A broken fence gate almost always traces back to one of five things: the gate frame has racked out of square, the hinges have pulled loose from the post, the latch no longer lines up, the gate is dragging on the ground, or the gate post itself has shifted. Fix the gate frame with an anti-sag kit or a corner brace. Fix a leaning post by resetting it in concrete. The trick is telling those two apart before you buy anything, because tightening a gate that hangs from a moving post just breaks again by the next freeze. In Central Ohio, that post movement is usually frost heave in our clay soil, and it is the failure most homeowners misdiagnose.

What You’ll Sort Out Below

Most gate advice online treats every problem as “the gate is sagging” and points you straight at an anti-sag kit. That is often the wrong first move. This guide walks through how to read what your gate is actually doing- corner drop versus post lean versus worn hardware- so you spend your Saturday on the fix that holds. We cover the five common failures we see on Columbus jobs, the anti-sag-kit-versus-post-reset decision, the Ohio weather that causes most of it, and the honest line where a gate stops being a DIY job. By the end, you will know which repair your gate needs and roughly what it takes.

First, Read What Your Broken Fence Gate Is Actually Doing

Stand back about six feet and look at the whole gate opening, not just the gate. You are trying to answer one question before you touch a tool: is the gate broken, or is the post that holds it broken? The fixes are completely different, and getting this wrong is the single most common mistake we see.

Here is the fast field check we run on every service call. Open and close the gate slowly and watch where it binds. A gate that swings fine but won’t latch has a lining-up problem, while a gate that scrapes the ground on the swing side has a dropped corner or a leaning post.

Now look at the vertical gap between the gate and the latch post. If that gap is wide at the top and pinched at the bottom, the frame has racked and dropped on the latch corner. If the whole gate has tilted away from the post, suspect the post itself.

Put your hands on the hinge post and rock it:

  • Solid post, no movement at the base: your problem is the frame or the hardware.
  • Any wobble or give at the base: the post has moved, and no gate hardware will fix that.

Finish by laying a level on the post. If it reads out of plumb, the post is leaning, and that is your real repair. Write down what you find, because everything below sorts by which of these you saw.

Corner drop versus post lean, the distinction that matters

A dropped corner is the gate frame losing its square. The hinge-side top and the latch-side bottom pull apart, the gate parallelograms, and the latch corner sags toward the ground. That is a gate problem, and an anti-sag kit or corner brace is the answer.

A post lean is the post rotating in the ground, carrying the whole gate with it. The gate can still be perfectly square and still not latch, because its anchor point moved. Bracing the gate does nothing here. You have to reset the post. In our experience on Central Ohio jobs, roughly half the “sagging gate” calls we get are actually leaning posts, and the homeowner has already wasted a kit on it.

The Five Ways a Fence Gate Breaks (and the Fix for Each)

Nearly every broken gate we see falls into one of these five. Match your symptoms, then read the fix.

Symptom Most likely cause The fix
Latch corner sags, gap wide at top Gate frame racked out of square Anti-sag kit or 45-degree corner brace
Gate won’t latch but hangs level Latch out of line or shifted post Reposition latch, or reset post if it moved
Hinge screws spin, hinge pulling off Hinge pull-out from post Longer lag screws, backer block, or new hardware
Bottom rail drags on the ground Post lean, frame drop, or heave Diagnose post first, then brace or reset
Whole gate tilts with the post Gate post moved (heave or rot) Reset post in concrete, then rehang

Sagging gate: the anti-sag kit fix

For a genuine dropped corner, an anti-sag kit is the right tool and the cheapest one. It is a steel cable with two corner brackets and a turnbuckle. Mount the brackets so the cable runs from the top corner on the hinge side down to the bottom corner on the latch side, then tighten the turnbuckle until the gate pulls back to square. That diagonal carries the gate’s weight back up to the strong corner. A wooden 2×4 cut at 45 degrees and screwed across the same diagonal does the same job if you would rather not buy a kit. Either way, the brace has to run from hinge top to latch bottom; get that backward, and you make the sag worse.

Dragging gate: figure out why before you cut anything

A dragging gate is a symptom, not a cause. Do not grab a saw and trim the bottom rail; that is how a fixable gate becomes permanently short. Run the post check first. If the post is plumb and solid, the frame dropped, so brace it and the drag lifts on its own. If the post leaned, reset the post and the gate came back up with it. Only after both of those are ruled out, and the gate still catches on a high spot, does trimming or regrading the ground under the swing make sense.

Latch that won’t line up: usually the post, sometimes the latch

When a gate hangs level, but the latch won’t catch, the latch and the strike have drifted out of line. Sometimes the latch hardware loosened and just needed repositioning a half inch. More often, the post it mounts to shifted a little with the seasons, especially the free-standing latch post that has no fence bracing it on the far side. Reset or shim that post before you start moving latch hardware around, or you will be chasing the same problem again next spring.

Hinge pull-out: the fix most people get wrong

Hinge pull-out is when the hinge screws no longer bite, the holes have wallowed out, and the top hinge starts tearing away from the post under the gate’s weight. The bad fix is jamming the same screws back in with toothpicks and glue. The real fix is either stepping up to longer, thicker lag screws that reach fresh wood, gluing a hardwood dowel into the stripped hole so new screws have something to bite, or moving to a heavier hinge with a wider bolt pattern. On a heavy solid wood gate, we often go to a strap or bolt-through hinge so the load spreads across the post instead of hanging off three short screws.

Post movement: the root cause behind most of the others

When the post itself moves, everything above fails at once: the gate drops, drags, and won’t latch, all from one cause. In Central Ohio, the two drivers are frost heave in wet clay and rot at the ground line on older wood posts. Resetting the post is more work than the other fixes, but it is the only one that lasts. Dig out the old footing, get the post plumb, and reset it in fresh concrete with the footing below our local frost line so next winter cannot lift it again.

Anti-Sag Kit or Post Reset: How to Choose

This one decision determines if your fix lasts one season or ten years, so it is worth getting right.

Choose the anti-sag kit or corner brace when the post is plumb and solid and only the gate frame has dropped. It is a one- to two-hour job, low-cost, and completely within the DIY range. It is the correct answer for a wood or vinyl gate that has racked but hangs from a good post.

Choose the post reset when the post is leaning, wobbling at the base, or heaved. No amount of cable tension fixes a moving anchor. A post reset means digging out the footing, replumbing, and pouring new concrete below frost depth, and it usually means pulling the gate off first. Bracing a gate on a bad post is the number one repeat-failure we get called back to; the kit holds the gate square for a few weeks, then the post moves again and undoes all of it.

If your check turns up both a dropped frame and a moving post, fix the post first, always. Get the anchor solid, rehang the gate, and only then decide whether the frame still needs a brace. Fixing them in the wrong order wastes the framework.

Why Central Ohio Weather Wrecks Gates in Particular

Gates fail faster here than in a lot of the country, and it is not random. Three things about our climate and soil do the damage.

First, freeze-thaw. Columbus sits in a zone that crosses the freezing mark dozens of times each winter, not once. Every cycle, water in the soil expands and contracts, and a post set too shallow gets ratcheted upward a little each time. That is frost heave, and it is why footing depth matters so much here. A footing that ends above the frost line will get lifted no matter how much concrete you used.

Second, our clay. Central Ohio soil holds a lot of clay, which swells when it soaks up spring rain and shrinks when it dries in a July drought. That seasonal swell-and-shrink rocks posts back and forth all year, and the free-standing latch post with no fence to brace it takes the worst of it. It is the post we most often find leaning on a service call.

Third, the humidity and wet-dry swing on the wood itself. A wood gate absorbs moisture in a wet Ohio spring and dries out in summer heat, and that cycling loosens joints and works hinge screws out of their holes over a few seasons. It is why hinge pull-out shows up on gates that were perfectly solid three years ago.

The practitioner takeaway: if you are resetting a gate post in Central Ohio, set the footing below our local frost line and give it a real concrete collar. Please shorten the depth, and you will be booking the same repair for next spring. Catching a loose gate post early is exactly the kind of thing on our pre-winter fence inspection checklist, and this one detail separates a gate fix that lasts from one that comes back.

When to Fix It Yourself and When to Call a Pro

Plenty of gate repair is honest DIY. A dropped frame, a loose latch, a set of new hinges- those are a good weekend afternoon with basic tools. Search “gate repair near me,” and you will find plenty of pros, but you may not need one for these.

Call a pro when the gate post has moved and needs resetting below frost depth, when the post is rotted through at the base, when the gate is heavy ornamental aluminum or a double-drive gate where the two leaves have to meet perfectly, or when you have already braced it once and it failed again. That repeat failure is the clearest signal that the real problem is the post or the footing, not the gate, and that is where getting a proper fence gate repair done right the first time saves you from doing it three times. This is the same repair-versus-replace call we walk through in our guide to fence company services, and it is worth an honest look before you commit either way. If the diagnosis itself has you stumped, having someone read the gate in person is worth the call.

Where to go from here

Start with the six-foot look and the post check, because that one step points you to the right fix: an anti-sag kit for a dropped frame, a fresh footing for a moving post. Match your symptom to the table, fix the post before the frame if both are bad, and set any new footing below our Central Ohio frost line so winter cannot undo the work. If your gate keeps failing after a brace, or the post has clearly moved, that is the point to bring in help. The team at Arrow Fence of Ohio has been hanging and rehanging gates across Columbus and central Ohio since 1991, and we are glad to take a look before a small gate problem turns into a whole new fence.