Trades / Siding / Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania has the oldest siding in the country. Most of it is overdue.

Pennsylvania's housing stock is the fourth oldest in the nation, a median of 57 years, which means millions of homes are wearing aluminum, masonite, or first-generation vinyl that is failing right now. We build the material pages, town pages, and review systems that put your crew in front of those re-sides. Flat $1,500 a month, written around how Pennsylvania homeowners actually search.

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Housing units across Pennsylvania
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Median age of a Pennsylvania home, 4th oldest in US
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Median year a Pennsylvania home was built
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Of occupied Pennsylvania homes are owner-occupied

The Pennsylvania market

Old houses, cold winters, and walls that finally gave up.

The numbers behind Pennsylvania siding work are quietly enormous. The Census counts roughly 5.86 million housing units statewide, and the Pennsylvania Association of Realtors puts the median home age at 57 years, the fourth oldest of any state behind only New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Off the spreadsheet that means a vast supply of homes sided in the 1960s and 1970s with materials at the end of the road: chalking aluminum, swelling masonite hardboard, faded and brittle early vinyl. Around 69 percent of those homes are owner-occupied, so the people deciding to re-side are the people who live there. This is not a market waiting on new construction; the work is already standing on every street, and it ages a year every year.

Be clear-eyed about the competition, though. You will not beat Angi or Modernize for a bare phrase like 'siding cost,' and should not try; the national lead resellers own those terms and sell the same Pennsylvania homeowner to several contractors at once. What sits unclaimed is everything specific: the vinyl-versus-fiber-cement comparisons, the James Hardie and LP SmartSide brand searches that manufacturer advertising keeps creating, and the town-by-town searches across a state with more than 2,500 municipalities. Most siding contractor sites in Pennsylvania are a logo, a number, and a dim Facebook album. A contractor who publishes honest material pages, real before-and-after galleries, and a page for each borough served is not fighting a crowd. In most Pennsylvania towns, that contractor is the only one who did the work.

New here? Start with the full siding marketing playbook, then come back for the Pennsylvania specifics.

Licensing & trust

No state license. The AG registration is your trust signal instead.

Pennsylvania does not issue a statewide siding or contractor license, so there is no license number to wave around the way there is in licensed states. What stands in its place is the Home Improvement Contractor registration with the Office of Attorney General. Contractors who put that PA HIC number front and center convert better, because a wary homeowner reading reviews uses it as proof you are a real, accountable business and not a storm-following truck.

$5,000 a year triggers AG registration

Any contractor performing at least $5,000 of home improvement work on residential property in a year must register as a Home Improvement Contractor with the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General. Siding, soffit, fascia, and exterior trim all count, so for any working crew this is not optional. There is no trade exam to pass.

Your PA HIC number belongs on the website

Pennsylvania law requires the registration number to appear on every contract, estimate, proposal, and advertisement. Your website is an advertisement, so the number goes in the footer and on the contact page. Skipping it is a compliance miss; showing it is free credibility with homeowners checking you out.

Insurance minimums, not skill tests, are the bar

Registration requires liability coverage of at least $50,000 for personal injury and $50,000 for property damage, plus workers' compensation for any employees. Because the state sets no competency exam, the trust burden shifts to your reviews, your finished work, and your proof of insurance, which is exactly what a good website is built to carry.

Philadelphia and Pittsburgh add their own licensing

On top of the AG registration, Philadelphia requires a city contractor license for most exterior work through Licenses and Inspections, and Pittsburgh runs its own contractor licensing. If your territory crosses into either city, those credentials belong on the site too, since a Philadelphia or Pittsburgh homeowner expects a properly licensed local company. The registration itself renews on a two-year term, so keep it current and the number live.

Verified June 2026 against Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General, Home Improvement Contractor Registration. Licensing rules change; confirm current requirements with the state before relying on them. Market stats: US Census Bureau, ACS 2024 1-year estimates; Pennsylvania Association of Realtors, Census ACS 2024; US Census Bureau, ACS 5-year estimates; US Census Bureau, ACS 2024 estimates.

Where the work is

Where the Pennsylvania siding work actually sits.

Philadelphia & the suburban ring

The city itself is brick and stucco rowhomes, but the work is in the postwar suburbs: Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware, and Chester counties are packed with 1950s-70s twins and ranches whose original aluminum and early vinyl is decades past its life. These are affluent, research-heavy buyers comparing fiber cement against insulated vinyl for weeks. Philadelphia exterior work also runs through city Licenses and Inspections, so a contractor who handles the permit is the safe choice.

Pittsburgh & the Allegheny hills

Pittsburgh's frame houses cling to steep hillsides, many sided in wood or aluminum that has weathered hard through freeze-thaw and damp. Tight lots and difficult access make this a craft market where a contractor who can show finished work on similar terrain wins. The city's own contractor licensing applies, and the surrounding boroughs each search for their own name, not 'Pittsburgh siding.'

Lehigh Valley (Allentown & Bethlehem)

The fastest-growing corner of the state, pulling households out from New Jersey and New York, with a mix of aging row housing and new suburban builds. The valley sees more severe summer storms than most of Pennsylvania, so wind and hail siding claims are a real line of work here, and a storm-and-insurance page earns its keep through the warm months.

Harrisburg, York & Lancaster

South Central PA blends historic stock with steady suburban growth along the I-83 and Route 30 corridors, and Lancaster County in particular mixes century-old homes with active new development. It is a value-conscious market where vinyl and engineered wood dominate, the towns search by their own names, and honest cost pages outperform glossy ones.

Northeast PA & Erie

From Scranton and Wilkes-Barre to Erie, this is some of the oldest housing in the state, much of it pre-1940 with original asbestos and aluminum cladding, in the harshest siding climate Pennsylvania has. Long winters and lake-effect ice compress the install season and punish any wall installed wrong, so material and flashing detail become a real selling point, and online competition is thin.

Seasonality

A short install window and a long stretch to get ready for it.

Pennsylvania gives siding crews a real installing season and a real off-season, and the calendar is unforgiving about it. From late spring through fall the work runs flat out, but winter genuinely stops it: vinyl panels grow brittle and crack when handled below freezing, fasteners behave badly in the cold, and snow and ice make staging and ladder work dangerous. Lake-effect zones around Erie and the long winters of the northern tier shut down earlier and reopen later than the southeast. Demand is squeezed into a window, and the contractors who own the search results going into spring collect the rush. Google ranks on a delay of months, so the position you hold in April was decided over the quiet winter before it.

Two climate patterns feed the work beyond the normal install rush. The first is freeze-thaw: Pennsylvania cycles above and below freezing dozens of times each winter, and that constant expansion and contraction is exactly what finally splits aging vinyl, buckles old aluminum, and opens the gaps behind it that rot the sheathing. Spring inspections turn those failures into re-sides. The second is storm season, mostly May through August, when severe thunderstorms and the occasional hail event across the Lehigh Valley and central counties drive a burst of wind-and-hail damage claims. Both patterns reward being ready early, not scrambling after the fact. A homeowner staring at a January heating bill is also a prime insulated-siding researcher, months before any crew can set a ladder, which is one more reason the slow season is when the next busy one is won.

Siding package · Pennsylvania

$500 setup + $1,500/mo

Billed quarterly · $4,500 per quarter

Full-service marketing built for siding contractors. Answer the material research, own the brand searches, be findable the week the hail hits, and see exactly which pages and towns every call came from.

  • Professional siding contractor website
  • A page for every town you serve, 100+ where the territory calls for it
  • Material and brand pages: vinyl, fiber cement, Hardie, LP SmartSide
  • Storm damage and insurance claim page
  • Before-and-after galleries organized by material and town
  • Google Business profile management
  • Automated review requests after every job
  • 100+ directory citations
  • Call tracking with per-channel attribution
  • Monthly reporting plus weekly text updates
  • 100% asset ownership

FAQ

What Pennsylvania siding contractors ask us

Do you put our Pennsylvania HIC registration number on the site?
Yes, and in Pennsylvania it matters more than usual because there is no state siding license to point to. Your Office of Attorney General Home Improvement Contractor number is the closest thing you have to a state credential, and the law already requires it on every advertisement, which includes your website. We put it in the footer and on the contact page where cautious homeowners look for it. With no competency exam behind it, that registration plus your reviews and proof of insurance is what tells a wary PA buyer you are accountable, not a truck passing through.
Most of our homes were sided in the 70s. How does the site turn that into work?
That aging stock is the whole engine of Pennsylvania siding, since the state has the fourth-oldest housing in the country at a median 57 years. We build material pages that speak directly to it: what to do when chalky aluminum or swelling masonite finally fails, what replaces it, and honest cost ranges for each path. We also build before-and-after galleries organized by the older home styles you actually work on, the postwar ranches and twins around Philadelphia and the frame houses in Pittsburgh, so a homeowner with a tired 1968 exterior can picture their own house finished and reach for the phone.
We cover a dozen boroughs around Harrisburg. Can the site reach all of them?
That spread is the core of what we build. Pennsylvania has more than 2,500 municipalities, and homeowners search their own borough by name, not the metro, so York, Mechanicsburg, Carlisle, and Hershey each get a dedicated page written around that town, not one copy-pasted list of cities in a dropdown. Your Google Business profile anchors to your address while the town pages cover the rest of the territory. Most competitors in South Central PA still run a single-page site, so a real borough page usually has a clear path to the top.
After a storm in the Lehigh Valley, canvassers get the work. Why would the website matter?
Keep canvassing, it works, and we are not here to replace it. The site catches the homeowners canvassing misses. A real share of people will not sign with anyone who knocked, and after a wind or hail event in the valley they go straight to Google for a local company, so that search has to land somewhere. A storm-and-insurance page that explains how Pennsylvania claims work also backs up your crews: the homeowner holding your door hanger looks you up before signing, and a real site with real reviews is the difference between a signed contract and a maybe.
What happens to the site and the photos if we cancel?
Everything is yours in writing from day one: the domain, the website code, the before-and-after galleries we built from your project photos, the Google Business profile, the reviews on it, and the call tracking numbers. Reviews live on your own Google profile, not ours, so nothing is held hostage. The commitment is one quarter at a time, $4,500 a quarter plus the one-time $500 setup, and if the tracked calls are not covering the fee you cancel and walk with every asset. We built it that way on purpose, so the pressure to keep your Pennsylvania phone ringing stays on us.

Keep exploring

More for siding owners, in Pennsylvania and beyond.

The full Siding playbook

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Siding in Washington

Siding in North Carolina

Windows & Doors in Pennsylvania

Electrical in Pennsylvania

Handyman in Pennsylvania

What a siding website costs

Somewhere in Pennsylvania, a 1970s wall is failing through another freeze-thaw.

Tell us your towns and the materials you hang. We will come back with a Pennsylvania-specific plan within 24 hours. [email protected]