A number of external factors — including traffic volume, pavement surface roughness, and environmental wear — greatly affect paint performance. Research has shown that paints often have lower initial retroreflectivity values and degrade at a much faster rate than other marking materials, which is why they are usually not classified as a durable marking material. Paints also experience decreased performance on coarse roadway surfaces such as surface treatments because the paint is applied thinly.

On low-volume roadways, paints have been known to provide service lives of up to 2 years. However, a reasonable target value for service life, under “normal” conditions is approximately 6 to 12 months. Three months is often the paint service life on roads that have a very high ADT. Because of their relatively short service lives, most paints are only used on low-volume highways, although the new acrylic resin formulations have shown promise as a durable marking on high-volume roadways within TxDOT.

The thinner applications and lack of opacity of the pigments often cause paints to have a tendency to appear dull or faded in color when compared to other materials. Some organic pigments used in yellow paint or two-component materials have a tendency to appear white at night under headlamp illumination. Lead-chromate-based yellow markings usually do not experience this phenomenon.