Press and media

The facts

What we can speak to

• How deck cost breaks down: material versus labour, and what actually moves a quote.
• Prescriptive code requirements for residential decks — joist and beam spans, ledger attachment, stair geometry, guard heights — and where they come from.
• Why ledger connections are the most common structural failure point on a deck.
• The arithmetic homeowners most often get wrong when estimating materials.

What we cannot speak to

We are not licensed engineers or contractors and do not offer structural opinions on a specific deck. We also do not hold proprietary market data — the cost figures on this site are national average ranges compiled from published sources, not a survey, and we would rather be quoted as saying so than have a precision we cannot support attributed to us.

How to cite figures from this site

Two kinds of number appear here and they have different standing. Code and engineering figures — span tables, ledger fastener spacing, stair limits — come from the American Wood Council's DCA 6 prescriptive residential deck guide and the model residential code, and each page names the table it uses. Cite those to the source, not to us. Cost figures are our estimates, stated as ranges with their assumptions on the page; cite those as estimates from Smart Decking Calculator.

Full detail on both is on the sources and method page.

Story angles we can help with

These come up repeatedly and are the ones where this site has something specific rather than general to offer.

• Why deck quotes vary so widely. The phrase "per square foot" covers at least three different scopes, which is most of the apparent variation. Height, shape and railing choice move a quote as much as size does.
• Hot tubs on decks. A filled six-person tub runs roughly 107 pounds per square foot against the 50 a residential deck is framed for — and the common reasoning error is comparing the tub's weight against the deck's total capacity rather than against the framing directly under it.
• Ledger connections. The attachment to the house is where most deck collapses begin, and the fastener spacing is prescribed by a published table almost nobody outside the trade has seen.
• The stringer nobody checks. Cut a 2x10 stair stringer at a normal rise and run and it leaves about 3.4 inches of throat against a 5 inch minimum. It is a good illustration of a code requirement that is invisible without doing the arithmetic.
• Frost depth and footings. A requirement that varies from 12 inches to 48 across the country, and whose consequences — a deck that racks over two winters — arrive long after the mistake.
• Repair versus replace. A sound frame makes a new deck surface cost roughly half a rebuild, and the test is a screwdriver rather than how the boards look.

Linking and embedding

You are welcome to link to any page here. The deck cost calculator can also be embedded on your own site — the embed page has the snippet. If you spot a figure that looks wrong, please tell us on the contact page rather than working around it; we would rather fix it.

Corrections

If we have published something inaccurate and you have referenced it, tell us and we will correct the page and say what changed.