Siding colors matched to paint: James Hardie, CertainTeed and LP to Sherwin-Williams, Benjamin Moore and Behr

You picked the siding. Now the trim, the soffits, the garage door, the shutters and the front door all have to be painted, and none of them come in your siding color. So you stand at a paint counter holding a siding sample, asking a question nobody has a good answer to: which paint matches this?

The manufacturers cannot help you here, and it is not an oversight. A siding maker has no reason to publish "our color is the same as a competitor's paint," and a paint maker has no reason to map its fandeck onto siding it does not sell. So the question gets answered on forums, from memory, one color at a time.

We can answer it differently, because both halves sit in our own catalog as measured numbers: 23,944 paint chips from eleven manufacturer fandecks, and 1,888 siding colors from six siding manufacturers. The tables below are what happens when you compare them properly.

How these matches were calculated, and where they stop

Every pairing here comes from a color-difference calculation (CIEDE2000) run over the measured values of both catalogs, not from someone eyeballing two samples. But a number alone would flatter us, so three rules are baked in.

We publish words, not scores. In our own testing a match once held its lightness perfectly while its hue drifted: the arithmetic was satisfied and the eye was not, and the eye was right. So each pairing below is labeled in plain language, and where a color is close in lightness but reads as a different hue, we say exactly that instead of hiding it behind a small number.

Blends are excluded. Some siding colors are not one color at all. CertainTeed's Cedar Blend, Weathered Blend, Arbor Blend and their siblings are variegated by design, with the tone shifting board to board. A single "closest paint" for a blend would be a fabrication. They are listed separately at the end.

Colors nobody measured are excluded. Where a manufacturer publishes no color value and no usable swatch, there is nothing to compare. Mastic's palette falls in this group entirely.

One more limit worth stating plainly: matching a value is not matching a surface. Paint on smooth trim and color on textured lap siding will never read identically even at a perfect numeric match, because the texture changes how light leaves the surface. These matches get you to the right chip to test. They do not replace the test.

James Hardie Statement Collection matched to paint

Note what the reds do. Countrylane Red is the one color in the collection where all three fandecks come up short, and they miss in the same direction. Deep, slightly muted reds are simply thin on the ground in exterior paint lines, so if you are matching this one, treat the table as a starting shortlist and expect to have a custom color mixed.

CertainTeed Monogram matched to paint

LP SmartSide ExpertFinish matched to paint

The colors that have no single match

Seven colors in CertainTeed's Monogram line are variegated: Arbor Blend, Cedar Blend, Driftwood Blend, Frontier Blend, Natural Blend, Rustic Blend and Weathered Blend. The tone shifts from board to board on purpose, which is what makes them read as wood rather than as plastic.

There is no honest single paint match for any of them. What works instead is picking the tone you want the trim to answer, usually the darkest or the lightest note in the blend rather than its average, and testing that against a real board. If you average a blend you get mud, and mud next to a lively wall reads as a mistake rather than a choice.

The same applies to LP's Naturals colors and to any product sold as a blend, a cedar tone or a weathered finish.

Seeing the pairing before you commit

A table gets you to the right chip. It cannot tell you whether dark trim will make your house look sharp or heavy, or whether that blue-gray goes cold against your roof.

That part you have to see. Upload photos of your house, apply the siding color and the trim paint you are considering, and look at the whole elevation instead of two samples held side by side. Because the order of your color picks carries meaning, the first color you choose becomes the dominant wall and the second becomes the trim, so a pairing from these tables goes in exactly the way you would describe it out loud.

Related guides

• Why your siding color looks different from the sample: why the panel on your wall never matches the chip in your hand, and how to judge color at house scale.
• How to choose an exterior paint color: the method behind the pairing, including which color goes where.
• James Hardie colors on your own house: try the Hardie palette on your photos before you order.
• Siding and paint colors: pick, match and price them: the overview that ties this cluster together.

Frequently asked questions