Outdoor & Yard costs

Driveways, fences, decks and tree work โ€” priced by size and material. Every guide shows the low, typical and high price from published national data, what drives the price, and how your region changes it.

How pricing works in this category

Outdoor projects are the most honestly priced work in home improvement, because they are measured in units you can verify with a tape measure: square feet of driveway or deck, linear feet of fence, height and condition of a tree. Our guides lead with the verified unit rate for each trade, then work the arithmetic for standard project sizes in the open, so the totals can always be traced back to a measurement of your own yard.

The second theme of this category is what sits underneath: concrete fails from a poor base, decks fail at the ledger board, fences fail at the post. Each guide explains the structural line items that separate a cheap quote from a sound one, and the permit, property-line and utility-marking steps (call 811 before digging) that have to happen before the visible work starts.

Every figure in these guides is an estimate drawn from published data and checked against at least two sources โ€” see how we research, and the disclaimer for what these numbers can and cannot do.