Why you shouldn't price a fence gate by the foot

Say the fence is 150 feet of 6 foot privacy around a back yard. Twelve feet of it is a double drive gate so the owner can get a trailer to the back, and four more feet is a walk gate by the house.

Say you charge $30 a foot installed. 150 times 30 is $4,500, the same number you'd write for 150 feet with no gates at all.

Across that 12 foot opening, the per foot price sets aside 12 times 30, or $360, for the drive gate. That $360 was built for 12 feet of pickets on rails between line posts. It wasn't built for a gate.

A drive gate hangs off two posts that carry a swinging leaf, so say you set them deeper than a line post, with more concrete. Say you build both leaves square, brace them so they don't sag, and spend an hour hanging and adjusting them until they meet in the middle.

Say the hardware, two pair of hinges, a latch and a drop rod, runs you $150, and the heavier posts, the extra concrete and the framing lumber another $150. That's $300 of the $360 gone before you've hung anything. The walk gate does the same thing smaller: 4 feet at $30 is $120 to cover a post pair, hinges, a latch and the time to hang it.

A gate is one thing, not twelve feet of fence

Price the run by the foot and each gate as its own item on top of it. A walk gate is one price, a drive gate is another, and neither moves with the length of the fence.

Then a straight run with no gates stays competitive, and the fence with two gates pays for them. Price both by the foot and you bid the gated job low enough to win it, then lose on the gates.

It's the same reason a short fence loses money at the same price per foot: the cost lives in the posts and the hardware, not the length. And it's why you want the gate count written down before you leave the driveway.

Yardstick prices walk gates and drive gates on their own, on top of the run.