Copper vs. Aluminum Gutters: The 50-Year Math
Half-round copper gutters cost three to five times as much as seamless aluminum up front. For a typical 2,500-square-foot Boston home, this video runs the 50-year numbers (aluminum installed and replaced twice, copper installed once), explains where aluminum systems fail, and says when aluminum is still the right call.
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Transcript
Half-round copper gutters run three to five times the price of seamless aluminum. Most homeowners stop reading right there. But you're comparing a fifty-year material to a much shorter-lived one, and over fifty years, the math flips.
Take a typical 2,500-square-foot Boston home: about a hundred and fifty feet of gutter and eighty feet of downspout. Seamless aluminum K-style, at May 2026 prices, runs about fourteen hundred to twenty-four hundred dollars. Plan on roughly twenty years of service. Installed, then replaced twice, that's forty-two hundred to seventy-two hundred dollars over fifty years, plus fascia repair if water wicked behind a failed run.
Half-round copper, with hidden hangers and hand-soldered seams, runs sixty-five hundred to eleven thousand dollars. Once. No replacement over the window.
And aluminum rarely fails as metal. It fails at sealed seams, at corroded fasteners, and at cracks from expansion and contraction. The system around it gives out. Copper, meanwhile, weathers to a patina instead of chalking and fading.
But copper isn't always the honest fit. On a newer home where the architecture isn't asking for copper, or if you're selling within five to eight years, aluminum is the right call, and we'll tell you so. The architecture decides. We just do the math with you.