Although drug-eluting stents (DES) for percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) have dramatically reduced the incidence of in-stent restenosis, their deployment for large-size coronary lesions is still controversial because of problems such as late in-stent thrombosis and late catch-up in DES. We aimed to evaluate the long-term outcome beyond 2 years of bare metal stents (BMS) as compared with DES in large vessels. Consecutive 228 patients who underwent PCI with large-size stents (>3.5 mm in diameter) in our hospital were enrolled in this study. The end points of this study are target lesion revascularization (TLR) and occurrence of major adverse cardiac events (MACE) for subject patients. We analyzed 183 patients (152 men, mean age 65.8 ± 10.5 years) whose outcome could be followed up for at least 2 years. At the first 8-month follow-up, clinically driven TLR rate was significantly higher in patients who received BMS than those who received DES (17.2 vs. 2.2 %, p < 0.05), although the rate of TLR was not different between the 2 groups beyond 8 months. Thus, overall rate of TLR was higher in BMS than in DES (22.7 vs. 5.4 %, p < 0.05). Under these conditions, the higher rate of TLR for BMS was observed in simple as well as complex lesions with or without diabetes, although there were no significant differences in MACE between BMS and DES. Multivariate analysis showed that BMS was an only independent factor of TLR at the 8 month follow-up period [p = 0.004, odds ratio 9.58, 95 % confidence interval (2.10–43.8)]. These results demonstrate that the rate of in-stent restenosis in large-size coronary lesions was transiently higher in the first 8 months for patients implanted with BMS compared with DES in which no in-stent thrombosis and TLR beyond 2 years were observed. We suggest using the DES even in large-size coronary lesions in terms of short- and long-term outcomes.