Fence Permits in Montgomery County, PA

Pennsylvania puts zoning and construction permitting in municipal hands. A township board of commissioners or a borough council writes the ordinance, a zoning officer administers it, and a code office issues the permit and sends the inspector. County government is not a step in that process for a residential fence, and there is no county fence ordinance to read.

Montgomery County contains more than sixty municipalities. Along the Main Line the list is short, because Lower Merion Township and Narberth Borough cover almost all of it, but the principle is the same as anywhere else: the ordinance that governs your fence is the one written by the municipality your parcel is in.

Narberth is the case that surprises people. It is a borough in its own right, roughly half a square mile, entirely surrounded by Lower Merion, with its own council, its own code office and its own fence rules. A Narberth address inside the borough is permitted by the borough. A Narberth postal address outside borough limits is permitted by Lower Merion, under a different ordinance and a different fee schedule.

Bryn Mawr, Gladwyne, Wynnewood and Merion Station are postal designations. The government behind each of them is Lower Merion Township, and that is where the application, the ordinance, the fee and the inspection all come from.

Bryn Mawr additionally straddles a county line. Part of it sits in Lower Merion Township, Montgomery County, and part sits in Haverford Township, Delaware County. Two houses a few hundred yards apart can be governed by two different ordinances in two different counties, with two different applications, two different fee schedules and two different turnarounds. Nothing in the mailing address reveals which one you are in. Haverford has the same split for the same reason.

Establish the municipality first. The county parcel viewer, the tax bill or a call to either code office settles it in a few minutes. Reading the wrong ordinance carefully is worse than reading none, because it gives you confidence in a number that does not apply to your lot.

This is the single most common reason a Main Line fence design has to change, and it is worth understanding before anything is drawn.

Zoning ordinances set height by yard type: a taller limit in the rear and side yards, a lower one in the front. On an interior lot that is simple, because there is one street and one front yard. On a corner lot the ordinance generally treats each street frontage as a front yard, so the property has two of them and the lower limit applies along both.

The practical effect is that an owner on a corner in Wynnewood, Narberth or Bala Cynwyd who plans a tall privacy line down the side street finds that the side street is legally the front. Rear-yard height is available only behind the line the ordinance draws, and that line is usually taken from the front building line or the street right-of-way, not from where the hedge or the driveway apron happens to be. On a shallow corner lot, the portion of the yard that qualifies as rear can be a fraction of what the owner assumed.

There are ways to work with it rather than against it. A lower open fence along the street frontage stepping up to a taller solid fence behind the building line is the usual answer, sometimes with planting carrying the visual load where the fence cannot. Both need to be drawn on the plan and approved rather than improvised on site, because the inspector measures what is built, not what was intended.

The Main Line is old, built-out ground with mature planting, stone retaining walls and lots that were terraced long before the current ordinance existed. That makes height measurement less obvious than the number in the ordinance suggests.

Height is generally measured from finished grade on the side facing away from the property — the neighbor side or the street side — which means the grade that counts may not be the grade you are standing on. A fence set on top of an existing stone wall is frequently measured as wall plus fence rather than fence alone. A berm, a raised bed or a regraded terrace against the outside face works the same way in reverse and quietly reduces the fence you are allowed to build.

Stone walls raise a second question that is not about height at all. Many Main Line walls are older than the houses behind them, some are shared, and some sit on or across the boundary rather than safely inside it. Before a fence is pinned to a wall it is worth knowing who owns the wall, whether it can carry the load, and whether attaching to it needs the neighbor agreement in writing.

Requirements vary by municipality, but the packet is consistent enough that you can assemble most of it before you call.

Draw the plan first. What stalls an application here is almost always a drawing that does not show the property lines, the front building line and the fence dimensioned to both, and that is the one item nobody at the counter can supply for you.

The two items most often drawn wrong on a Main Line plan are the front building line and the street right-of-way. The right-of-way commonly extends well past the edge of the paving, sometimes past the sidewalk and the street trees, so a fence set at what looks like the edge of the road can sit on ground the municipality controls.

A fence in the right-of-way is not automatically refused, but it is conditional in most ordinances and it can be ordered out at the owner cost when the municipality needs the ground. Drawing the right-of-way properly on the plan is how that gets caught at the counter rather than after the concrete has cured.

The same logic applies to the utility, sewer and drainage easements recorded against the parcel. They do not show up on the ground, only on the plan and in the title work, and several of them carry a condition that anything built inside them must be removable. Removable construction is a design decision, not a field adjustment, so it has to be settled before material is ordered.

Between homeowners associations, condominium associations and deed-restricted communities, a large share of Main Line property carries a private approval requirement on top of the municipal one. Architectural review is a separate process with a separate submission, a separate committee and a separate calendar, and the township permit has no bearing on it whatsoever.

The standards that come up most often here: an approved material list that excludes vinyl outright or permits it only in specified colors, a strong preference for black aluminum on anything visible from the street, a requirement that the fence read identically from both sides, and a height cap below what the township would allow. Where the two disagree, the stricter is the one enforced against you, so it is the one to build to.

Some Lower Merion parcels carry a further layer, because a historic resource designation or a historic district overlay adds a design review step of its own. Whether a specific property is affected is a question for the township, and it is worth asking early — it changes the calendar more than it changes the design.

Submit both approvals at once. Committees frequently meet monthly, and sequencing the two adds weeks for nothing. We prepare and file the municipal application and the architectural review packet together, and we build to whichever standard is more restrictive.

Confirm four things with the code office that governs your parcel: the height permitted in each yard on your specific lot, how the front yards and corners are defined, whether the fence may sit on the property line or must be set back, and the footing depth the municipality enforces. Those four answers decide the material order, and none of them can safely be inferred from the fence next door, which may predate the current ordinance or may never have been permitted at all.

Turnaround varies by municipality and by season, and spring is the crunch. A straightforward residential permit moves quickly in some offices and slowly in others, particularly where zoning review is involved or the application is scheduled to a meeting. Pool barriers add an inspection to the back end of the job.

PA One Call mark-out is filed before any hole is dug, on every job. On built-out Main Line lots with a century of buried services, mature root systems and abandoned utility runs underneath them, the mark-out is also what tells us where the post line has to move.