Guide

How to estimate a paint job

Most painters start out pricing at so-many-dollars a square foot, and most painters eventually stop, because that number is an average of jobs that were nothing like each other. Here is the method that replaces it.

The idea in one line

You are not selling square feet. You are selling hours. Paint is a small part of the bill; labour is most of it. So price the labour directly: work out how many hours the job takes, multiply by what an hour costs you, then add materials and your margin.

Step 1 — Measure the surfaces, not the room

Walls in square feet. Ceilings in square feet. Trim in linear feet. Doors and shutters as a count. These get priced differently and at wildly different speeds, so lumping them into one "room" number throws away the information you need.

Subtract the openings you genuinely will not paint. Do not subtract a doorway and then forget you are painting the casing around it.

Step 2 — Divide by a production rate

A production rate is how much of a surface one painter covers in an hour, for one coat. These are reasonable starting figures, single coat, one painter:

These are starting points, not truth. Your crew's real rates come from comparing your estimates against your actual hours over a few dozen jobs. That comparison is the single most valuable thing an estimating system can give you, and almost nobody does it.

Step 3 — Multiply for coats and condition

Two coats is not double. The second goes on faster than the first — the cutting-in is done, the coverage is even — so roughly 1.8× a single coat is a better starting multiplier, and it is the one the calculator on this site uses. Then adjust for what is actually in front of you: heavy patching, a dark colour going light, high ceilings needing staging, glossy trim that needs sanding, furniture that has to be moved and covered.

This is where dollars-per-square-foot quietly loses you money. Two rooms of identical size can differ by half again in hours, and the flat rate charges the same for both — so you overcharge the easy one and lose your shirt on the hard one.

Step 4 — Work a real room

A 12 × 14 bedroom with 9-foot ceilings, two coats on walls and ceiling, trim included.

At a loaded cost of $45/hour that is about $455 of labour. Add roughly four gallons between walls and ceiling plus a quart of trim enamel — call it $245 in materials at retail. Then add your margin, which is the part that pays for your truck, your insurance and the hours you spend estimating.

That is a room in good condition. Average condition — normal patching, a bit of sanding — pushes the same room to roughly 12.6 hours and about $810 of cost, which is the default the calculator opens with.

Note what happened: the number came from the work, and every line of it is defensible to a customer who asks. That is very hard to do from a rate card.

Pricing a house exterior instead? The same method, with siding, soffit and prep, is worked through in how to price an exterior paint job.

Step 5 — Check it against reality

Log the hours the job actually took. Compare them to the hours you estimated. Adjust the production rates. Do that for twenty jobs and you will have rates that are yours rather than an internet average — which is the whole game, and the reason the method beats a flat rate even when the flat rate happens to be about right.