Most homeowners who call us have already settled the parts they expected to be hard. They know roughly what they want on the wall, and they have made peace with what it costs. Most full James Hardie projects here run $25,000 to $45,000, depending on home size, trim detail, and how much tear-off the house needs.
What catches them off guard is the calendar. The crews worth hiring are booked well ahead of the season, every year. That is true across Central Pennsylvania, not just for us, and we would rather explain it plainly than let someone find it out in week three of shopping.
Here is what sits behind that, and how to plan a project around it.
What the wait actually buys you
It is fair to ask why a crew is worth waiting for, when the work looks like nailing boards to a wall. The answer is in the manufacturers' own installation instructions.
Vinyl siding is hung, not fastened. The Vinyl Siding Institute's installation manual states that a panel can expand and contract half an inch or more over a 12-foot-6-inch length during normal year-round temperature swings. The fastener head has to stand roughly 1/32 inch off the nail hem, a gap the manual describes as the thickness of a dime. Nail it tight and the manual is blunt about what follows: the siding will buckle.
You can check this yourself on any finished vinyl wall. Put a hand flat on a panel and push it sideways. It should slide. If it will not move, it was nailed tight, and the wall will tell on the installer in the first hot spell.
Fiber cement has its own rules, and in Pennsylvania they are the stricter set. Every ZIP code in the state sits inside James Hardie's HZ5 zone. Mountville, Lancaster, York, Hershey, Carlisle, all of it. There is no HZ10 territory anywhere in Pennsylvania, and the HZ5 instructions tighten exactly the details where snow and splash collect:
- HZ5 requires a minimum 2 inch clearance where siding meets roofs, decks, slabs, paths, and steps. HZ10 allows 1 to 2 inches at those same details.
- HardiePlank's water absorption is 36 percent by mass under ASTM C1185. The board is tested to pass that standard's freeze-thaw cycling, so this is not a fragile product. But passing assumes it is not sitting in snow, splash-back, or meltwater off an ice dam.
- Butt joints go in moderate contact over one of the joint treatments James Hardie recognizes. It recommends the first: 6 inch wide flashing lapping 1 inch onto the course below. Caulking is on the permitted list, but James Hardie does not recommend it on ColorPlus, because caulk and the factory finish weather differently.
None of that shows up the day the crew drives away. The wall looks finished. It surfaces on the first full seasonal temperature cycle, well after the final payment, as buckled panels, open butt joints, or rot behind a wall that still looks intact from the street. Improper installation is an explicit exclusion in James Hardie's warranties, which means the manufacturer's coverage is worth what your installer's flashing detail is worth.
Why experienced crews are scarce
A lot of contractor writing blames this on young people refusing to work with their hands. That is not true, and it is easy to check. The median age of a U.S. construction worker is 42, one year above the national workforce median. Gen Z's share of the construction workforce more than doubled between 2019 and 2023, from 6.4 percent to 14.1 percent.
The problem is at the other end of the career. Baby Boomers fell from 20.6 percent of the construction labor force to 14.2 percent across those same four years. Gen X now anchors the experienced tier at 33.7 percent, and it is a numerically smaller generation than the one retiring above it. Anirban Basu, chief economist at Associated Builders and Contractors, has said that a majority of new worker demand in 2026 will be attributable to retirement rather than to increased demand for construction services.
So the pipeline fills at the entry level and drains at the top. A first-year helper is not a crew lead, and no amount of hiring shortens the years in between. In the 2025 AGC of America and NCCER workforce survey, 92 percent of firms reported difficulty filling hourly craft positions, and the leading obstacle was not a shortage of applicants but a lack of skills and qualifications, at 57 percent. Worth noting that AGC's membership leans commercial and heavy civil rather than residential remodeling, so read that as an industry-wide finding rather than a siding-specific one.
Pennsylvania compresses the calendar
Everyone wants siding on the house between April and October, and there are only so many qualified crews to fill those months. That is a good share of the wait right there.
We do work through the winter. What changes in cold weather is the specification, and the specification gets less forgiving. Below 40°F the VSI manual requires installers to widen expansion clearances at openings from 1/4 inch to 3/8 inch, because a cold panel still has all of its growing left to do. The BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook notes that in northern states exterior trades like roofing are limited during winter months, and that many roofers work only seasonally in colder climates. Locally, the National Weather Service office in State College puts Lancaster County's average last spring freeze around April 11 and the first fall freeze around November 1.
A December workday also hands a crew far fewer usable daylight hours than a June one. None of that stops the work. It means the comfortable months are crowded, and the crews who are good in the uncomfortable ones are the same crews everybody wants in July.
A long wait is information. So is an opening.
We are not going to tell you that every contractor with availability is bad at the work. Openings happen for legitimate reasons. A job gets cancelled, financing falls through, an adjuster pushes a start date and the slot behind it opens up. We have had all three on our own board.
So the question for a crew that can start next week in peak season is not "why are you available." It is "what changed?" A real answer is specific: a job that moved, a date, a reason. Two more are worth asking anyone, including us. How long has the crew lead been running walls, and is the person who measured and quoted the job the person supervising it?
For our part, we are a registered Pennsylvania Home Improvement Contractor, #PA203681, and we install James Hardie fiber cement and premium vinyl. Ask us those same questions when you call. If a contractor cannot answer them straight, you have learned something worth knowing.
How to plan around a crew that is worth waiting for
- Work backward from a season, not a date. Pick the season you want the work finished, then start the conversation well before it. If you want siding on the house by next fall, this year is when that conversation happens.
- Get in line before you finalize colors. The measurement, the scope, and the deposit hold the slot. Color, texture, and trim profile can be settled later, and rushing those is how people end up with a wall they merely tolerate.
- Sequence the roof before the siding. If the roof is within a few years of replacement, do it first. Step and kickout flashing at roof-to-wall intersections are where the two trades meet, and installing them once, in the right order, is cheaper and drier.
- Use the wait to decide well. Go look at finished houses in the material you are considering. James Hardie requires its factory-primed products to be painted within 180 days of installation, for one. That belongs in the decision, not in a surprise.
- Treat an insurance claim as its own clock. Inspections, supplements, and approvals run on a timeline unrelated to a contractor's schedule. Start both clocks at once, or you start the contractor's clock from zero after the claim settles.
What not to do is let the wait push you into hiring whoever is free. A season of waiting costs you a few more months of looking at your current siding. A rushed install stays on the house for decades.
If you need work sooner than peak season allows
Ask about off-peak starts. The late fall and winter calendar is genuinely more open, and cold-weather work is exactly where crew skill earns its keep: wider expansion gaps on vinyl, sealants applied inside their temperature range, fewer daylight hours to work with. It is not the right window for every project, and we will tell you if yours is not one of them. But if your schedule is tighter than ours, that is the conversation to have.
Call before you are ready
If your project is a season or more out, this is the right time to call. An early call costs nothing and buys a real place in line, a real measurement instead of a guess, and months to settle material and color without a clock running.
Here is what that first step looks like. One phone call, then a walk-around and measurement at the house, then a written scope you can hold up against any other bid you collect. None of that costs anything, and none of it obligates you. We would rather talk in August about a job for next June than in June about a job for next week.