How much does a pergola cost in 2026?

Number one is the product price: a list price on the manufacturer’s site, the same in Ohio as in Oregon before delivery. Number two is what the finished structure costs standing in your yard — your ground, your region’s labor rates, whether the roof needs power, whether your municipality wants a permit. Nobody who has not seen your site can verify it.

Published cost guides usually collapse the two into one price-per-square-foot range. That is how the same 12×12 pergola “costs” anything from about $1,400 to about $19,000 depending on which one you open: one is quoting a bare cedar kit, the other a modeled site-built redwood structure with 45 hours of labor. Neither is wrong about what it is describing. Both are wrong to call it “the cost of a pergola”.

The spread is the finding. These estimates differ by an order of magnitude because they describe different projects — a kit on an existing patio, a custom wood structure with footings, a modeled redwood build — and none says which one you are planning. The rest of this page takes the project apart line by line so you can price yours instead of someone’s average.

Below is the cheapest published size of a representative family in each tier, each with the date we verified it and a link to the manufacturer’s page. It is a ladder, not a shortlist: it shows how far apart the tiers sit before a dollar of installation is added. For the full cross-brand price reference see Pergola prices; for which are worth buying, Best pergola kits.

Two things about that ladder matter for the project total. The same brand often sells one footprint at two or three prices depending on operation and lighting, so “a louvered aluminum pergola” is not one price. And the more a kit costs, the more of the project it tends to leave out: a canopy pergola ships with everything it needs, while a motorized system may list foundations, anchoring hardware, a 120 V outlet and professional assembly as things you provide — PergoLux does, and each brand’s own inclusion list is on its product page. That is where the second number starts.

Each family here carries the manufacturer’s own list of what ships in the box and what does not. These two are typical of the two ends of the market, and the exclusions are the bridge from number one to number two: each excluded item is a line in the sections that follow.

Yardistry prices its assembly and anchoring add-ons on the product page itself; PergoLux lists foundation, footings and professional assembly as excluded, without a price; Purple Leaf says it offers no installation service; Mirador refers certified installers on request. That is most of the market in four positions: some brands sell you the labor, some point you to it, some leave it to you.

There are two very different jobs hiding inside “installation”. One is assembling a kit on an existing slab or deck: the brands describe this in hours, and some sell it as a priced add-on. The other is a site build — footings dug and poured, a ledger fixed to the house, sometimes a slab — which contractors price in crew-days at rates that vary by region and trade. They are priced differently, which is why nothing below is a single number.

The Home Depot runs its own installation program: its services page quotes installed prices for custom wood pergolas by size and offers an in-home consultation. Whether it will install a kit bought elsewhere is not published. Lowe’s publishes no pergola installation price we could verify; ask the store.

Whether you need a foundation depends on what you already have. The louvered kits we checked are specified for anchoring to a flat concrete surface: Mirador and Erommy ship the expansion bolts, PergoLux and Yardistry do not. On a sound slab or a properly framed deck the foundation line may be zero plus anchoring. On lawn it is a slab or individual footings, and in a freeze-thaw climate those have to reach below the frost line, which is where the regional variation lives.

PergoLux publishes foundation plans for its Series 3 pergolas giving pad layouts and dimensions per size, but no concrete volume or price, so they cannot be turned into a cost. The figures below are third-party estimates for the work.

A manual pergola needs no electrical work. A motorized one needs a supply: PergoLux requires a standard 120 V outdoor outlet for the Pergola 4 Pro, BON’s Villa specifies 110 V at 2 A, and The Luxury Pergola ships a plug-in cord. If a weatherproof outlet already stands where the post will, this line is zero; if not, it is a new circuit or outlet, which your jurisdiction may require a licensed electrician and a permit for.

The code point that catches people: electrical work is exempt from a permit only below 25 volts and 50 watts (quoted below). A new 120 V outlet is not exempt; plugging listed equipment into an existing one may be. Your municipality decides.

The model code most US jurisdictions build on exempts detached accessory structures under 200 sq ft from a building permit (quoted in full below). A freestanding 10×13 (130 sq ft) or 12×16 (192 sq ft) sits under that line; a 12×20 (240 sq ft) does not, and a pergola attached to the house is not a detached structure at all. Jurisdictions amend the threshold, and setbacks, HOA rules and floodplain overlays apply regardless. Only your building department can tell you that you do not need a permit.

Permit fees are small next to the other lines, and rarely quoted with a real fee schedule behind them. Here is one, alongside the published ranges.

The kit price buys a roof on posts. The photographs on the product pages usually show it with side screens, lighting and heaters, all of which are priced separately. The figures below come straight from the manufacturers’ catalogs on the date shown.

A set of four screens or shutters on a mid-priced louvered kit can cost as much as the kit. Some families bundle what others sell separately — BON’s Villa and Mirador’s 111S e-Motion include lighting, PergoLux’s Pergola 4 Pro includes beam LEDs — which is why the deltas in the next section are not purely the price of a motor.

The premium quoted for a motorized louvered roof usually comes from the installed market, where a dealer-installed system is being set against a kit — two products in two markets. The measure that isolates the motor is one brand, one footprint, manual against motorized. Three brands sell both, pinned here to 10×13, the footprint most brands share. Read the deltas with the included-items list in mind: the Mirador e-Motion adds RGB lighting and a remote as well as the motor, the PergoLux Pro adds beam LEDs, app control and double-wall louvers, and the Hansø Horizon adds app and smart-home control with no published parts list to check against.

The delta within a family is in the low thousands, not the tens of thousands — though the project cost moves too, because a motorized roof needs a 120 V supply and possibly an electrical permit that a manual roof never needs. For contrast, Angi (8 Jul 2026) puts installed motorized systems at $3,900–$50,000+, average $13,700, with installed rates of manual $50–$110, motorized $60–$130 and “smart” $80–$180 per sq ft; HomeGuide (1 Oct 2024) gives $45–$110 / $55–$125 / $75–$175. Those include the dealer tier and are not comparable with the kit deltas above. Motorized pergolas lists every motorized family we have verified; Best louvered pergola brands ranks the brands.

The per-square-foot bands published for pergola materials describe site builds, not kits, and kits do not follow them. The way to see that is to hold the footprint constant. At 10×12, one of the most common kit sizes, there are cedar, wood, steel and aluminum frames with canopy, open-slat and louvered roofs. The per-square-foot column is our own computation from the price and the nominal footprint.

Two patterns show up. Within one family the per-square-foot figure falls as the footprint grows, because posts, motors and crank mechanisms are a fixed cost spread over more roof; the table below shows it inside a single family. And a louvered roof, not the frame material, is the biggest single step in kit price: the cedar louvered Yardistry sits with the aluminum louvered kits, not with the cedar open-slat ones.

On running cost: wood needs restaining or resealing on a cycle no manufacturer here publishes, and aluminum does not. We have no sourced figure for that maintenance cost and will not invent one; the warranty text on each family page states what the manufacturer will and will not cover, which is the closest published proxy.

Is it cheaper to buy a pergola or build one? There are four routes, and they are not four points on one line: a self-build from lumber costs your time and skill, a kit costs a known price plus a weekend, a kit with paid assembly costs a known price plus a published or quoted fee, and a custom site build costs a quote. The figures below are what people who have published numbers say each route costs. Every one is theirs, not ours.

Cost is not the only variable: how hard the kit is to put up matters too, and no brand publishes that as a number. Each family page carries the manufacturer’s installation type (DIY, professional, or either) and the assembly wording from the product page, so you can price your own time against the assembly fees above.

We do not add these up: the first line of each is a verified product price, and every line after it is somebody else’s estimate for somebody else’s region, named. They show the shape of a project at three points on the ladder.

No major dataset isolates pergolas. The National Association of Realtors and National Association of Landscape Professionals 2023 Remodeling Impact Report on outdoor features covers 11 projects — fire feature, in-ground pool, irrigation, landscape lighting, a new patio, a new wood deck, an outdoor kitchen among them — and has no pergola line. Zillow’s March 2026 analysis of listing features that sell for more, built on over two million 2025 listings, names docks, outdoor kitchens, outdoor showers and outdoor fireplaces, and does not mention pergolas.

Adjacent outdoor features show premiums in the low single digits, and nothing published isolates a pergola’s effect. We publish no return figure. Buy one because you will use it.

Every product price here is the manufacturer’s own published price, read on the date shown on its row and linked to the page it came from. We publish the price charged on that date and never compute a discount, because several brands run permanent or contradictory “compare at” prices. Every figure for installation, ground, electrical and permits is a third party’s, and carries that publisher and date.

No brand paid for placement. Affiliate relationships do not affect which products we include, how we rank them, or what we recommend.