By: John Ryan, Metal Construction Association
The cost of replacing a roof can be one of the most significant maintenance expenses in the life of a building. USGBC’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design building rating program (version 4) assumes a building service life of 60 years. With most types of roofing, building owners can expect to replace the roof once or twice in that amount of time, incurring significant expense to do so.
Many buildings are The Metal Construction Association (MCA) is proud to announce a new study that verifies that coated steel roofs can last as long as the buildings they cover. The research study concluded that the expected service life of an unpainted 55% Al-Zn coated steel standing seam roof constructed today in a wide range of environments using best practices can be expected to be in excess of 60 years.
Learn more about the study here, and access the full study and executive report in MCA’s Technical Resources library.
Metal Construction Association Blog 
This is an interesting development. Thanks for posting.
Thanks very much, I will refer my clients to this page when discussing the benefits of metal roofing over tile roofing.
The lead in to this mentioned fasteners might need replacement. Indeed, there’s a huge difference between standing seam with no exposed fasteners and screw down with exposed fasteners, the latter starts leaking as soon as the neoprene washer dries out. That has happened to roofs in my area which are newer than many shingled roofs. As far as I’m concerned, the only thing screw down metal roofs are good for is non habitable structures such as barns and storage buildings with no finished ceilings or floors.
who were the three independent consulting companies that did the study?
You can find that information on the full report, available on metalconstruction.org. The three are: Ron Dutton Consulting Services LLC, Metal Roof Advisory Group, Metal Roof Consultants.
That’s what our client mostly argue about, especially about how zincalume roof could benefit their building regarding that it could add more budget to their expense.
I think that maintenance is important to keeping up all types of roofs. I think that this is a great benefit that metal roofs have. They last so it’s worth it to do the maintenance. I’ll have to look into this.