Hedge laying cost per metre (South Of England style)

[kav]

On 17/02/2026 at 17:51, spandit said:

Got a 90m hedge that needs laying in East Sussex. I'd like to tackle it myself but fear it's beyond me. Had one quote so far but wouldn't mind another one

Can you put up photo? We are say £18-30/m depending on size etc. Aiming for 2-2.5 stakes and binders a meter and you are looking at 6-8 quid in materials alone!

[AHPP]

1 hour ago, kav said:

Nice looking hedge to lay and your cuts look good. While we normally do South of England or Midland we have also laid similar using minimal stakes and no binders. Using a stake every 2m(ish) and on alternating sides. Use stakes to hold brash and the odd preacher round the outside if stake to 'lock in'. If that makes sense?

 

You beauty. 

[kav]

8 hours ago, AHPP said:

You beauty. 

If you look up North Somerset or Westmorland style I took inspiration from that. Stakes are trimmed to just under the brash. Not a 'pretty' as bound hedge but decent functional hedge

Hedgelaying Styles – National Hedgelaying Society

WWW.HEDGELAYING.ORG.UK

 

 

 

[AHPP]

I originally wanted to stake alternative sides, stake tops leaning in, then bind like a tent ridge to give it a bit more of a three dimensional build. There was no tension on the binding though so it was both useless and unsightly.

[Peewit]

On 17/02/2026 at 18:30, AHPP said:

Following with interest. I put over 30m of young easy going this morning and was planning to stake and bind so it’s vaguely South of England. Had a go with a bit of stuff I cut from a hazel stool. Probably three or four feet between stakes. It looks shit (so shit I’m going to pull it out tomorrow before too many people see it). Spoke to a mate who lays it. No wonder it looks shit. Done properly it uses three stakes and one binder per meter!

 

Anyway. Won’t be cheap. Off the top of my head, pulled out of my arse, back of a fag packet, frankly guessing, £40 a meter?

 

Tell us your quote when a couple more of us have had a guess.

 

SoE uses two stakes per yard and one binder per stake with two extra at the beginning and end of each run. 

Achieving a neat finish with SoE is easy with a few simple rules. 

1. Place every stake at exactly the same spacing - every 18". To achieve this my holly mallet which I cut from a tree, has a shaft of 18" so when I'm knocking stakes in I use it as a distance guage. 

2. Get the stakes in a straight, or regular, line wth no kinks and wiggles. This is harder. It is natural to eye each stake back against the line you've already knocked in. You swear they're perfectly in line but when the job's finished it looks like a dog's hind leg. As well as lining them up with those you've already put in, every four or five yards you need to walk back down the laid hedge and eye the line of stakes forwards against the hedge you've yet to lay. They should be heading for the centre of the unlaid hedge at all times. If they're starting to veer off to one side, you won't spot it and you'll automatically correct the course without thinking about it and so introduce a dog-leg. Walking back down your work every so often and eyeing them up the hedge as well as down helps to stop this happening.

3. Make corrections before you set the binders. Some stakes will be pulled out of line by pleachers under tension and no amount of fighting the pleacher will get the stake to stay where you want it. Wait til you're well past this troublesome stake and the hedge is woven in on either side, and very often you'll find you can pull it out and reposition it without the pleacher springing out. 

4. Adjust the stakes when the binders are in place but not dressed down. Few stakes are ever perfectly straight. With the binders holding them steady you can often take out a minor kink just by turning the stake in its hole without pulling it out.

If I get a really wayward one that can't be pulled out without springing the hedge, I'll ocasionally snip it off just below the top of the hedge line and put another stake in next to it in the right place. 

Edited 18 hours ago by Peewit

[AHPP]

Mine’s tuned out nothing like South of England. Couldn’t be arsed binding. 
 

Someone help the OP with the rates. 

[Peewit]

Rates are simple. It's what you need to earn laying 20 metres a day finished work on average, plus the cost of copice material if it's being used. If you can't command that, either you're not fast enough or they won't pay enough to make it viable, and either way, commercially, you finish up in the same place.  

It doesn't matter what other people charge. 

[Peewit]

OK. To break it down, Natural England grant funding for this year currently stands at £13.52/metre.

That doesn't factor in bought-in coppice material like stakes and binders because Natural England field officers don't know the first thing about hedgelaying and they're just government quango employees with degrees and final salary pensions, Kermit the frog wellingtons and a factsheet from the NHLS (who dont know that much about hedgelaying either, except for how to promote the NHLS) which they've downloaded off the internet. 

If you're working purely for grant funded money you need to lay an absolute minimum of 20 meters a day. I work on 25-30. By the time you've taken off travel diesel and saw fuel (in my case currently running at £100 per week for the two) plus wear and tear and chainsaw spares you're lookiing at about £200 a day gross, which is hard to earn a living from. 

 

If you add in stakes and binders for SoE at four sticks per metre at a bare minimum of £1.50 each (and that's now very cheap) you're looking at £20 per metre price. That assumes you will lay 20 metres per day every day on average for the season. If you can't command that price as a working minimum or produce the output, or your stakes and binders are costing more than £1.50 each to purchase and deliver to site, you're basically just doing it for the love of it. And your client, if he's a landowner on a grant scheme, is just getting his hedge reduced in height and tidied up for a few years (because that's how they see it) for free courtesy of the tax-payer.  

Edited 14 hours ago by Peewit

[kav]

8 hours ago, Peewit said:

OK. To break it down, Natural England grant funding for this year currently stands at £13.52/metre.

That doesn't factor in bought-in coppice material like stakes and binders because Natural England field officers don't know the first thing about hedgelaying and they're just government quango employees with degrees and final salary pensions, Kermit the frog wellingtons and a factsheet from the NHLS (who dont know that much about hedgelaying either, except for how to promote the NHLS) which they've downloaded off the internet. 

If you're working purely for grant funded money you need to lay an absolute minimum of 20 meters a day. I work on 25-30. By the time you've taken off travel diesel and saw fuel (in my case currently running at £100 per week for the two) plus wear and tear and chainsaw spares you're lookiing at about £200 a day gross, which is hard to earn a living from. 

 

If you add in stakes and binders for SoE at four sticks per metre at a bare minimum of £1.50 each (and that's now very cheap) you're looking at £20 per metre price. That assumes you will lay 20 metres per day every day on average for the season. If you can't command that price as a working minimum or produce the output, or your stakes and binders are costing more than £1.50 each to purchase and deliver to site, you're basically just doing it for the love of it. And your client, if he's a landowner on a grant scheme, is just getting his hedge reduced in height and tidied up for a few years (because that's how they see it) for free courtesy of the tax-payer.  

There is additional grant payment of £5.82for stakes and binders. It doesn't cover it but it helps. Plus should the grant be 100% or should the landowner actually have to pay something . Anyway that's a whole new topic

[Peewit]

4 hours ago, kav said:

There is additional grant payment of £5.82for stakes and binders. It doesn't cover it but it helps. Plus should the grant be 100% or should the landowner actually have to pay something . Anyway that's a whole new topic

You're right, it is a whole other topic  (dry stone wallers also have a great deal to say on whether their grant funding rates are realistic), but whether the job can be accommodated on grant money alone is relevent when considering what to charge. You also have to factor in traveling time. It may be worth starting a thread on grant funding..

 

This season I've had 3000 metres to do on an estate that's 45 miles away. The estate won't pay a penny above grant funding. They basically want it done for nothing. I have no stakes or binders to buy in as Northumberland style doesn't use any, mostly because hazel coppice is very rare in the north east as traditionally they didn't use sheep hurdles and there are no thatched buildings so hazel coppicing isn't really a thing. You just peg down with whatever pegs and crooks you can salvage from the hedge. But it means you also have to weave in pretty tightly if it's not yielding many pegs, so it's hard work to make the meterage each day and I actually find it slower going than SoE style.

Some hedgers up here don't weave in or do much cutting back. They just lay what's there and leave it as it is, pegged or sometimes tied with string. I don't like doing that because every hedge these days has been thrashed to death with tractor flails and if you don't take the worst of that damaged material off you get very poor regrowth and a poor shape as it grows. But I can understand why they do it with the money that's paid. 

 

Also, up here you've got no chance of charging any extra for heavy scrub clearance. All farm hedges here seem to have wire fences either side, sometimes with little room to stand, and often a heavy scrub belt of gorse, bramble and suckering blackthorn to cut out before you even find either the fence or the hedge. You have to price to earn a living, when you add in travel and fuel. If they won't wear it, it's not worth working for nothing or running at a loss. 

Another complication this year has been the atrocious wet weather. When you're traveling 40+ plus miles to work you have to make sure the weather when you get there will allow you to get a decent shift in.

Basically what I'm trying to say is, price what you need to to earn a living, not what other people think you should be charging. It's a job at the end of the day, not a holy calling. 

Edited 1 hour ago by Peewit