How long does a fence last?
Six materials and six very different answers — and on a fence, more than almost anywhere else on a house, the warranty paper is measuring something much narrower than the thing you are standing in front of. A treated wood fence's term covers rot in the boards and stops where a board touches the ground. A chain-link term is written to a rust threshold. An aluminum lifetime term is prorated, and it does not survive the sale of the house. Every number below is tied to the document it came from, with its tier on the page.
Updated
Every material on one 150-year axis
Soft band: typical service-life range. Solid bar: the published warranty term. The difference between their right-hand ends is the story.
The numbers, with their sources
| Material | Service life | Warranty term | Source tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wood fence (pressure-treated pine) | ~20 yrs | 15-year limited, non-transferable, conditional | Tier 3 · baseline chart (undated) |
| Vinyl fence (PVC) | 100+ yrs | “Lifetime” limited, transferable, conditional | Tier 3 · baseline chart (undated) |
| Chain-link fence (galvanized) | 20–70 yrs | 12-year limited, non-transferable, conditional | Tier 2 · trade / standards literature |
| Aluminum fence (powder-coated) | 25+ yrs | “Lifetime” limited, prorated, non-transferable, conditional | Tier 1 · manufacturer document |
| Wrought iron fence | 100+ yrs | — | Tier 2 · trade / standards literature |
| Composite fence | 25+ yrs | 25-year limited, transferable, conditional | Tier 1 · manufacturer document |
Two patterns run through the grid. First, "lifetime" appears on two of these six fences and means something different on each: on vinyl it survives exactly one handover and then turns into a fixed 30 years counted from the original purchase date; on aluminum it pays half after year 25, shrinks to a quarter of its length within a mile of salt water, and does not transfer at all. Second, the fixed terms are all narrower than the fence they sit under — wood's 15 years cover rot in the boards and expressly stop at ground contact, and chain-link's 12 years are written to 5% red rust, the same threshold the galvanizing industry uses to mark a zinc coating's first maintenance and which its own chart puts decades further out. Two of these materials have no independent service-life literature at all. Those cells say so on the page instead of inventing a figure.