Permits & Rules
Do I need a permit to put up a fence?
In most of Chester, Delaware and Montgomery County, yes. Fence permits are issued by your township or borough rather than by the county or the state, and the requirement differs between neighbouring municipalities. Most require a zoning permit for any fence, some exempt fences below a certain height, and a pool barrier always requires one and is inspected. The application generally needs a plot plan showing the fence relative to your property lines, plus height, material, style and gate locations. The governing rule comes from your specific municipality.
The filing is usually a zoning application rather than a building permit, and it typically asks for a plot plan or survey with the proposed fence line drawn on it, the height, the material and style, the gate locations and which way they swing, and a fee. Pool barriers ask for more: gate hardware, latch height, and picket or mesh spacing. Some municipalities want the property corners staked before they will issue. None of it is difficult, but it takes time, and turnaround lengthens noticeably in spring when every homeowner in the township applies at once.
Skipping the permit is not a quiet decision. Fence work is visible from the street, and the usual sequence is a complaint, a stop-work notice, and then either a retroactive application or an order to move or remove what has been built — at the owner's cost, not the contractor's. It also resurfaces at resale, when an unpermitted structure has to be disclosed or resolved before settlement. The permit fee is trivial next to the cost of taking a finished fence back down.
Township approval is not HOA approval. If your property sits in a homeowners association, architectural review is an entirely separate submission on its own timeline, and committees frequently meet monthly rather than continuously. HOA standards routinely cap height, restrict material and colour, and dictate which face points outward — often below what the municipality would permit. Where the two conflict, the more restrictive governs in practice. Both should be filed in parallel so the two delays do not stack on top of each other.
The permit is not the only thing that has to happen before a hole is dug. Pennsylvania law requires a PA One Call utility mark-out ahead of excavation, and that is a separate obligation from the zoning permit. It is free, it protects gas, electric, cable and water service, and it is not something to skip because the job is small or the crew is in a hurry. A post hole is exactly deep enough to find a service line.
We prepare and file the municipal application and the HOA architectural submission as part of the job, and we place the One Call before any post hole is dug. We also confirm the height and setback your municipality actually enforces before material is ordered, because ordering an eight-foot fence for a township that permits six is an expensive way to learn the rule.
