Panels rarely lean on their own. Most of the time the rails and pickets are fine, and one or more posts have given up at the one spot you can't see: the few inches right at the ground line, where moisture, soil contact, and freeze-thaw cycles all pile on. That means most leaning fences don't need replacing. They need the right fix for the specific way the post failed, and the three fixes below cover nearly every case.
If the screwdriver says the wood is solid and the rock test says the hole let go, this is your fix. It costs nothing but gravel and an hour.
Brace it plumb first. Push the post back to vertical, check it with the level on two faces, and hold it there with the 2x4 braces screwed to the post and staked into the ground. Don't skip the braces — a post you're packing soil around will wander as you work.
Dig out the loose side. Open up the hole on the side the post leaned toward, down a foot or so, and pull out the loose soil and any cracked collar of old concrete.
Repack in lifts. Shovel in crushed gravel 4–6 inches at a time and tamp each layer hard before adding the next. Soil works too if it's granular; heavy clay doesn't. Loosely dumped fill is how the post got loose in the first place.
Recheck and release. Confirm plumb on both faces, top the hole off with soil mounded slightly so rain sheds away from the post, then take the braces off and reattach anything you loosened.
If the probe finds rot at the ground line but solid wood a few inches above it, a steel repair spike is the middle path. It's a heavy steel stake made for exactly this job, sold at any home center, and it lets the sound upper post do the work while the spike handles the ground.
Brace the post plumb, same as above. The spike locks in whatever angle the post is sitting at, so get the angle right first.
Drive the spike. Set the stake tight against the post face and drive it down alongside the buried section until it seats in firm soil below the rotted zone.
Lag it to sound wood. Fasten the spike's bracket to the post above the rot with the supplied lag screws — into wood your screwdriver confirmed is solid. Screws driven into rot hold nothing.
Test it hard. Braces off, then push at the top of the post like a storm would. A good spike install barely moves. Expect this repair to buy years of service, not a permanent cure — the rest of the post is still the same age.
When the post is rotted through, snapped at the base, or the footing has cracked and tilted as one lump, patching stops making sense. Reset it and be done.
Free the post. Unscrew the rails or pull the panels on both sides, dig around the old footing, and lever the whole lump out. A long 2x4 as a lever, or a farm jack if you have one, makes this far less miserable.
Dig a proper hole. Go below your local frost line — depths vary widely by region, so ask your building department or any fence supplier what local installers use. Bell the bottom slightly wider than the top so frost can't get a grip and jack the post up.
Set on gravel and brace plumb. Drop 4–6 inches of crushed gravel in the bottom for drainage, set the new post, and brace it plumb in both directions before anything goes in the hole.
Fill, and crown the top. Pour concrete around the post, or backfill with well-tamped gravel if your soil drains freely. Either way, mound the surface so it slopes away from the wood — a flat or dished top holds a puddle against the post all winter, and that's the rot you're trying to outlive.
Wait before you load it. Give fresh concrete at least 24–48 hours (the bag says exactly) before rehanging panels or a gate. Loading a green footing is how this year's straight post becomes next year's leaning post.
Pouring a bigger concrete collar around a rotten post. New concrete, same sponge inside. The post keeps dissolving, and the eventual removal job just got heavier.
The permanent diagonal brace. A 2x4 kicked from the fence to a ground stake is a fine temporary brace and a terrible permanent one — it loosens, it rots, and it trips everyone who mows. If a brace is still there a year later, the repair never happened.
Packing the hole in one dump. Untamped fill settles within a season and the lean returns, usually a little worse than before.
Fixing only the post that's leaning. The other posts on the run are the same age and were set the same way. Probe the neighbors while your tools are out — next year's lean is usually already soft at the base.
Read the post first, then pick the fix: repack a sound post, spike one that's rotted at the base but solid above it, and reset the ones that are done. Most single-post leans are a one-afternoon job for less than the cost of one contractor visit. If the leaning post carries a gate, fix the post before you touch the gate hardware — our guide to fixing a sagging gate starts from these same ground-line checks, and the post and footing inspection here mirrors the one in the annual deck maintenance checklist.
Doing it yourself, a steel repair spike typically runs about $20–$40 and a bag of concrete mix under $10, so most fixes land well under $60 in materials. Hiring it out, expect a few hundred dollars per post in most areas — the price swings a lot with region, access, and how much fence has to come apart.
Usually, yes. The repack and spike fixes both work with the panels in place as long as you can brace the post plumb — loosening the rails on either side makes it easier. A full reset is the exception; that one needs the section detached.
Commonly several years. It depends on how much sound post is left above the rot for the bracket to grab. Think of it as extending the post's life, not resetting its clock — when the upper post starts going soft, it's reset time.
Both work when done right. Concrete holds firmer in soft or sandy soil. Gravel drains better around the post and makes a future straightening job much easier. Either way, use a post rated for ground contact and crown the surface so water sheds off instead of pooling.
Four usual suspects: rot at the ground line where the wood stays damp, a footing that's too shallow or too small, frost heave pushing the footing up and sideways, and steady wind load on solid privacy panels. On older fences it's often two of them working together.