First, the honest naming: almost nothing sold as wrought iron today is wrought iron. It’s welded steel, panelized or shop-fabricated, wearing the iron look. True wrought iron is heritage material, hand-forged, and a customer who wants the real thing is buying blacksmith work at blacksmith prices. The calculator above prices the steel fence most of us actually install: by the linear foot, by height.
Reading the example rates
The example rates above ($68 per linear foot at 4 ft, $85 at 6 ft) sit at the top of the fence menu for a reason. Steel panels are heavy, so setting them is a two-man operation. Posts get more concrete. And unlike wood, a mistake isn’t fixed with a saw and a handful of pickets. Your fabricator’s pricing and your market set the real numbers, so adjust before you trust them.
A quick sanity check: 80 feet of 6 ft steel at the example $85 rate is $6,800 before the gate. Iron runs tend to be shorter than privacy fence jobs, front yards and courtyards more than full perimeters, but the per-foot number is high enough that a small measuring error is real money.
Custom work does not fit a flat rate
Stock panels price cleanly by the foot. The moment the customer asks for arched tops, finials, scrollwork, or a radius section, you’re buying fabrication time, and that belongs in the quote as its own line, not absorbed into the per-foot rate. Same goes for matching an existing historic fence: that’s shop work, quoted from drawings, and it’s fine to say so.
Rust is the long game
Steel carries a maintenance cycle aluminum doesn’t: the finish breaks down, rust starts at welds and ground contact, and a repaint is mostly prep labor (grinding, spot priming) before any paint goes on. Two things follow from that. First, be straight with customers comparing metals; the aluminum vs wrought iron comparison covers the trade-off. Second, rust prep and repaint work on iron fence is steady repeat business, and it prices by the hour, not the foot. The method for that is in how to price fence repairs.
The rate-building method for the fence itself is in how to price a fence job. Build your steel rates once, and PriceDesk puts this same calculator on your phone with your numbers, free for 14 days.