Fence Contractor Availability and Review Density Report 2026 — Indexed Coverage Across the United States

Fence projects are scheduled, quoted, and decided over weeks. A homeowner getting bids in Memphis has very different installer options than one in upstate New York. Federal datasets (NAICS specialty trade contractors, BLS construction tables) roll fence installation into broader specialty-trade buckets — they do not publish a per-state count of consumer-facing fence contractors.

This study reports what the Ownlisted indexed directory dataset shows: 2,376 active fence-contractor listings, distributed across 44 states and 192 cities, carrying 254,226 aggregated Google reviews. It is a directory snapshot, not a market census.

The 15 states with the most indexed fence contractors carry 71% of the dataset. The pattern differs from solar: Sun Belt states still lead, but the Southeast (Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia) and Pacific Northwest (Washington at 76 listings) carry larger supply per 100k residents than the absolute-count leader, California.

Per-100k figures use US Census Bureau 2024 vintage state populations from src/lib/research/state-pop-2024.ts.

Among the top-15 states by indexed count, fence-contractor supply per 100k residents falls into three tiers:

• High (≥ 1.0 per 100k): Tennessee (1.18), California (1.08), Arizona (1.02), Colorado (1.02).
• Mid (0.7–1.0 per 100k): Texas (0.80), Washington (0.95), North Carolina (0.76), Georgia (0.70), Florida (0.69), Ohio (0.69).
• Lower (< 0.7 per 100k): Virginia (0.68), New Jersey (0.55), Illinois (0.50), New York (0.29).

The Tennessee / California / Arizona / Colorado top tier maps to states with strong year-round building seasons + sustained residential construction permit volume. New York's bottom-tier per-capita figure is a directory-coverage signal as much as a market signal — fencing in NYC and Long Island concentrates under landscaping and general-contractor verticals that don't roll up to the fence-contractor slug.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program publishes a dedicated occupation code for fence installers — SOC 47-4031 (Fence Erectors), May 2024 release. BLS counts approximately 23,260 wage- and salary-employed fence erectors nationally with a median annual wage of $43,830. SOC 47-4031 is the cleanest occupation match for the vertical; it counts wage-and-salary fence erectors and does not include solo-proprietor operators without payroll, which is the largest data caveat in this category — a meaningful share of consumer-facing fence work in the US is done by sole-proprietor crews who are not on the BLS payroll-employment count.

Aggregate national employment figures from BLS describe the wage- and salary-employed population in this occupation; they are not a count of the businesses listed in the Ownlisted directory and are not used to validate any individual indexed business. The 2,376 indexed contractors above are firms (each may employ multiple BLS-counted erectors); the indexed count and the BLS erector count are different units. The NAICS-level establishment count (NAICS 238990, All Other Specialty Trade Contractors) is not cited here because 238990 is a residual catch-all for specialty trades not classified elsewhere — it substantially overstates fence-vertical supply.

The dataset carries 254,226 Google reviews across 2,338 rated contractors (98.4% of indexed listings hold a Google rating). Weighted average rating is 4.75.

Review depth (average review count per contractor) varies sharply across the top-15 states. Florida (188) and Tennessee (146) have substantially deeper per-listing review counts than California (44) or New York (123). The California number is the most striking: 427 indexed contractors but only 18,539 reviews — an average of 44 per contractor, the lowest in the top-15. Two plausible drivers: shorter average operator tenure on the West Coast residential-fencing scene, and Google review-display compression for newer-listing operators.

99.2% of indexed contractors carry a phone number; 90.9% carry a website. The 9.1% website gap concentrates in lower-supply states and represents single-owner / family-run operators that book primarily through phone and word-of-mouth.

Operators researching fence contractors in lower-website-coverage states should treat the phone-only contractors as legitimate options — not less-credible just because they don't run a public site. The right vetting cue in this category is review depth + state contractor-board licensure (where applicable), not website presence.

For city- or state-specific fence-contractor research, the underlying directory pages provide the granular comparison surface:

• Fence contractor home: fenceprolist.com — full network roll-up.
• Top-traction city pages:
  • Houston, TX — best fence contractors
  • Charlotte, NC — best fence contractors
  • Phoenix, AZ — best fence contractors

Each city page lists the indexed contractors in that metro with rating, review count, and contact info.

Suggested citation:

Ownlisted Research. (2026). Fence Contractor Availability and Review Density Report 2026 — Indexed Coverage Across the United States. Ownlisted. Retrieved from https://ownlisted.com/research/fence-contractor-availability-2026

Reuse and attribution. Charts, tables, and downloadable CSV may be cited or reproduced with attribution to Ownlisted Research and a link to the study URL above. Carry the snapshot date (2026-05-01) so readers know the dataset version. The methodology and limitations sections must travel with the figures — do not republish per-state counts without the "indexed dataset, not market census" framing.

Press / media inquiries. Reach the Ownlisted Research team via the brand-hub contact page.

• Not a market census. The indexed dataset is the set of fence contractors Ownlisted's directory ingestion currently tracks.
• Rating + review counts are Google-derived. Ownlisted does not collect first-party reviews on fence-contractor profiles.
• Per-capita figures cover 25 states — the same constraint as the §90 sister studies. The "per 100k" column is blank for any state outside src/lib/research/state-pop-2024.ts.
• No project-volume data. The dataset does not measure linear feet of fence installed, permits issued, or any operational throughput metric. It measures listing presence and review accumulation.
• Vertical adjacency. Some fence work is performed by general-contractor and landscaper businesses that don't roll up to the fence-contractor slug. Cross-vertical breakouts are out of scope for this report.
• Snapshot in time. Counts reflect the May 2026 snapshot.