​When deciding whether to paint or stain your fence, most professionals will recommend that you choose to stain your fence. Stain not only generally lasts longer but is also more weather resistant. 

​Stain will be more costly upfront over paint. However, because you will need to repaint your fence more frequently than you will need to re-stain your fence, in the long term painting your fence will become much more costly. Therefore, if you are planning on making this decision a long-term style choice, staining would be the more cost-effective option. 

​When starting with an unstained/unpainted fence, the amount of work staining or painting the fence would take would be relatively equal. However, one of the major negatives that comes with painting a fence is that paint is known to easily chip and peel, especially in particularly harsh weather areas. Because of the chips and peeling, when repainting your fence you will need remove all of the old paint before repainting. This process can be very labor intensive and timely. On the other hand, when you stain your fence you will not have to deal with these issues. While stain does fade over time, stain holds up longer than paint and the re-staining process is much easier than the repainting process. The only prep work needed to re-stain a fence would be a quick pressure wash to make sure the old stain is sufficiently removed before re-staining the wood. 

​While staining may clearly seem like the better choice, many people opt to paint their fence because they want their fence to be a particular color. Recently, there have been many new stain colors created and produced. Therefore, it is now easier than ever to find the color option you want for your fence in a stain form.