Is your outdoor living & hardscapes bid fair?
Cost to Build a Deck in 2026: The Boards and the Labor Split It Even
Chuck Thompson is a retired homebuilder and contractor who owned L.C. Thompson Construction in Jefferson City, Missouri. TheFatBook Cost Index V3 2026 (built from BLS wage and Craftsman labor data) referenced throughout this article is our proprietary dataset that powers all of our calculators and bid-fairness checkers. Full details are on the methodology tab.
Building a 240-square-foot pressure-treated deck costs $7,053 on average in 2026, with most jobs landing between $6,353 and $7,806. That figure comes from TheFatBook Cost Index V3 2026, and it works out to about $29 a foot for a straightforward, ground-accessible build. Two lines carry that bill and they run almost even: the lumber at 31% and the crew's labor at 29%. Everything else is the permit and the cost of running the business. Once you see that the boards and the hours are the whole story, the usual haggling targets turn out to be the wrong ones.
Where $7,053 Goes
| Component | Cost | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Lumber and materials | $2,169 | 31% |
| Labor (51 crew-hours) | $2,071 | 29% |
| Permit | $184 | 2% |
| Overhead | $1,391 | 20% |
| Contractor margin | $1,247 | 18% |
| Total | $7,053 | 100% |
The crew books 51 hours, call it six working days for footings, framing, decking, and railing. The carpenter earns a base wage near $28.29 an hour; the bid carries that hour at $40.61 loaded, about 44% above base, because workers' comp and payroll taxes ride every hour of a trade that works at height with saws. The labor line is the one homeowners argue with first. It's the wrong line. On a job this size the hours are set by the framing the code requires, not by padding.
The permit row is the standard allowance our index carries. The real number is your city's, and it runs anywhere from $79 to $1,811 for the same deck; permitcalculator.com's deck permit page has the city-by-city table.
The Internet Says $30 to $60 a Foot
Angi's survey of more than 10,000 customer projects puts the national average deck at $8,291, with most owners spending $4,339 to $12,624, and pressure-treated builds at $30 to $60 per square foot installed. Our $29 a foot sits right at the bottom of that band, which is where a clean, ground-level pressure-treated build belongs. Their number blends every material and every site, so the elevated decks, the composite upgrades, and the hard-access lots pull the average up. Match the scope to the number before you decide a quote is high.
The Only Line With Real Spread Is the Boards
Materials are 31% of this job, and decking is the one component where your choice moves the total by thousands instead of hundreds. Our index prices the same 240-square-foot frame three ways: pressure-treated pine at $7,053, cedar at $10,604, and composite at $11,140. Pressure-treated pine runs $3 to $7 per linear foot of board. Cedar runs $4 to $10. Composite and capped PVC run $20 to $38, a fivefold jump over pine at the top end, before a single screw goes in. Swapping the walking surface on the same frame is the difference between a lumber package and a luxury one.
What the upgrade buys is maintenance, not strength. The frame under a composite deck is still pressure-treated pine. And resale won't carry the decision either way: Angi's resale analysis puts a new deck's recoup at about 83% of build cost, which means every deck is partly a purchase for yourself no matter what you walk on.
What Changes City to City
| Metro | Average | Range | Crew labor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Atlanta | $6,736 | $6,029 to $7,499 | $1,642 |
| Austin | $6,799 | $5,993 to $7,651 | $1,702 |
| Phoenix | $7,218 | $6,474 to $8,021 | $1,921 |
| Denver | $7,309 | $6,536 to $8,143 | $2,098 |
| Chicago | $9,052 | $8,323 to $10,134 | $3,204 |
Atlanta to Chicago is a $2,316 gap, about 34%, and the crew explains roughly two-thirds of it, $1,562 straight off the wage line. The rest is what it costs to run a contracting company in each market: insurance, the shop, the truck, the office that answers when you call. Lumber barely moves between these cities. What varies is the wage the framing crew commands, because this is a labor-heavy build and the hours do not shrink when the market gets expensive.
The Code Already Framed Your Deck
Here's the part that kills the other popular savings idea. The framing under your deck isn't really up for negotiation. Building departments around the country check residential decks against the American Wood Council's DCA 6 guide, and its prescriptive tables already decided the big numbers: posts are 6x6 minimum, and every span table assumes the deck holds 40 pounds per square foot of people and furniture plus 10 of structure. A builder can't value-engineer below that, so two honest bids on the same deck are framing the same skeleton.
The guide has edges, though, and stepping past them costs real money. DCA 6 covers a single-level deck attached to the house; multi-level builds and unusual layouts push you into engineered design. And the guide says flatly that hot tubs are beyond its scope. Park one on the plan and you've left the prescriptive lane, which means an engineer's stamp before the permit office says yes.
So the honest levers are three: the footage, the boards, and staying inside the prescriptive lane. Everything else in the bid is the market and the math. When the bids come in, run them through the bid checker; it grades each line against these same index figures.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does a deck cost per square foot?
Our 240-square-foot pressure-treated build works out to $29.32 per square foot, all-in. Bigger decks dilute the fixed costs of footings and mobilization; smaller ones concentrate them. Per-foot quotes only mean something next to a stated size.
Is composite worth it over pressure-treated?
It's a maintenance decision, not a structural one. The board cost runs up to five times pine's, the frame underneath is pressure-treated either way, and resale returns most but not all of any deck budget. Wood's recoat cycle is the recurring cost that composite buys away; deck staining has its own line in our index if you want to price what you'd be escaping.
How much would I save building it myself?
The wage line is $2,071, and some of the overhead and margin follows it out of the bill. The lumber doesn't care who carries it; you'll still buy roughly $2,169 of materials and the permit. Against that, 51 crew-hours is most of a month of solo weekends, and the ledger connection and footings are the two spots where inspectors fail amateur decks. What a pro really sells on a deck is passing inspection the first time.
Figures are the national project basis from TheFatBook Cost Index V3 2026 for a 240-square-foot pressure-treated deck; metro rows reflect local wages and operating costs. Sources: Craftsman National Estimator BOM, BLS OES wages, verified permit fees.