The short version
Almost nobody selling a "wrought iron fence" today is selling wrought iron. True wrought iron is hand-worked solid stock from a blacksmith — gorgeous, heavy, expensive, and in Indiana weather, a rust-maintenance subscription. What most people actually want is the look: black ornamental pickets, clean rails, maybe finials. That look is exactly what powder-coated aluminum was engineered to deliver, minus the rust and minus most of the price. It's why we install aluminum fence every week and haven't hung true iron in years.
I'm Dave Rogers, owner-operator of Get Fenced! in Lafayette — licensed and insured. Here's the honest comparison, including the cases where real iron genuinely wins.
What "wrought iron" actually means (and what you're really quoted)
- True wrought iron: solid iron bar, forged and joined by a fabricator or blacksmith. Custom scrollwork, real mass, hundred-year bones if it's repainted on schedule. Priced like the custom metalwork it is — commonly 3–5× residential aluminum, before the repaint cycle.
- Welded steel ornamental ("iron" at the fence yard): hollow steel pickets welded into panels, painted or powder-coated. Stronger than aluminum, cheaper than forge work — but steel rusts wherever the coating fails: welds, scratches, drill points, the bottom of every picket where mower clippings hold moisture.
- Powder-coated aluminum: extruded aluminum pickets and rails, factory powder coat, mechanically assembled. Can't rust — not "resists rust," can't. The finish holds through freeze-thaw, road salt spray, and sprinklers. Maintenance is a hose.
What Indiana weather does to each
Our climate is the tiebreaker. Thirty-plus freeze-thaw cycles a winter work moisture into every coating flaw, and summer humidity keeps bare metal wet enough to bloom rust in weeks. Iron and steel fences here live on their paint: miss a couple of seasons and you're wire-brushing oxide bloom off a hundred pickets. Aluminum ignores all of it — the metal itself doesn't oxidize destructively, so a scratch is cosmetic, not terminal. That's also why aluminum is the default around pools (chlorine spray) and ponds; it's most of what our pool fence work is built from.
Strength, honestly
Solid iron bar beats hollow aluminum on raw strength — no argument. The real question is whether your fence needs it. A residential perimeter fence resists leaning kids, wind, and the occasional soccer ball; quality aluminum is engineered past all of that, and both ride on the same foundation we give every fence: driven steel posts below the frost line, which is where fences actually fail in clay. If something does bend a picket, aluminum panels repair by section with catalog parts; bent iron scrollwork is a fabricator visit.
Where real iron still wins
Fair is fair. Historic districts restoring original ironwork; custom gates with hand-forged curves as the design centerpiece; high-traffic commercial frontages where mass matters — those are legitimate iron-or-steel jobs, and we'll say so when we see one. What we won't do is quote you "wrought iron" and deliver painted steel that starts rusting at the welds in year three. If the look is what you're after, get the look with the metal that survives here: browse the styles and pricing on the aluminum fence page, check real Lafayette aluminum costs, and if gates are part of the picture — iron-look drive gates are aluminum's best trick — start at our gates page.
Want a number instead of a debate? The instant estimate prices an ornamental aluminum perimeter for your actual yard in about a minute.