Fencing
How long a cedar fence lasts
How long does a cedar fence last?
The pickets will outlast what holds them up. A cedar fence's real lifespan is set by its posts and footings, which is why two fences built from identical wood can be a decade apart.
Two different clocks
Cedar pickets weather. They go from warm brown to silver-grey over a couple of years, and that greying is a surface change, not decay. Left alone, they keep doing their job.
The posts are on a completely different clock, and it's the shorter one. When a fence 'wears out', what actually happened is that the structure underground gave up while the visible part was still fine.
What shortens it
Shallow footings in soil that moves. Wood that rots in ground contact. Rails fastened in a way that lets water sit in the joint. Gates built from the same light material as the panels, which then rack and drag on the posts they hang from.
Every one of those is decided during the build and none of them can be corrected afterward with maintenance.
What you can actually control later
Stain. It is the only meaningful maintenance a cedar fence has, and it is optional in the sense that it changes appearance rather than lifespan. Sealing slows the weathering and keeps the color.
Keeping sprinklers off the fence helps more than people expect. Wood that gets soaked three times a week stays wet in exactly the places you don't want it to.
Nobody replaces a fence because the pickets wore out.