Is it cheaper to repair or replace a fence?

MyBuilder publishes the decision rules and they hold up in practice. Repair when damage is confined to one or two bays, the posts are structurally sound, the fence is under eight to ten years old for timber, and the repair comes in under about 50% of what replacing that section would cost. Replace when posts are rotting at the base across multiple bays, when the fence is over 15 years old with widespread deterioration, or when the style or panel size no longer matches what is available to buy today.

Run the numbers on your own fence. Six panels replaced at our £85 to £150 per panel guide range is £510 to £900 excluding VAT. Eleven metres of new closeboard at £90 to £130 per metre is £990 to £1,430 excluding VAT, and that comes with new posts, new gravel boards and a fence with its full life ahead of it. Repair wins clearly at two or three panels. At five or six it is close, which is exactly where MyBuilder advises getting a replacement quote alongside the repair quote.

Posts decide it, so test them before deciding anything else. Walk the run and push each post hard at shoulder height. Timber posts fail at the ground line, where the wet and dry cycle at soil level rots the section fastest, and that failure cannot be fixed by replacing panels. One or two moving posts is a repair at £100 to £150 each. Four or more across a run of ten metres and you are rebuilding the fence one expensive piece at a time, at a worse price than doing it properly.

The fence type changes the answer. Closeboard fails component by component and every component is replaceable: boards at £0.80 to £2 each, arris rail brackets at £2 to £5 plus £7 to £15 labour, a whole rail at £15 to £25 plus an hour. That keeps closeboard repairable well past the point where lap panel fencing is finished, because a damaged lap panel means a whole new panel. An old closeboard fence on concrete posts is often worth saving when a lap fence of the same age is not.

Photograph the run end to end, then photograph the base of every post that moves. Count the moving posts and count the damaged panels separately, because those two numbers decide the answer between them. Send both with your postcode and we will price the repair and the replacement side by side rather than steering you at one. Sometimes the honest answer is to replace three panels this autumn and leave the rest for a few years, and we will say so where that is the case.

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