + (8 × £250), divided by 36 responses = £190.28/day

• Upper estimate: (15 × £200) + (13 × £250) + (8 × £300), divided by 36 responses = £240.28/day

  
  

That gives us a working range of £190–£240/day, representing the expectations of roughly 82% of respondents. It's not a precise average — it's a reasonable estimate based on how the vote was distributed, and we think it's a fairer representation than just picking the widest span.

Why is there a £180 Gap between the lowest and highest responses?

Some of the comments on the original poll went further than the vote itself, and gave us a clearer picture of what's actually driving the spread. A couple of respondents told us directly what they'd expect to pay for different roles on the job: around £120–£160/day for a labourer, versus £300/day for a skilled fence installer. That's feedback from outside the poll itself, but it lines up neatly with the gap we saw in the vote — and it points to the real driver being role, not just company-to-company pricing differences.

Here's what that looks like on an actual two-person job:

• Option A — a labourer plus a skilled installer: roughly £160 + £260, or £420/day.

• Option B — two skilled installers: £300 + £300, or £600/day.

  
  

Over a two-day job, that's £840 versus £1,200 — a difference of £360 for what could be the same finished fence.

Both figures can be entirely legitimate for the business quoting them — a sole trader with low overheads and a specialist contractor running a VAT-registered company with employees, insurance, and equipment costs are both pricing fairly for their circumstances. We're not here to say one is right and one is wrong. We're simply showing that a genuine, significant difference exists — and that it's worth knowing about before you accept the first (or only) quote you get.

Issues With Our Data.

1. Small sample. 44 responses is a helpful local signal, not a statistically robust dataset.

2. Skill level and role aren't the same for everyone answering. "Someone to put up a fence" could mean a fully qualified fencing contractor running their own business, or it could mean a general labourer helping out on the job. Both are legitimately "someone putting up a fence" — but their day rates are not comparable, and our poll didn't separate the two.

3. One person, or a crew? This is the biggest gap in the original question, and it's worth being upfront about it: we never asked whether the expected rate was per person, or a flat rate for the whole job. A homeowner picturing one experienced tradesperson doing the whole thing solo is going to answer very differently to a homeowner picturing a day rate that covers a two-person crew.

4. Bucketed data. We're working from rate bands rather than exact figures, so our £190–£240 estimate uses the edges of each band as a proxy — it's a reasonable estimate, not a precise calculation.

This matters enormously for how you interpret the £190–£240 figure. There are really two plausible readings:

• Reading A — a flat day rate for the job. £190–£240 covers the full day's work, regardless of how many people show up to do it. This is more likely how the average homeowner is thinking, since most of us are used to getting one quote for "the job," not itemised per person.

• Reading B — a per-person, per-day rate. £190–£240 is what one skilled person costs for the day, and a full crew is priced on top of that. This is closer to how contractors themselves often think about labour costs, and it opens up a very different picture of the total job cost

None of this makes the pattern meaningless. It just means the £190–£240 figure is best read as "what the majority of local homeowners currently expect to pay," not as a definitive market rate.

The Kicker: Why This Matters More Than It First Appears

Here's the part we think is genuinely important, for homeowners and contractors alike.

Most of us will only ever get two quotes before choosing who does the work. And when one quote comes in noticeably lower than the other, the instinctive assumption is that it must mean lower quality, or corners being cut.

What this data suggests is that the assumption often doesn't hold. If a £120–£160/day rate and a £300+/day rate can both be entirely fair pricing for two equally capable businesses, then a homeowner comparing two quotes could easily be looking at the same end result, from equally competent tradespeople, at a difference of hundreds of pounds — simply because one business has a different cost structure to the other, not because one does worse work. Without a wider view of the market, there's no way to know which quote you're actually looking at.

That works both ways for contractors too. Understanding that there's this much genuine variation in the market is a chance to look at your own resourcing — could using different or additional labour, without compromising quality, let you price more competitively? And on the flip side, understanding what homeowners in your area actually expect to pay means you can pitch your quoting with real confidence, rather than guessing at what the market will bear.

Why This Still Matters — for Homeowners and Contractors

This is exactly the gap Bid4MyJob exists to close: giving both sides clearer, more transparent visibility into what fair local pricing actually looks like, rather than everyone guessing in the dark from just one or two quotes.

For homeowners, that means being able to see the wider picture before assuming a lower quote means lower quality. For contractors, it means quoting with real local insight, rather than pricing blind.

Thank you again to everyone who took part — this is exactly the kind of feedback that helps us build a genuinely useful picture of the local market. We'd love to hear whether your original answer was based on a solo tradesperson or a full crew — drop a comment on the original Nextdoor post, or get in touch directly.