If you search this question you will find confident per-foot prices from sites that have never seen Texas, let alone your yard. Here is the honest version: the number that matters is the one written down after someone measures your actual run, because two identical-looking fences a few miles apart in this county genuinely cost different amounts to build properly. What we can do — better than a national calculator — is show you what the price is made of, which parts of it are yours to control, and what this county specifically adds to the bill.
The ranges below are broad on purpose. They are planning numbers for this part of North Texas, not a quote, and the drivers underneath them are what move you from one end to the other.
The shape of every fence price
Nearly every residential quote reduces to the same arithmetic:
(linear feet × per-foot rate) + gates + tear-out + site factors + permit
- Linear feet you mostly cannot change — the property is the property. But measuring it honestly matters: people routinely guess their boundary 20–30% short.
- The per-foot rate is where material, height and build quality live. It is the headline number, and it is the least variable part of a real quote.
- Gates are priced per gate, not per foot, and they are never free: a gate is hardware, a heavier post, and more labor than any panel.
- Tear-out of an existing fence, with haul-off, is real money — typically hundreds, not tens.
- Site factors: slope, access, and — around here more than most places — what the ground demands of the posts.
- Permit: small, fixed, and published in some cities. Denison posts its fence permit fees — $50 residential, $100 commercial — and Gunter publishes a $95 residential fence permit. Details for every city are in our Grayson County permit guide.
Planning ranges by material
Relative order first, because it holds everywhere: chain link costs the least, wood sits in the middle, vinyl and ornamental steel sit above it, and ranch fencing runs on a different axis entirely — by what it has to contain.
- Chain link — most residential galvanized runs land somewhere in the mid-teens to around $30 per foot installed; black-coated and taller runs push the top of that. Worth knowing before you price it: Gunter prohibits chain link as residential perimeter fencing below one acre, and Sherman does not count it as decorative in a front yard.
- Wood privacy — the county’s default fence. Broad range for a six-foot privacy build: mid-$20s to mid-$40s per foot. Treated pine sits low, cedar higher; eight feet, cap-and-trim, and stain push toward and past the top.
- Vinyl — typically $35 to $60 per foot. The material is the smaller reason; the larger one is that vinyl punishes cheap post work, so an honest vinyl quote carries better footings than the same yard in wood.
- Ornamental iron / steel — panel-grade steel typically $30 to $60 per foot by height and grade. Pool enclosures add code hardware — self-closing, self-latching gates — which is a real line item.
- Ranch and acreage — priced by the thousand feet and by the animal. Basic barbed wire runs in the single digits to low teens per foot; no-climb mesh meaningfully more; continuous pipe fence is the premium option, often several times the cost of wire. The money concentrates in corners, braces and gates, not the straight runs.
Every one of those ranges assumes normal access and workable ground. The next two sections are what moves a real quote inside — or past — them.
How much should a 200 ft fence cost?
Two hundred feet is roughly a typical suburban back yard’s fence share, so run the arithmetic with real parts:
- The run: 200 ft of six-foot wood privacy at the range above is roughly $5,000–$9,000 for the fence itself.
- Gates: a walk gate adds a few hundred; a double drive gate adds high hundreds to more than a thousand. Most yards need at least one of each.
- Tear-out: removing and hauling 200 ft of failed fence typically adds several hundred dollars.
- Permit: if you are in a city that requires one, budget the published fee — $50 in Denison, $95 in Gunter — plus the site plan time.
So a realistic all-in answer for a 200-foot wood project in this county is mid four figures to low five figures, and anyone quoting far below that range is worth questioning about post depth, footing size, and who hauls the old fence away. That is not a price — it is the structure of one, and it is exactly the arithmetic we put in writing, line by line, after measuring.
What Grayson County adds to the bill
This is the part national cost guides cannot see, and it is why local quotes differ from calculator numbers.
The ground decides the post work, and post work is the cost that matters. The south of the county is Blackland clay — reactive ground that grips and works a post seasonally, so a fence built to last here needs depth past the active layer and a belled footing, which is more auger time, more concrete, and more labor per post than a national estimate assumes. The north and west sit on the Woodbine sands, where the surface grips a post less — and the sand is usually a cap over clay that still moves, so the footing has to be carried past it as well as sized up. Either way, post depth is the spend that decides whether the fence is still plumb in year five — it is the worst place in the budget to economise, and the first place a suspiciously cheap quote does.
City rules move real dollars. Bells caps residential fences at six feet — which cuts panel cost but rules out a like-for-like replacement of a taller fence. Gunter’s chain link prohibition below one acre removes the cheapest material from the menu entirely. Sherman requires a building permit and inspection. None of these are large line items by themselves; all of them change what may legally be built, which changes the quote.
Wind is a design cost. Open ground means a tall solid panel carries real load, and the honest response — closer post spacing on exposed runs — costs more than pretending the wind is not there.
Reading two quotes that differ
When one quote comes in far under another for the “same” fence, the difference is almost always buried in four places: post depth and footing spec (the part you cannot see once it is built), who removes the old fence, gate hardware, and concrete per post. Ask both bidders the same four questions and the gap usually explains itself. A fence is a hole-digging project with lumber on top — judge the quote by what goes below grade.
Before any of it
Call 811 first. It is free, required across Texas before digging, and takes a couple of days — fence posts go deep enough to find utilities, and finding one the hard way is the most expensive line item on this page.
When you want the real number instead of a range, tell us the fence type and rough footage and we will measure the run and put the figure in writing — request a quote. No pressure, and no number until someone has actually seen the ground it has to stand in.