A fence panel rarely fails on its own. Usually the panel is fine and the post has rotted, or the post is fine and one panel has blown out in a storm, or the whole run is tired and you are trying to decide whether replacing two panels is throwing money at a fence that needs replacing properly. The cost question therefore has three parts, not one: what the panel costs, what the post situation adds, and whether the fence is even yours to replace.

This guide works through UK fence panel replacement costs in that order. It gives the fitted price per panel, the supply-only prices if you are buying panels yourself, what post replacement adds, the ten-year maths that makes the dearer concrete post build cheaper over time, how to settle ownership before you spend anything, the height rules that apply when you change a fence, and a clear repair or replace decision at the end. All prices are typical ranges from UK cost guides checked in October 2026, given so you can sense-check a quote. They are not a price for your garden, and London and the South East typically run 20 to 30 percent higher than the national ranges below.

Fitted Cost per Panel: Timber Posts vs Concrete Posts

The fitted cost of one replacement panel depends first on whether the posts can stay. If the posts are sound, the job is quick: lift out the old panel, slot or screw in the new one, and check the line. If a post needs replacing too, the job becomes a small groundwork job, and the price jumps accordingly.

For a single panel with sound timber posts, UK guides point to a fitted cost of roughly £60 to £150. That range is wide because it covers very different panels. At the lower end is a basic lap panel fitted to existing posts, where the panel itself costs £20 to £50 supply only and labour adds £40 to £60 per panel in MyBuilder’s 2026 guide. At the higher end is a heavier closeboard or featherboard panel, a taller 6ft panel, or a job where the fencer has a minimum call-out charge that makes one panel cost almost as much as two. A single-panel job in Hertfordshire is put at £60 to £150 fitted with sound posts by a 2026 local guide, and at roughly £130 to £260 if a post needs replacing at the same time, which lines up with the national guides once you allow for the post work.

Concrete posts change the fitted figure. A small-guide breakdown of garden fence replacement costs puts a fitted panel at £95 to £130 with timber posts and £130 to £190 with concrete posts and gravel boards, with old panel removal and disposal adding a further £40 to £70 per panel in some quotes. That higher concrete-post figure is not a worse deal, as the lifetime section below shows. It reflects heavier materials, concrete post and gravel board supply, and more labour to set the post properly. Checkatrade’s wider installation averages give the same picture from the other direction: a full fence installation averages £1,450 with 4ft panels and £1,850 with 6ft panels, which works out at roughly £145 to £185 per panel on a typical ten-panel run once posts, boards and labour are included.

Labour is the other half of the fitted price. MyBuilder puts fencing labour at £300 to £400 per day, with most installers covering 10 to 15 standard panels per day on straightforward ground, while MyJobQuote puts labour at £50 to £80 per panel for an average-sized installation. The two figures are consistent: on a full run, the per-panel labour cost falls because the fencer is already on site and the posts are already being set. On a one-panel job, you are paying for the visit as much as for the panel, so always ask whether the quote includes a call-out or minimum charge, and whether old panel removal and disposal is included or charged separately. Waste disposal is a common extra, typically £20 to £30 per section in one calculator guide, or £50 to £150 for a larger job in another, and it is worth confirming before the work starts rather than discovering it on the invoice.

If you are replacing a whole run rather than one panel, the per-panel figure matters less than the per-metre figure. MyBuilder puts fully installed timber fencing at £70 to £150 per linear metre, rising to £130 to £200 per metre for composite or metal systems. A 15-metre boundary at those rates lands in the £1,050 to £2,250 range for timber, which brackets the £1,000 to £1,500 figure for a basic 15-metre timber fence and shows why a quote at either end can still be reasonable, depending on panel type, post type and ground conditions.

Panels Only: Supply Prices by Type

If you are buying panels yourself, either for DIY fitting or to supply to a fencer, the panel type is the main price driver. Panels are almost always sold as 6ft wide (1.83 metres), in heights from 3ft to 6ft, and taller panels cost more in both materials and labour because they are heavier and catch more wind.

The cheapest common panel is the lap panel, also called overlap or waney edge. MyBuilder puts the average fence panel at £45, with timber lap panels starting from as little as £20, and its repair guide puts a standard lap panel at £20 to £50 supply only. MyJobQuote averages a 6ft lap panel at £40. Lap panels are the panels most UK gardens already have: horizontal slats overlapped over a frame, cheap, quick to fit, and perfectly adequate for a sheltered boundary. Their weakness is lifespan. Thin slats and a light frame mean a lap panel in an exposed spot commonly lasts 8 to 12 years before it starts to bow, split or lose slats.

Closeboard, also called featherboard or feather edge, is the step up. MyBuilder’s repair guide puts closeboard panels at £25 to £60 supply only, and MyJobQuote averages a 6ft closeboard panel at £50. Closeboard panels are built from vertical feather-edge boards fixed to horizontal rails, so they are heavier, stronger and better at standing up to wind than lap panels. They cost more per panel, but they last longer and they look better from both sides, which matters if your neighbour sees the back of your fence every day.

Beyond timber, the prices step up sharply. MyJobQuote averages a woven panel at £70, a palisade or picket panel at £75, a hit-and-miss panel at £75, a slatted or Venetian panel at £100, and a composite panel at £135. Checkatrade puts a composite 6ft by 6ft panel at £120 supply only, with finishing profiles at around £12 each, aluminium posts and caps at around £35 each, and post bases at around £13 each, taking a composite system to about £130 per metre supply and fit, or £200 per metre for a premium slatted product. Composite panels need almost no maintenance and commonly last 20 years or more, but they only make financial sense if you plan to stay in the house long enough to benefit, and if the rest of the fence, posts and boards, is built to the same standard. A £135 composite panel on a rotting timber post is money wasted.

Two buying points are worth knowing. First, check the panel height you are actually replacing. A 6ft panel costs more than a 4ft panel, and Checkatrade’s installation averages show the difference clearly: £1,450 for a 4ft fence against £1,850 for a 6ft fence on the same length. Second, buy the gravel board at the same time if you do not already have one. A gravel board, the horizontal board at the bottom of the panel, keeps the panel itself off the ground and away from the damp soil that rots timber fastest. MyJobQuote puts gravel boards at £10 to £30 for timber and £30 to £50 for concrete, and that small extra spend is one of the cheapest ways to extend a timber panel’s life.

Post Replacement Costs

Posts are where fence costs hide, because a panel quote that assumes sound posts is not comparable with a quote that includes post replacement. If your fence is leaning, wobbling or blowing out panel by panel, the posts are usually the problem, not the panels.

A timber post rots at ground level, where the wood stays damp and airless. The rot is often worse than it looks from the surface: a post can feel solid at chest height and be hollow at the soil line. Replacing a timber post set in concrete means breaking out the old footing, removing the post, setting a new post in fresh concrete or Postcrete, and allowing it to cure before the panels are reattached. MyBuilder’s 2026 repair guide budgets around £100 to £150 per post all-in for that job. MyJobQuote’s material-only figures explain part of that total: a timber post costs £10 to £25 supply only depending on height, and a concrete post £15 to £35, but the labour, the breaking out, the concrete and the curing time are what take the all-in figure to £100 or more.

Concrete posts cost slightly more in materials but solve the rot problem entirely, because there is no timber at ground level to rot. A concrete post replacement is put at £50 to £80 per post in one calculator guide for the post work itself, and the all-in figure lands in the same £100 to £150 range as timber once breaking out and resetting are included. The difference is not the first cost. It is what happens next, which is the subject of the lifetime maths below.

There are two cheaper post fixes worth knowing about, with honest limits. A steel post repair spike, driven into the ground alongside an existing post and bolted to it, costs around £15 to £25 in materials in MyBuilder’s repair guide and can add years to a leaning post’s life. It is a reasonable short-term fix, but it is not a permanent solution if rot is already established below the surface, because the rotted section is still carrying load. A metal repair bracket for a broken arris rail, the horizontal timber that holds feather-edge boards, costs as little as £2 to £5 per bracket plus £7 to £15 labour, and it is worth doing when the rail, not the post, is the failed part. Neither fix helps if the post itself has rotted through. If you are unsure whether the post or the panel is the problem, our guide on how to fix a wobbly leaning fence panel works through the checks, including the push test at ground level, before you spend anything.

Ask any fencer quoting post work three questions: does the price include breaking out the old concrete footing, does it include a gravel board, and is the new post set in concrete rather than just backfilled with soil. A post backfilled with soil will lean again within a year or two. A post set in concrete, with the concrete sloped away from the post so water runs off rather than pooling against it, is the detail that decides whether the new post lasts its full expected life.

The 10-Year Maths: Timber Posts vs Concrete Posts

This is the section that changes the decision for most people, because the cheaper fence on day one is usually the dearer fence over ten years. The maths is simple, and it comes down to one fact: timber posts rot at ground level in about ten years, while concrete posts last around thirty years, and panels can be swapped out from above on concrete posts without digging anything up.

Take a typical ten-panel run. With timber posts, the fitted cost per panel is roughly £95 to £130 in one small-guide breakdown. Call it £110 per panel, or £1,100 for the run. Over ten years, that is about £110 per year, before any panel replacements. But at around year ten, the timber posts start to fail. Replacing the posts means breaking out every footing and resetting the run, at roughly £100 to £150 per post, or £1,100 to £1,650 for eleven posts on a ten-panel run. Even if the panels themselves are still usable, the post job alone roughly doubles the ten-year cost of the fence. Spread over ten years, the timber-post build works out at roughly £12 per panel per year in the small guide’s comparison, once post replacement is counted.

With concrete posts and gravel boards, the fitted cost per panel is roughly £130 to £190. Call it £160 per panel, or £1,600 for the run, which is £500 more on day one. But the posts do not need replacing at year ten, or at year twenty. Panels can be lifted out and replaced individually from above, without touching the posts, so a failed panel is a £60 to £150 single-panel job, not a groundwork job. Spread over the same period, the concrete-post build works out at roughly £7 per panel per year in the same comparison, because the post cost is paid once and then lasts for the life of several sets of panels.

The table below makes the comparison concrete, using the midpoint of each range and a ten-panel run as the example. The exact figures will vary with your garden, but the direction does not: the dearer build is cheaper once the first set of timber posts fails.

There are two honest caveats. First, concrete posts look different. They are grey, heavy and obviously concrete, and some people prefer the look of timber posts, especially in a front garden or a garden where the fence is a feature rather than a boundary. Concrete gravel boards with timber panels are a common compromise: the board takes the ground-level damp, the panels stay dry, and the posts are the only timber at risk. Second, if you plan to move within a few years, the ten-year maths does not apply to you in the same way, because you will not be the person paying for the post replacement. In that case, a sound timber-post repair is the rational choice, and the money saved is real. If you plan to stay, concrete posts are the cheaper fence, even though they cost more on the quote.

Whose Fence Is It? T-Marks, Deeds and the Neighbour Conversation

Before you pay to replace a fence, settle who owns it. Replacing a neighbour’s fence without agreement can lead to a dispute that costs far more than the fence, and replacing your own fence in the wrong place can create a boundary problem that follows the house when you sell it.

There is no default rule that the left-hand fence is yours, or the right-hand fence, despite how often that is repeated. The small-guide breakdown of fence ownership states this plainly: nobody owns the left-hand fence by default. Ownership is shown, where it is shown at all, on the title plan for your property, which you can download from HM Land Registry for £7. On that plan, a T-mark pointing into your garden from a boundary line means that boundary, and the fence on it, is your responsibility. A T-mark pointing into your neighbour’s garden means it is theirs. If there is no T-mark, or if the plan is unclear, the deeds may contain a written covenant about boundary maintenance, and if neither source settles it, the fence is often treated as shared in practice, even though that is not a legal rule.

The practical steps are straightforward. First, download your title plan and your neighbour’s title plan if you can, and check the T-marks. Second, read your property deeds or transfer document for any boundary covenant, which sometimes specifies not just who maintains a boundary but what type of fence must be kept there. Third, talk to your neighbour before any work starts, even if the fence is clearly yours. A replacement fence changes what they see every day, and a neighbour who was not consulted is far more likely to object to the height, the style or the exact line, even if they have no legal right to stop you. A short conversation, with the quote and the panel type shown, prevents most fence disputes before they start.

If the fence is shared, or if ownership is genuinely unclear, the normal approach is to split the cost, or to agree that one side pays for the replacement and the other side accepts the style and height. Get that agreement in writing, even if it is only an email or a short note signed by both sides, stating who paid, what was installed, and where the boundary line was agreed to be. That note is worth more than any verbal understanding if either house is sold, because the next owner will inherit the fence and the question with it.

One more ownership point: if a fence was damaged by a storm, check your home insurance before paying out of pocket, but do not assume it will pay. Some policies cover storm damage to fences and some exclude fences entirely, and the excess may be close to the cost of a single-panel replacement anyway. A single panel at £60 to £150 is often below the excess, so claiming for it would cost you the excess and a claims record for no net benefit. A full run blown down, at £1,000 to £1,500 or more, is the case where an insurance claim is worth checking properly.

Height and Planning Rules: The 2m and 1m Limits

In most cases you do not need planning permission to replace a fence panel, or even a whole fence, provided the replacement stays the same height and in the same place. The rules that matter are the permitted development limits, and they are simple enough to check before you order panels.

For a fence in a back or side garden, away from a road, the permitted development limit is 2 metres high. For a fence next to a highway used by vehicles, including a road or a pavement alongside a road, the limit is 1 metre. Those are the figures given in the Planning Portal guidance and repeated in the 2026 cost guides. If your replacement fence stays within those limits, and your house is not listed and not in a conservation area, you normally do not need planning permission. If you want to go higher than 2 metres at the back, or higher than 1 metre next to a road, you need to apply for planning permission, and you should not order taller panels until that permission is granted.

There are exceptions that catch people out. Listed buildings need listed building consent for fence changes that affect the character of the property, and conservation areas can have Article 4 directions that remove permitted development rights for fences, meaning even a like-for-like replacement needs permission. Some newer housing estates have covenants in the deeds that restrict fence heights or ban front garden fences entirely, and those covenants are enforceable even though they are not planning rules. If your house is listed, in a conservation area, or on a newer estate, check with the local planning authority or read your deeds before replacing a front fence, because the cost of removing a fence that should not have been built is the full cost of the job twice over.

Height is also worth checking against the existing fence, not just against the limit. Panels are sold in standard heights, and a 6ft panel is 1.83 metres, which is within the 2-metre back garden limit but well above the 1-metre front limit. A front garden fence replaced with 6ft panels next to a road is not a like-for-like replacement in planning terms, even if the old fence was also 6ft, because the old fence may itself have been unlawful or may predate the current rules. Measure the height from ground level on your side, not from a raised bed or a retaining wall, because the planning measurement is taken from the natural ground level, and a fence on top of a raised wall can breach the limit even if the panel itself is under 2 metres.

Repair or Replace: The Decision

The repair or replace decision comes down to three checks: the posts, the proportion of panels failing, and the age of the run. Work through them in that order, because the posts decide almost everything.

If the posts are sound, repair. A single blown panel, a cracked panel, or a panel that has lost slats is a repair job, and at £60 to £150 fitted it is far cheaper than replacing a run. Our guide on how to fix a wobbly leaning fence panel covers the cases where a wobble is a loose fixing or a leaning post that can be straightened, rather than a failed post. If only one or two panels are failing and the posts are solid, replace those panels and keep the rest.

If the posts are rotting, replace the posts, and think hard about whether to replace the panels at the same time. Replacing posts one by one, as each fails, means paying a call-out and groundwork charge repeatedly, and it leaves you with a fence of mixed age, where the oldest panels fail just as the newest posts are settling. If more than a third of the posts are rotting, or if the panels are also near the end of their life, replacing the whole run in one job is usually cheaper than a series of single-post jobs, because the fencer is already on site, the groundwork is done once, and the per-panel labour cost falls on a full run.

If the whole run is tired, replace the run, and choose the post type for the next thirty years, not the next three. That means concrete posts and concrete gravel boards if you plan to stay, even though the quote is higher, because the ten-year maths above shows the concrete build is cheaper over time. If you are replacing a run as part of a wider garden refresh, it is also the cheapest time to think about what else the boundary needs, whether that is a gate, a hedge, or a change of layout, and our garden decking ideas guide is a useful starting point for the wider garden plan, since decking, fencing and boundaries are usually planned together. The same combined-job logic applies elsewhere on the house: if scaffolding or access is already paid for on one job, it is the cheapest time to check the next one, and our guide to gutter replacement cost covers the access factors on that side of the house.

A final practical point: do not replace a fence in the middle of winter if you can avoid it, unless storm damage forces your hand. Frozen ground makes post holes harder to dig and concrete slower to cure, and a fencer working in waterlogged ground is more likely to leave posts that lean as the ground dries. Late spring and early autumn are the best times for fence work, when the ground is workable and the concrete cures properly. If a storm has blown panels out in winter, replace the panels to make the boundary secure, and schedule the post work for better ground conditions if the posts will allow it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does it cost to replace one fence panel in the UK?

Typically £60 to £150 fitted if the posts are sound, depending on panel type and height. If a post needs replacing at the same time, expect roughly £130 to £260. A single panel is often close to a fencer’s minimum call-out charge, so replacing two panels together is usually better value per panel.

How much does a fence post replacement cost?

Typically £100 to £150 per post all-in, including breaking out the old concrete footing, setting the new post in concrete, and reattaching the panels. The post itself costs only £10 to £35 supply only, so most of the price is labour and groundwork. A steel repair spike at £15 to £25 in materials is a cheaper short-term fix for a leaning post, but not a permanent fix for a rotted post.

Are concrete fence posts worth the extra cost?

If you plan to stay in the house, yes. Concrete posts cost more on day one, roughly £130 to £190 fitted per panel against £95 to £130 with timber posts, but they last around thirty years against around ten years for timber posts at ground level. Panels can then be swapped out from above without digging, so the concrete build works out cheaper per year over ten years and beyond.

How do I know whose fence it is?

Check the title plan from HM Land Registry, which costs £7 to download. A T-mark pointing into your garden means that boundary is your responsibility. There is no default rule that the left-hand or right-hand fence is yours. If the plan and deeds do not settle it, talk to your neighbour and agree the position and cost in writing before work starts.

Do I need planning permission to replace a fence?

Normally no, if the replacement stays the same height and place. The permitted development limits are 2 metres for a back or side garden fence and 1 metre for a fence next to a highway used by vehicles. Listed buildings, conservation areas and estate covenants can remove those rights, so check before replacing a front fence in those cases.

Is it cheaper to repair or replace a fence panel?

Repair is cheaper if the posts are sound and only one or two panels are failing. Replace the run if more than a third of the posts are rotting, if many panels are failing at once, or if the fence is near the end of its life, because repeated single-post call-outs cost more than one full-run job.

How long does a new fence last?

Lap panels commonly last 8 to 12 years in an exposed spot, closeboard panels last longer, and composite panels can last 20 years or more. Timber posts last around 10 years at ground level, while concrete posts last around 30 years. A gravel board, which keeps panels off damp soil, extends the life of any timber panel.