Let $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}$ be a domain in $\mathbb{R}^{m}$ with nonempty boundary. In Ward [‘On essential self-adjointness, confining potentials and the $L_{p}$-Hardy inequality’, PhD Thesis, NZIAS Massey University, New Zealand, 2014] and [‘The essential self-adjointness of Schrödinger operators on domains with non-empty boundary’, Manuscripta Math.150(3) (2016), 357–370] it was shown that the Schrödinger operator $H=-\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E5}+V$, with domain of definition $D(H)=C_{0}^{\infty }(\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA})$ and $V\in L_{\infty }^{\text{loc}}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA})$, is essentially self-adjoint provided that $V(x)\geq (1-\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}_{2}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}))/d(x)^{2}$. Here $d(x)$ is the Euclidean distance to the boundary and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}_{2}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA})$ is the nonnegative constant associated to the $L_{2}$-Hardy inequality. The conditions required for a domain to admit an $L_{2}$-Hardy inequality are well known and depend intimately on the Hausdorff or Aikawa/Assouad dimension of the boundary. However, there are only a handful of domains where the value of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}_{2}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA})$ is known explicitly. By obtaining upper and lower bounds on the number of cubes appearing in the $k\text{th}$ generation of the Whitney decomposition of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}$, we derive an upper bound on $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}_{p}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA})$, for $p>1$, in terms of the inner Minkowski dimension of the boundary.