Quick Summary
Roofing industry estimates put a cedar shake roof in New Orleans at roughly 15 to 25 years, well short of the 30 to 40 years the same roof reaches in a dry climate. The difference is moisture. New Orleans averages 63.35 inches of rain a year against a 70.5 degree average temperature, and warm damp wood is what decay fungi need to establish. Big Easy Roofing inspects, maintains and replaces cedar shake roofs across Orleans, Jefferson, St. Tammany and Tangipahoa parishes, where the deciding factor is rarely the wood itself but whether the roof was allowed to dry between rains.
Last Updated: September 2026
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Cedar shake roofs fail early in southeast Louisiana for a reason that has nothing to do with the grade of the wood. The United States Department of Agriculture Forest Products Laboratory states plainly that when shakes or shingles are installed directly on the sheathing in geographical regions having high humidity, they need to be preservative treated. New Orleans is exactly that region, and a large share of the cedar shake roofs across the New Orleans metro were never specified that way.
Industry estimates put cedar shake in New Orleans at roughly 15 to 25 years, against 30 to 40 in a dry western climate. No federal standard sets a figure. A ventilated, preservative treated, regularly cleaned roof reaches the top of that range. One laid tight to solid sheathing with heavy shade falls well below it.
That spread is unusually wide for a roofing material, and it is the most useful thing to understand about cedar here. Two identical roofs installed the same week on the same street routinely reach very different ages. The variable is drying. Cedar tolerates getting wet and does not tolerate staying wet.
Warm wet wood is the growing medium for the fungi that break cedar down. Th
By Big Easy Roofing 
Sep 3, 2026