Texas Fence Law — What Changed in 2025, and Who Pays

Two fence-law questions come up constantly, and most of what ranks for them online is either written for another state or simply invented. Here are the straight answers for Texas, with the actual statutes linked — and the standing caveat that we are a fencing company describing the rules, not lawyers applying them to your lot. For a dispute with money on it, talk to an attorney.

What is the new fence law in Texas?

The one people mean is Senate Bill 711, passed by the 89th Legislature and effective September 1, 2025. It amended section 202.023 of the Property Code — the part of Texas law that limits what restrictive covenants can forbid — and it changed life in covenant neighborhoods specifically.

The short version: a property owners’ association can no longer flatly prohibit you from installing a perimeter fence, or another security measure, on your own lot. Before this, plenty of covenants simply banned fencing certain lots — open greenbelt frontages, certain corner exposures — and that blanket “no” was enforceable. Now it mostly is not.

The exceptions matter, because they are where boards still have real authority. An association may still stop or regulate fencing that:

• obstructs a license area defined by a written license agreement or plat;
• obstructs a sidewalk in the public right-of-way or installed for public or community use;
• obstructs a drainage easement or drainage area;
• and it may require a driveway gate to sit at least 10 feet back from the right-of-way where the driveway meets a laned road.

Front yards keep a wrinkle of their own: where a community’s recorded covenants already address fencing in front of the home’s front-most building line, the association can still prohibit it — with carve-outs for owners whose residential address is protected from public disclosure or who document a security need through a law enforcement agency.

And existing fences are grandfathered: the statute lets an owner keep perimeter or front-of-home fencing installed before September 1, 2025, as it stands.

What SB 711 did not do is end HOA fence review. Boards can still regulate height, material, color and appearance through their normal covenant process — the change is about the blanket no, not about the how. In practice, in the covenant-heavy parts of Grayson County, this shifted the conversation from “whether you may fence” to “what the fence must look like” — which is where what boards actually approve takes over.

Does my neighbor have to pay for half of my fence?

In Texas: no — not unless they agreed to.

This surprises people who moved from states with “good neighbor fence” statutes that force cost-sharing on boundary fences. Texas has no such statute. Texas A&M AgriLife’s landowner guide to fence law puts it plainly: a landowner has no legal obligation to contribute to the cost of building or maintaining a neighbor’s fence unless an agreement created one. If your neighbor declines to chip in, the fence is yours to pay for — and, importantly, yours, if it stands on your side of the line.

What can create a genuine obligation: a written agreement between owners (do this if you are splitting costs — a handshake over a fence line is how disputes start), a deed restriction, or an HOA covenant that assigns shared-fence responsibilities. Those are contracts, and contracts are enforceable where the statute is silent.

The practical playbook when you want a fence and your neighbor is indifferent: have the conversation early, get any cost-share in writing before material is ordered, and if you are building alone, set the fence a small distance inside your own line so ownership and future maintenance are never ambiguous. And know your actual boundary before any of it — on older lots and on acreage, the old fence is very often not where the line is, and a survey is far cheaper than a fence in the wrong place.

Whose fence is it?

A fence entirely on your property is yours — your cost, your maintenance, your decision, including which way the finished side faces (though some cities around here decide that for you). A fence placed on the boundary itself is generally treated as belonging to both owners, which is exactly why building on the line without a written agreement is the classic mistake: you have created shared property with someone you have not agreed with about anything.

Livestock is a different body of law entirely

For acreage owners, the fence questions above are the small ones. The big one is Texas’s open-range heritage: as a default, Texas is historically a “fence out” state — the burden sat with landowners keeping livestock out, not with stock owners fencing them in. What makes the real answer local is chapter 143 of the Agriculture Code: counties (and in some cases parts of counties) can adopt local stock laws that reverse the default and require livestock to be fenced in, and much of the settled part of the state has done so — plus separate rules apply along highways regardless. Whether a stock law covers a particular tract is a county-records question, so confirm it with the county rather than assuming either default. It changes what your perimeter fence is legally for — and it is one more reason ranch and farm fencing is specified around the animal and the boundary, not around a catalog page.

Where this leaves an ordinary back yard

For a typical residential lot in Sherman, Denison or the towns between: the statutes above are mostly background. What actually governs your fence is your city’s ordinance — height caps, front-yard rules, permits, and in some towns materials — and your HOA’s covenants, in that order of who says no first. We keep both mapped, city by city, in the Grayson County permit guide, and the cost consequences of those rules in what a fence costs here.

One closing repeat, because it is the honest line: this page describes the rules and links the sources. Whether any of them applies to your boundary, your covenant, or your dispute is a legal question about your specific facts — that is an attorney’s job, and a good survey usually settles more than an argument does.