Fence Permits in Chester County, PA

Pennsylvania delegates land use regulation to municipalities. Zoning ordinances, including the sections that govern fence height, location and setback, are written by township supervisors and borough councils, administered by a zoning officer, and enforced locally. Building permits under the Uniform Construction Code work the same way: municipalities adopt and administer the code, and a number of them amend it. County government is not a step in that sequence for a residential fence.

That makes the first question on any Chester County fence project not what the county requires, but which municipality the property actually sits in. Get that wrong and you have read the wrong ordinance, filled out the wrong application and budgeted the wrong turnaround.

A postal address will not reliably tell you. A West Chester mailing address covers parcels in East Bradford, West Goshen, East Goshen and Westtown Townships as well as the borough itself, and the borough ordinance is not the township ordinance. A Kennett Square address covers Kennett Township and East Marlborough as often as it covers Kennett Square Borough. Malvern, Paoli, Berwyn and Devon addresses spread across Willistown, Tredyffrin, Easttown and Charlestown. The county parcel viewer, your tax bill or one phone call to the township office settles it in a minute, and it is the minute that saves the afternoon.

Every ordinance in the county answers the same handful of questions. It is the answers that differ, and these are the ones worth asking before a design is finalized.

Ask them of the code office directly rather than inferring them from the fence next door. A fence that is standing is not proof that it was ever permitted, and an ordinance amended since it went up does not carry forward to the next one.

West Chester Borough and Kennett Square Borough are dense, small-lot, walkable street grids where the front-yard rule bites hardest and where a parcel inside a designated historic district can pick up an additional design review. On a narrow borough lot the difference between a front-yard and a rear-yard limit is the difference between the fence you wanted and the fence you get.

East Goshen, West Goshen, West Whiteland and Uwchlan are subdivision townships. The ordinance in each is generally straightforward, but the fence is at least as likely to be governed by a homeowners association as by the township, and the association is usually the stricter of the two. Tredyffrin and Easttown mix large lots, long road frontage and steep ground, where setback and corner sight-line rules matter more than height does.

The western and southern townships add a different set again. East Marlborough around Unionville, Kennett Township, Pennsbury, East Bradford, Willistown and Charlestown carry working farm ground, horse property, stream corridors and preserved parcels, and their ordinances usually distinguish agricultural fencing from residential fencing. A post-and-rail line around a paddock and a six-foot privacy fence behind a house are not the same application in those townships, and an exemption that covers one does not cover the other.

The packet is not complicated, and most municipalities in the county want the same core items. Incomplete applications, rather than objectionable ones, are what stall a fence permit.

Where a current survey is required and you do not have one, that is the long pole in the schedule rather than the permit itself. Older properties here often have nothing more recent than the original subdivision plan, and surveyors book out through the spring.

Nearly every ordinance in Chester County sets height by yard rather than by property. Rear and side yards get the taller limit, the front yard gets a lower one, and the line between them is drawn from the front building line or the street right-of-way rather than from where the lawn appears to end.

The corner lot is the case that catches people. Most municipalities here treat a corner property as having two front yards, one addressing each street, which puts the lower front-yard limit along both frontages. A homeowner who plans a tall privacy line down the side street discovers at the counter that the side street is legally a front yard, and that rear-yard height is only available behind the line the ordinance draws. On a shallow corner lot the part of the yard that counts as rear can be much smaller than it looks.

Height is also measured from finished grade, and grade is not a constant on rolling Chester County ground. A fence set on top of a retaining wall, a berm or a raised bed is measured in many ordinances as the combined height of wall and fence, and measured on the outside face rather than the inside. A stepped fence line running downhill can measure legal at one post and over at the next, which is a conversation to have on the site walk rather than with the inspector.

Some municipalities allow a fence directly on the property line. Others require it to sit a stated distance inside. The two are not interchangeable and the difference decides where the post holes go, so it belongs in the first conversation rather than the last.

Either way the ordinance assumes you know where the line is, and that is the assumption most likely to be wrong. Old fence lines in this county wander. A line set by eye sixty years ago and rebuilt twice along the previous posts is not evidence of a boundary — it is evidence of where somebody once put a fence. Rebuilding along it can concede land you own, or place your structure on land you do not.

On a replacement this is worth resolving before tear-out, while the old fence is still standing and still marking what everybody has been treating as the line. Once it is on the truck, the conversation with the neighbor gets considerably harder.

Two things about local ground show up in the permit and again in the build. The first is frost. Footings are set below the frost depth the municipality enforces, and in the clay-heavy soil that runs through most of the county a shallow footing does not fail immediately. It heaves over three or four winters until the line goes crooked and the gates stop latching. The depth is a municipal figure; the reason behind it is not.

The second is water. Much of the county drains to the Brandywine and Red Clay watersheds, and a fence line that crosses a stream corridor, a floodplain, a designated riparian buffer or a stormwater basin easement runs into a separate review. Some townships require any fence within a drainage easement to be removable so the easement holder can bring equipment in, which changes the post detail and the panel connection. That is a decision to make before the material order, not during the inspection.

PA One Call is not a municipal matter and it is not optional. The utility mark-out is filed before any hole is dug, on every job, and the marks are frequently what tells us the post line has to shift a foot to clear a gas service or an old lateral.

A large share of the housing built in Uwchlan, West Whiteland, East Goshen, Tredyffrin and Charlestown over the last forty years sits in a community with architectural review. That review is a separate approval from the township permit, with its own submission, its own committee and its own calendar, and municipal approval tells the committee nothing at all.

Association standards are usually tighter than the ordinance. They restrict material and color, frequently require a fence that reads identically from both sides, and sometimes cap height below what the township would permit. Where the two disagree, build to the stricter, because that is the one that will be enforced against you.

Submit both at the same time. Committees often meet monthly rather than continuously, and running the two approvals in sequence instead of in parallel can add a month to a project for no reason. We prepare and file the municipal application and the architectural review packet as part of the job, and we schedule the crew against the approvals rather than ahead of them.