Does New Siding Actually Increase What a Home Sells For?

You are about to spend real money on the outside of a house, and somewhere along the way someone told you siding pays for itself. The research behind that claim is real. It is also narrower, older, more regional and more opinion-based than almost anyone quoting it admits.

Here is what the published data reports, what it does not report, and where the honest gap sits.

The report everyone cites, and what it actually measures

The source is Zonda’s 2025 Cost vs. Value Report, the 38th annual edition, published through the Journal of Light Construction on September 18, 2025. As of this writing that 2025 edition is the most recent one. A 2026-dated article quoting cost-versus-value percentages is quoting the 2025 numbers under a newer label, so check the year on any figure you are handed.

Two facts about how the report is built change how you should read every figure in it.

First, the resale side is not sales data. Zonda surveyed more than 6,000 Realtors, working in cooperation with the Realtors Property Resource of the National Association of Realtors, and asked one question: what value does each of these 28 remodeling projects add to the sale price of a home? Respondents saw project descriptions, photos, construction costs and median home prices for their city, and gave an opinion. Those answers are professional estimates. They are not a record of what any house sold for. So the accurate sentence is never “siding returns X percent.” It is “real-estate professionals estimated X percent.”

Second, the cost side prices a defined scope, not your house. The fiber-cement project is specified as replacing 1,250 square feet of existing siding with new fiber cement, factory primed and factory painted, including all 4/4 and 5/4 trim in fiber cement or cellular PVC. The vinyl project replaces the same 1,250 square feet with vinyl installed to the manufacturer’s specifications, with factory trim at openings and corners. Both definitions call for a continuous water-resistive barrier beneath the siding. The people who write the scope treat the WRB as part of the job, the same point we make in our guide to choosing siding materials.

Twelve hundred and fifty square feet is a wall area, not a house. Do not read the report’s job costs as a quote for your home.

The national number, and why it is not your number

Nationally, the 2025 report puts fiber-cement siding replacement at a job cost of $21,485 against an estimated resale value of $24,420. That is 113.7 percent of cost recouped, fourth out of the 28 projects tracked. Vinyl siding replacement comes in at $17,950 against $17,313, or 96.5 percent, sixth of 28.

The 113.7 percent figure is the one that ends up on flyers. It is a national average, and Pennsylvania is not the nation.

Every Pennsylvania market in the report sits in the Middle Atlantic region. The region’s city list is Erie, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and York, plus five New York markets. In that region, fiber-cement siding replacement carries a job cost of $25,666 against an estimated resale value of $25,475. That is 99.3 percent, 14.4 points below the national average, and it does not clear 100 percent. Vinyl in the Middle Atlantic is 96.3 percent, a job cost of $21,175 against $20,391, essentially level with the national vinyl figure.

So the regional version of the claim is not that fiber cement pays for itself here. It is that agents in this region estimated the added sale price at roughly what the work costs.

Harrisburg, York and Philadelphia are further apart than you would expect

The report also publishes city-level numbers, and three of its cities sit inside or beside our service area.

• Harrisburg: fiber cement, $20,745 job cost against $17,739 estimated resale, 85.5 percent. Vinyl, $17,933 against $11,714, 65.3 percent.
• York: fiber cement, $20,745 against $17,443, 84.1 percent. Vinyl, $17,933 against $10,888, 60.7 percent.
• Philadelphia: fiber cement, $22,409 against $24,465, 109.2 percent. Vinyl, $17,785 against $16,027, 90.1 percent.

Harrisburg and York are the numbers closest to Lancaster, Dauphin, Cumberland, Lebanon, Adams and York counties, and they are the weakest ones on this page. Of the three cities above, Philadelphia is the only one that clears 100 percent, and it is the one that matters most to the Chester County end of our territory. The report also covers Erie and Pittsburgh, both outside our service area, and we have not pulled those figures. Its Middle Atlantic city list has no Reading entry, so we are not going to interpolate one for Berks County.

The report does not explain the spread between Philadelphia and the two midstate markets. Agents in each city were shown median home prices for their own city, which is part of it. Beyond that, we would be guessing, and a guess dressed up as an explanation is worse than silence. What we can say directionally, because the report’s authors say it, is that Middle Atlantic returns strengthened year over year relative to some other regions, while the Pacific region led overall.

Recouped is not profit, and the difference is the whole decision

A recouped percentage is a ratio of estimated added sale price to job cost. It is not a return on an investment in any sense a financial advisor would recognize.

At 99.3 percent, every dollar you spend is estimated to raise the sale price by about 99 cents. Nothing is left over. At 85.5 percent, about 14 and a half cents of every dollar does not come back at the closing table. Even the national 113.7 percent is not a 13.7 percent gain: it is an opinion about price effect at one moment, unrealized until you actually sell, and it says nothing about what you paid to finance the work in the meantime.

Three things the percentage does not tell you:

• Whether you paid a fair price. The ratio uses a modeled regional cost, not your contract. Overpay and your personal ratio drops immediately.
• Whether the estimate holds on your street. These are city and regional aggregates of agent opinion, not appraisals of your house.
• When you sell, and what the market is doing then. Value you never realize is not value.

One more piece of context siding marketing leaves out: fiber cement ranks fourth of 28 nationally, which means three other projects rank above it. Whatever those three are, siding is not the top of the list. If pure return were the goal, it would not be the first thing you did.

The second data set, and what it stopped publishing

The other study homeowners run into is the National Association of Realtors Remodeling Impact Report. Its 2025 edition, published in April 2025, contains no cost-recovery percentage for siding and no dollar figure. Siding does not appear in its cost recovery chart at all.

The most recent NAR edition that does publish siding cost recovery is the 2022 report. In it, remodelers estimated a fiber cement siding job at $18,600 and Realtors estimated $16,000 recovered, or 86 percent. Vinyl was $18,300 and $15,000, or 82 percent. Those figures are four years old, and anyone citing them should say so.

Do not blend the two studies. They use different years, different assumed houses and different methods. NAR cost figures come from a survey of remodeling contractors, 177 responses in the summer of 2024 for the 2025 edition, against an assumed 2,300 square foot post-1978 house in good condition. Values come from a separate Realtor survey. And NAR publishes national figures only. There is no NAR Pennsylvania siding number. If you see one, it was invented.

Put the two together and the honest summary is this: both major data sets are estimates made by professionals, neither is a record of completed sales, and the one with local granularity says the midstate is well under 100 percent.

Curb appeal, condition, and whether the house sells at all

The report’s own authors give a reason exterior projects dominate the rankings, and it is not that siding is magic. They attribute it partly to real-estate professionals placing high value on curb appeal when setting a selling price, and partly to the lower labor cost of exterior replacement compared with kitchens, baths and additions. Eight of the ten highest-return projects are exterior replacements.

So a good part of the siding number is a statement about how agents price houses, not about the material on the wall.

There is one peer-reviewed measurement worth knowing. Johnson, Tidwell and Villupuram published “Valuing Curb Appeal” in the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, volume 60, pages 111 to 133, released online in September 2019. Their finding, stated exactly: own-property curb appeal is worth about twice that of an across-the-street neighbor, and neighbor and own-property curb appeal together may account for up to 7 percent of a house’s sale price.

Read that carefully. The 7 percent is a combined ceiling covering your house and the one across the street. It is not 7 percent for your siding. The looser version circulating on contractor blogs, that homes with strong curb appeal sell for 7 percent more, comes from a university press release, not from the published paper. We are not going to hand you the bigger number because it sells better.

Two qualifiers from the same paper do matter locally. The curb appeal premium is more pronounced when the housing market is weak, and it is greater in neighborhoods where average curb appeal is already high. On a maintained street in Lititz, Hershey or Mechanicsburg, a wall of chalked, cupped, patched siding costs you more than the same wall would on a street where nothing is kept up.

On the related question everyone asks next, how much faster a house sells with new siding, we have nothing to give you. We looked for primary or peer-reviewed research on the effect of siding or exterior condition on days on market and did not find any. Every number in circulation traces back to agent blogs or marketing pages. So we do not state one.

Value at resale versus value while you live there

NAR measures a second thing, and it is more useful to most readers than the money. It asks homeowners how happy a project made them, on a one-to-ten Joy Score.

In the 2025 report, new siding scored 7.3. Painting exterior siding scored 8.8. The typical project across the whole report scores 8.2. New siding scores below the report average and well below a paint job. That is not a flattering result for our industry and it is still the published result.

The 2022 edition, which combined vinyl and fiber cement, put new siding at 7.9. In that same report, 93 percent of homeowners who replaced siding said they had a greater desire to be home afterward, and 67 percent felt a major sense of accomplishment when they thought about the project. The top reason given for doing the work, at 53 percent, was upgrading worn-out surfaces, finishes and materials. Selling the home within two years was the reason for 13 percent.

That split is the most useful figure in this post. Thirteen percent were getting a house ready to sell. The rest were spending the money on a house they planned to keep living in.

What they bought instead is the part no report scores: a wall assembly that sheds water, trim that does not need scraping every few seasons, and a finish that is not an ongoing project. If the energy side is what you are weighing, we worked through whether that pays back in insulated siding and Pennsylvania energy bills. If the finish is the question, the two Hardie warranties are covered in ColorPlus versus field-painted siding.

When siding is the wrong reason to spend the money

If return is the only reason you are considering this, the local data does not support it. Agents in Harrisburg estimated 85.5 percent and in York 84.1 percent for fiber cement. For vinyl in those two markets the estimates were 65.3 and 60.7 percent. Buying a wall as an investment here means accepting, going in, that the published local estimates say you do not get all of it back.

A few situations where we would tell you to wait or do something smaller:

• You are listing in the next two months and the siding is sound but tired. Cleaning, targeted repair and fresh paint on trim usually serve you better. Read repair versus full replacement first, because matching an aged wall is harder than it looks.
• You are choosing between siding and a roof or windows that are actively failing. Water entry wins.
• You want a specific dollar return promised in writing. No contractor can honestly give you one, and we will not.

The situations where the spend is straightforward have nothing to do with resale: rot or failed substrate behind the wall, repeated repairs that no longer hold, trim going faster than you can replace it, or a plan to stay ten or more years. The signs a wall is finished are usually visible before the cost is.

What we will tell you is the part we can stand behind. Most full James Hardie projects here run $25,000 to $45,000 depending on home size, trim detail and tear-off. Our own coverage is a 10-year workmanship guarantee on full replacements, which is separate from what the manufacturer covers. Good crews book ahead seasonally, so the calendar is worth thinking about before the weather makes the decision for you, which we go through in why good crews book ahead. If you want the material comparison first, it is in James Hardie versus vinyl on Pennsylvania homes and the local cost picture is in what siding replacement costs in Lancaster County.

New siding can raise what a buyer will pay. Published estimates for our specific markets say it usually raises it by somewhat less than the job costs. That is a fine trade when the wall needs replacing anyway. It is a poor one when it does not.