Trust

How the drawing is dimensioned.

Regulations

We describe typical U.S. residential patterns drawn from model codes and commonly published municipal handouts. We do not assert that a pattern is in force on your lot. Search-indexed city pages include official building-department links, source scope and a last-verified date. Until that review is complete, the city has no page.

Costs

A price appears only when a primary source publishes it, with its year and scope. For a deck, the Remodeling 2025 Cost vs. Value Report estimates the cost of one defined 16×20 deck, nationally and by city, and the deck cost page gives it with that scope and with how the report builds it. For installed fences, sheds, patios and driveways none of the sources we read publishes a price, so YardPermit gives none for them — neither a national one nor one for your ZIP code. The calculators give the quantities and take your local prices; the cost pages add what the trades earn, from federal wage data.

Calculations

Volume, posts, joists, and board feet use standard dimensional formulas. Assumptions (spacing, hole diameter, waste) are editable. See How YardPermit estimates cost.

How a cost figure is checked

Every price-related number on the site comes from a file we opened and read: hourly wages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (May 2025), what benefits add from its Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (June 2026), and the average value of crushed stone and of sand and gravel from the U.S. Geological Survey (2025), and the Cost vs. Value report’s estimate for one deck (2025). Each is shown with its period and scope — a wage is labeled as a wage for employees, not a contractor’s rate — and the numbers live in one module, so a page cannot quote a figure the source list does not back. They are read again when the agencies publish new estimates.

Sources we read and did not use

State transportation departments publish what they paid on their own contracts for items such as chain-link fence and sidewalk concrete. Those are primary figures, but their scope is public road work, where the price per foot swings with the size of the contract and the site, so none appears as the price of a backyard project.

Los Angeles offers an online permit fee calculator. LADBS says its results are estimates and that final fees are set when an application is submitted, so no page quotes one. The city pages give the valuation rates LADBS publishes, from which it sets the fee.

The Cost vs. Value report also prices a “backyard patio”, but its scope is an outdoor room: a flagstone patio with an outdoor kitchen, a gas fire pit, a cedar pergola, a new glass door, lighting and buried gas and electric lines. A patio quote covers far less, so the patio cost page does not use it. The report’s terms also keep its figures out of calculators, so no calculator starts from the deck estimate; you enter your own price.

How a calculator is tested

Every formula has an automated test with a worked example, and the boundary cases — a fence run that is not a whole number of bays, a deck length that does not divide by the joist spacing — are tested to round toward the safe quantity. The same tests run before every release, so a change to a formula that would silently under-count is caught before it ships.

What a checked date means

Each source on a page carries the date it was read and a note on what it was used for. A page's own review date moves only when that page is reviewed; publishing a new page never restamps an old one. Sources older than six months trip the release check, and a page whose source has expired or changed leaves the search index until it is reverified.