Deck Cost Calculator

Search for what a deck costs and you get a range: $30 to $60 a square foot, take your pick. On this deck that spans $5,760 to $11,520. It contains the answer, and it also contains being wrong by twice.

A rate hides the things that actually move the number. It assumes a height, a railing, whether there are stairs, what the ground is like and which board you picked — and then hands you one figure as though none of that mattered. Ours works out near $50.17 a square foot on survey estimates, and we put it at the bottom of the page rather than the top, because it is what fell out of the calculation rather than what went into it.

There is a reason the rate survives, and it is worth knowing who is telling you it. Every result on the first page for this search is run by somebody with an interest in which material you choose — composite manufacturers and the retailers who stock them. A calculator built by a company that sells one board is not going to show you that board losing to pressure-treated pine on price, and it is not going to price the labour either, because labour is the part that makes the material look like a rounding error.

This page is not selling you a board. It prices five, including the cheapest, and shows you the half of the bill that has nothing to do with any of them.

$2,593 of materials. $7,039 of labour. Survey estimates, not quotes — and 73% of the bill on the side most calculators leave out entirely.

Broken into the four things that actually happen: digging and pouring the footings is $555, framing and laying the deck is $5,697, the railing is $2,800 and the stairs are $580. All survey estimates. Only two of those four have any materials in them at all.

Digging footings and building stairs are hours and nothing else. There is no timber in a hole. That matters more than it sounds, because those are exactly the two phases people assume they can absorb by doing the work themselves — and they are the two where doing it yourself buys you the whole line rather than a fraction of it.

It also explains why the site work you cannot see from a plan is where estimates go wrong. A footing through rock costs what a footing through loam costs plus a day, and no square-foot rate has ever known the difference.

Building this deck in pressure-treated pine is $9,632. Building the identical deck in ipe — the most expensive board on the site — is $12,007.

That is $2,375 between the cheapest material and the dearest. It sounds like the decision. It is not.

The whole materials bill in pine is $2,593. So switching to ipe nearly doubles what you spend on timber, and moves the total by a quarter. Cedar is $906 more than pine. Composite is $1,434 more. Redwood sits between them at $11,031. Every one of those is a real difference and none of them is the thing setting the price.

The $7,039 of labour does not move at all. The same hands dig the same footings, hang the same joists and lay the same number of boards whichever species is on the trailer — ipe takes longer to fasten because every screw wants a pilot hole, and that is the only part of the work the material touches. Our figure does not model that, so read the ipe total as the floor rather than the number.

All of these are our own survey estimates rather than quotes, which is the other reason to treat the gap between materials as smaller than it looks.

$2,593 of materials and about 105 hours, against $7,039 of labour you are not paying — which values your time near $67.23 an hour.

That is not a wage and should not be read as one. It is what the labour would have cost somebody else, on our survey estimates rather than measured rates. Whether your own hours are worth more or less than that is a question about your weekends, not about decks.

Two things come off the saving before you start. The tools, if you do not own them — an auger, a mitre saw and a laser level run $120 to $450 to hire, another survey estimate. And the phases where hours are the entire cost: the panel shows those in hours rather than dollars when you tick the box, because a day with a shovel priced at nothing is not a saving, it is a day.

The footings are the ones to think hardest about. They are pure labour, they are the first thing you do, and they are the one part of a deck that is genuinely unforgiving — everything above them inherits whatever you got wrong.

We hold a range for permit fees and we are not going to print it. It is wide enough that quoting it would not help you plan anything — a range that broad is the absence of an answer wearing a range's clothes.

What the fee actually turns on: your jurisdiction, how high the deck sits, whether it attaches to the house, and whether your building department accepts a clear hand drawing or wants drafted plans. Every one of those is local. Ring them — it is one phone call and the answer is exact, which is more than any calculator on the internet can offer you.

Drafting is the one part of this we will put a figure on, because it is a service you buy on a market rather than a fee somebody sets: $0 to $600 on our survey estimates, and the bottom of that range is zero because plenty of jurisdictions take the hand drawing.

Get the permit. Nearly every jurisdiction requires one for a deck over thirty inches or attached to the house. Building without one surfaces when you sell, and an unpermitted deck can force a teardown — which is the most expensive line item on this page and it is not on it.

Access, first, because it is the biggest and the least visible. A deck a wheelbarrow can reach costs less to build than one it cannot. If every bag of concrete goes through a house or round a narrow side gate, that is hours nobody quoted and no calculator can see. It is the single largest thing standing between this figure and a real one.

Then the ground. Grading, drainage, roots and tree work all happen before a footing goes in, and none of them are here.

Then the ordinary ones: delivery, design or drafting beyond what the permit needs, and anything you are having built in — benches, planters, lighting, a pergola. Demolition is not in the default figure either, though it is priced the moment you tell the panel there is a deck there already. The stair timber is missing too, and the panel says so where it happens: nothing on this site prices stringers and treads, so that phase is labour only.

None of this makes the total wrong. It makes it a floor, and a floor you can hold a quote against is worth more than a range you cannot.

• What size the framing should be. This page prices joists at the size the site assumes, which is not the same as the size your span needs. That is a question we do not answer yet, and pricing a joist is not specifying one.
• Anything about the ledger. The board bolting the deck to the house is the connection that fails all at once. Take it to AWC DCA 6 and your building department, and expect no figure from us.
• What a permit costs. The section above says why.
• Anything that is not a rectangular, ground-level deck. Multi-level decks, wrapped stairs and elevated builds all change the labour, and none of that is in these figures.

The deck underneath all of it — 192 sq ft, 26 board rows, 13 joists and 3 posts on a 16 × 12 ft (4.9 × 3.7 m) deck — comes from the same function the whole-build material list, the deck lumber calculator and the deck screw calculator use. If you already have a deck and are deciding whether to keep it, the deck repair cost calculator sets a repair against the replacement figure this page produces.