How Much Does a Privacy Hedge Cost in the Twin Cities? (2026)

A 50-foot privacy hedge in the Twin Cities costs about $1,040 installed using 17 American Pillar Arborvitae in #3 containers at 3 feet on center, $1,290 in #5, $2,690 in #10, and about $8,450 in 6-foot balled-and-burlapped stock. That is plants plus per-plant planting, delivered and planted. The only thing you are buying with the bigger number is time.

Every other article on this subject tells you a hedge costs "$3,000 to $15,000 depending on your project." That is not a price, it is a shrug. We deliver and plant hedges across the metro every week, our catalog prices are public, and our planting fee is a published per-plant schedule — so the arithmetic is reproducible. You can check it yourself. Below we do it out loud for four starting sizes, two run lengths, three plant species, and the cost per linear foot of each.

This guide covers what a hedge actually costs in 2026 Twin Cities dollars, how plant count is calculated from run length, what the planting fee is by container size, how many years each starting size costs you before the screen closes, what a juniper hedge costs compared to arborvitae, and the site conditions that move a quote up or down. All prices are Three Timbers Minnesota 2026 catalog prices, current as of this writing.

The short answer: a 50-foot hedge, four starting sizes

A privacy hedge is a single-species row of upright evergreens planted close enough that their mature widths overlap into a continuous visual barrier. The cost is two numbers added together: the plants, and the labor to put them in the ground. Nothing else is mandatory.

Here is the canonical example we quote from — American Pillar Arborvitae, 50 feet, 3 feet on center, 17 plants:

Same plant. Same spacing. Same crew. The spread from bottom to top is more than eight to one, and all of it is the size of the plant on delivery day.

How the number is built, with nothing hidden

Step one: plant count

Divide the run length by the on-center spacing and round up. Fifty feet at 3 feet on center is 16.7, which rounds to 17 plants. That is the whole calculation. On-center means measured trunk to trunk, not gap to gap — a mistake that costs people two or three plants on a long run.

Spacing is not a preference, it is a function of mature width. American Pillar matures around 3 to 4 feet wide, so 3 feet on center gives you overlap. University of Minnesota Extension's standard guidance on hedge planting is the same principle: space at or slightly inside the mature spread so the plants close, and resist the urge to crowd them tighter than that, because a crowded row shades out its own lower branches and thins from the bottom.

Step two: the planting fee

Our planting is priced per plant by container size, published, and identical whether you buy one shrub or ninety:

Two things people ask immediately. First: plant delivery and planting have no minimum job, at any order size. A single #5 arborvitae planted in your front bed is a real order and we will do it. The $1,500 minimum you may have seen quoted elsewhere on our site applies only to full landscape installation crew work — design-build projects with grading, hardscape, and bed construction — and it does not apply to mulching or rock installation either. Second: delivery is free on orders over $200, which every hedge in this article clears with room to spare. Orders land in 2 to 4 business days.

What a 100-foot run costs

Same math, longer wall. One hundred feet at 3 feet on center is 33.3, rounded up to 34 plants:

Notice the price scales almost perfectly linearly. There is no volume break hiding in a hedge quote, because there is no volume break in the work — the thirty-fourth hole takes the same effort as the first. If a contractor's 100-foot number is not roughly double their 50-foot number, ask what changed.

The real trade: money against years

This is the decision, and almost nobody frames it honestly. A bigger plant is not a better plant. It is the same plant, three or four growing seasons further along, and you are paying someone to have grown it and paying freight on the weight.

Growth rates in Twin Cities clay, from what we actually see on our own installs — not from catalog copy:

• American Pillar Arborvitae — about 1.5 to 2 feet per year. The fastest arborvitae we sell.
• Techny Arborvitae — about 1 foot per year. Denser and tougher, slower to height.
• Emerald Green and Holmstrup types — 8 to 12 inches per year.
• Columnar junipers (Taylor, Sky Rocket) — slower than arborvitae. That is the honest trade for their browse resistance.
• Black Hills Spruce — roughly 6 to 12 inches per year.

The "3 feet per year" figure you will find on arborvitae tags and half the blogs in this market is nursery marketing. We have never measured it on a metro property. Plan on the numbers above.

Now put those growth rates against the starting sizes. Container grades vary crop to crop, so treat the heights below as typical rather than guaranteed, and expect a "solid screen" to mean the row has closed side to side at roughly 6 feet of height:

Read the #3 row against the #10 row, because that is the choice most people are actually making. The #3 hedge costs about 39 percent of the #10 hedge — roughly $1,650 less on a 50-foot run — and it costs you about three additional years of waiting. Divide it out and you are paying somewhere around $550 per year of privacy bought forward.

Whether that is a good trade depends entirely on your situation, and we will say plainly which way we lean. If you plan to be in the house another decade, start small. The #3 row catches up, the plants establish faster because a smaller root ball recovers quicker, and you have $1,600 left over for mulch, edging, and rabbit protection. If you are screening a neighbor's new second story, selling in three years, or you have simply waited long enough, buy the #10 and stop reading. The 6-foot B&B row is for people who need the wall now and are not price-shopping — it is a legitimate purchase, but understand that you are paying roughly $170 per linear foot for the privilege of skipping five growing seasons.

What a juniper hedge costs — the browse-proof option

Arborvitae is the metro's most heavily browsed evergreen. Deer strip it to the browse line, and rabbits standing on packed snow eat the lower two to three feet of foliage bare, leaving a permanent bald skirt that never fills back in. We replace those hedges for a living. On exposed sites, property lines, yards backing onto woods or parks, or anywhere you see rabbit runs in the snow, juniper is the better privacy hedge — and the price difference is smaller than most people assume.

Columnar junipers are narrower than arborvitae, so they want tighter spacing than a Techny row. We plant Taylor and Sky Rocket at 3 feet on center — the same spacing as an American Pillar hedge, which makes the two directly comparable — so a 50-foot run takes 17 plants. Tighten to 2.5 feet on center if you want a faster-closing screen and are willing to pay for the extra plants; every price below is figured at 3 feet:

A #5 juniper hedge runs about $1,380 to $1,480 installed against $1,290 for a #5 American Pillar row — call it $90 to $190 more on 50 feet. At the same 3-foot spacing the plant count is identical, so the whole difference is the higher price per juniper. That is the entire premium for a hedge deer and rabbits leave alone.

The honest trade-offs, because they are real:

• Junipers fill in more slowly than arborvitae. You are trading years for durability.
• Columnar junipers need tighter spacing than a Techny row — 3 feet on center against 4, which is more plants per linear foot on that comparison.
• Sky Rocket splays open under heavy Minnesota snow load. Taylor holds a tighter form and is the better pick on a run that catches roof-slide or plow-throw snow.
• Junipers get juniper tip blight and are an alternate host for cedar-apple rust.
• Junipers hate wet feet. Do not put them in a low, poorly drained corner of a clay yard.
• Arborvitae still wins in a fenced yard with no browse pressure — faster fill, lower cost per plant, denser at the base. If your yard is fenced and you have never seen a deer on it, plant the arborvitae.

We cover the plant-by-plant comparison in depth in our guide to juniper privacy screens as the arborvitae alternative.

Techny arborvitae and the spruce screen

Techny is the other arborvitae we sell in volume — slower than American Pillar at about a foot a year, but denser, darker, and noticeably tougher in wind. Fifty feet at 3 feet on center, 17 plants:

Then there is the option nobody quotes because it does not look like a hedge: a spruce screen. Black Hills Spruce matures wide, so you plant it at roughly 10 feet on center — five plants over 50 feet instead of seventeen. Five #10 Black Hills Spruce at $169.99 plus $35 each to plant is about $1,020 installed, or $20 per linear foot, the cheapest per-foot screen on this page. Step up to five 6-foot B&B at $410.99 and it is about $3,050, or $61 per foot — still less than a #10 arborvitae row.

The catch is space and patience. A spruce screen needs 10 to 15 feet of depth to be planted correctly, it will not give you a crisp property-line wall, and at 6 to 12 inches of growth a year it is the slowest thing on this list. On a suburban lot with a 6-foot side yard, it is not an option. On a two-acre Lake Elmo or Stillwater property where you are screening a road, it is often the right answer and the cheapest one.

Cost per linear foot, side by side

What moves your number up or down

Everything above assumes a normal residential job: reachable back yard, ordinary clay or clay-loam soil, nothing to remove first. Here is what changes it.

• Access. A 36-inch gate means every plant and every shovel of backfill goes through by hand. A yard we can reach with equipment plants faster than one we cannot, and on large B&B orders access is sometimes the difference between "yes" and "we need a different plan."
• Slope. A hedge across a grade needs each hole leveled into the slope. It is slower and it usually wants a shallow berm on the downhill side so water does not run off the root ball.
• Existing removal. Taking out a dead arborvitae row, an old chain-link fence line, or 50 feet of landscape rock and fabric is real work and gets quoted separately.
• Soil. Heavy clay is the metro norm and we plant in it constantly. Buried construction rubble in a newer subdivision is the genuine problem — Woodbury, Lakeville, and Blaine builds from the last twenty years turn up concrete chunks and compacted fill often enough that we mention it up front.
• Distance from the truck. Carrying 6-foot B&B arborvitae 150 feet around a house is a different job than setting them off the tailgate.
• Utility locates. Free, and required before we dig. Call Gopher State One Call at 811 or file online at least two business days ahead. Private lines — irrigation, invisible fence, low-voltage lighting, a gas run to a fire pit — are not covered by the public locate. You have to mark those.

What is not in the hedge price

None of these are required, but people are often surprised, so here they are with real numbers.

• Mulch — $40 per yard. A 50-foot hedge bed 4 feet wide is 200 square feet; at 3 inches deep that is about 2 yards, or roughly $80. The formula: square feet × depth in inches ÷ 324 = cubic yards. Mulching has no minimum job.
• Rabbit and deer protection. If you plant arborvitae on a browsed site, budget for chicken wire cylinders around the base every winter or repellent applied every 4 to 6 weeks from October through April. This recurring cost is a real part of the arborvitae-versus-juniper math and almost nobody includes it.
• Irrigation. A new hedge needs 5 gallons per plant, once a week, through its first two summers. On a 17-plant run that is 85 gallons a week — doable with a hose, easier with a drip line.
• Edging, fabric, and bed prep. Optional. We skip fabric under hedges; it degrades, weeds root on top of it anyway, and it makes future planting miserable.
• Optional coverage. Plant protection is available as an add-on at checkout if you want it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does a 50-foot privacy hedge cost in the Twin Cities? About $1,040 installed for 17 American Pillar Arborvitae in #3 containers at 3 feet on center, $1,290 in #5, $2,690 in #10, and roughly $8,450 in 6-foot balled-and-burlapped stock. Those totals include the plants and the per-plant planting fee. Delivery is free on orders over $200.

How many arborvitae do I need for 50 feet? Seventeen, at 3 feet on center. Divide the run length by the spacing and round up: 50 divided by 3 is 16.7, so 17 plants. On-center means trunk to trunk, not gap to gap. A 100-foot run at the same spacing takes 34 plants.

Is it cheaper to buy small arborvitae and wait? Yes, substantially. A #3 hedge costs about 39 percent of the same hedge in #10 containers — roughly $1,650 less over 50 feet — and reaches a solid screen about three years later. Smaller stock also establishes faster because a smaller root ball recovers more quickly after transplant.

Is there a minimum order for planting? No. Plant delivery and planting have no minimum job at any order size. One shrub is a real order. Our $1,500 minimum applies only to full landscape installation crew work, and it does not apply to mulching or rock installation.

How much more does a juniper hedge cost than arborvitae? About $90 to $190 more on a 50-foot run in #5 stock — roughly $1,380 for Sky Rocket or $1,480 for Taylor, against $1,290 for American Pillar Arborvitae. Both are planted 3 feet on center, so the plant count is the same and the entire difference is the higher price per juniper.

How fast does a privacy hedge actually grow in Minnesota? American Pillar Arborvitae grows about 1.5 to 2 feet per year in Twin Cities conditions, Techny about 1 foot, Emerald Green and Holmstrup types 8 to 12 inches, columnar junipers slower still, and Black Hills Spruce 6 to 12 inches. The commonly advertised 3 feet per year is nursery marketing and we do not see it in the field.

What is the cheapest privacy screen per linear foot? Black Hills Spruce in #10 containers at 10 feet on center, at roughly $20 per linear foot installed, just edging out #3 American Pillar Arborvitae at about $21. The spruce needs 10 to 15 feet of bed depth and grows slowly, so it only works on larger lots.

Does the price include mulch and bed prep? No. Plants and planting are quoted together; mulch is separate at $40 per cubic yard. A 50-foot hedge bed 4 feet wide takes about 2 yards at 3 inches deep, or roughly $80. We do not install fabric under hedges.

When should a privacy hedge be planted in Minnesota? Evergreens should go in the ground by mid-to-late September in the fall, or from late April through May in spring. Arborvitae, juniper, and spruce keep transpiring all winter and need root establishment before the ground freezes in mid-to-late November, so a late-October evergreen planting is a real risk of winter desiccation.

How much water does a new hedge need? Five gallons per plant, once a week, for the first two full summers. Rainfall counts toward the weekly total. On a 17-plant run that is 85 gallons a week — one deep soak beats daily sprinkling, which only wets the top inch and leaves the root ball dry.

Ready to price your hedge?

Every number on this page is a live catalog price you can check yourself. Browse American Pillar Arborvitae, Techny Arborvitae, Sky Rocket Juniper, Taylor Juniper, and Black Hills Spruce, or start with the full privacy hedge collection. Add planting to any plant at checkout at the per-size rate above — there is no minimum job. If you are still deciding how long you are willing to wait, read how fast privacy trees actually grow in Minnesota. Three Timbers Minnesota grows and ships from Waconia and delivers across the Twin Cities metro in 2 to 4 business days, free over $200, and our crew can plant the whole run for you. Questions on a specific run length? Call or text 612-214-1955.