Ask three Marietta contractors to price the same backyard and you'll usually get three different numbers, sometimes a few thousand dollars apart. That gap almost never means one of them is trying to take advantage of you. It usually means the quotes are built from different assumptions about material, structure, and site work that never show up until you ask what's actually inside the price. Once you know the four things every deck estimate is made of, you can read any quote — ours or a competitor's — the way a builder does.
The Four Line Items Behind Every Quote
Strip the marketing language out of a deck estimate and you're left with decking material, framing and footings, labor, and permits or engineering. In the Marietta area, pressure-treated Southern yellow pine decking material typically runs $4 to $8 per square foot, while composite boards — the kind we install through our composite and Trex decking line — run $6 to $13 per square foot before installation. Framing and footings are the part no one sees once the boards go down, and on a raised or multi-level deck they can eat up a third or more of the total budget, partly because Cobb County's dense red clay soil often calls for deeper concrete footings than sandier soil would need to hit frost-line and load requirements.
Labor for a licensed local crew generally runs $11 to $16 per square foot for a straightforward single-level build, on top of materials. That number climbs with stairs, curved layouts, or a lot where the crew can't just back a trailer up to the build site.
Rough Numbers by Deck Size
These are planning ranges for a simple, single-level deck in the greater Marietta market — not a quote, since your lot, grade, and design change the math quickly.
- Around 200 sq ft: roughly $3,200–$5,200 in pressure-treated wood, or $6,500–$10,500 in composite.
- Around 300 sq ft: roughly $4,800–$7,800 in wood, or $9,500–$15,500 in composite.
- 400+ sq ft: roughly $6,200–$10,500 or more in wood, or $12,500–$21,000 or more in composite.
The dollar gap between wood and composite widens as square footage grows — that's just per-square-foot math, not composite becoming a worse deal at scale. Factor in ten years of staining, sealing, and board replacement on a wood deck, though, and the comparison often flips. We break that full cost-over-time picture down in our composite vs. wood decking guide.
What Pushes a Quote Up Beyond Square Footage
Elevation and Footings
A deck sitting a step off the patio door needs far less structure underneath it than one perched ten feet up a sloped Cobb County backyard, which calls for deeper footings, taller posts, and usually a full staircase with mid-rail landings. This is the category of work we cover under multi-level and pool decks, and elevation is consistently the single biggest cost driver after size.
Railings and Add-Ons
Standard wood or black-aluminum balusters cost the least per foot. Cable rail, glass panel systems, and premium composite railing all add real money to the total. Screening the deck in or adding a shade structure are worthwhile upgrades for a Georgia summer — see our comparison of a screened porch versus an open deck — but each is priced as its own scope on top of the base structure, not folded quietly into it.
Permits and Engineering
Almost any attached or elevated deck in the City of Marietta or unincorporated Cobb County needs a permit, and many need stamped engineered plans, especially above a certain height or with a roof load on top. That's a real line item, not paperwork worth skipping to save money — our Marietta deck permit guide walks through exactly what an inspector checks and why it matters when you eventually sell the house.
Site Access and Grade
Tight side-yard access off a narrow driveway, an old concrete patio that has to come out first, or a lot that slopes hard toward the back fence all add labor hours a phone quote can't account for. It's one reason we walk the site in person before putting a number on paper, whether that lot is inside the Marietta Square area or out toward East Cobb.
Get a Real, Itemized Quote
We measure your space in person and hand you a written estimate broken down by category, not a mystery lump sum.
📞 Call 470-327-9145What Happens After You Approve a Quote
An itemized estimate is really just the starting document for the project. Once it's signed, the schedule moves into design finalization, the permit submission, and then the actual build — a sequence we lay out in full in our first-call-to-finished-deck timeline for Marietta homeowners so there are no surprises about how long each phase takes.
Reading a Quote Like a Line Item, Not a Verdict
When you're comparing estimates, ask each contractor to show the categories above rather than accepting a single bottom-line total. A quote that separates material, labor, footings, and permits lets you compare two bids apples-to-apples instead of just picking the smaller number without knowing what it does or doesn't cover — and it makes any mid-project change order much easier to evaluate later, since you'll know exactly which category it touches. Whether your lot sits in Marietta proper or anywhere else in Cobb County, that's the standard we hold our own written estimates to, using materials sourced through our custom wood deck program or composite lines depending on what fits your budget and how long you want the deck to last.