How Much to Charge for Painting: Build the Number Yourself

Short answer: How much to charge for painting is a calculation, not a lookup. Measure wall area as perimeter times ceiling height minus openings, convert to gallons at 350 to 400 square feet per gallon per coat, estimate hours at your own production rates, multiply those hours by your burdened labor cost, add overhead per billable hour, then divide the total by one minus your target margin. Adding a percentage to cost is markup, and it keeps less than you think.

There is no national price for a paint job, and any page that hands you one is selling you somebody else’s cost structure. What travels between markets is the arithmetic: unit, quantity, hours, cost per hour, overhead, margin. Run it once with your own numbers and you can quote anything from a hallway to a two-story exterior without guessing. The lines you build along the way become the ones on the bill, which is why they should already read like what an invoice needs while you are still on the walkthrough.

What unit should I price painting in?

The single most expensive mistake in this trade is pricing off floor area. An 8-foot ceiling and a 10-foot ceiling in the same footprint are two different jobs, and the customer quoting you “1,800 square feet” over the phone is describing neither of them.

Job	The unit to price it in	Why that unit
Interior walls	Net wall square feet	Floor area ignores ceiling height entirely
Repeat or tract interiors	Per room, derived from your own wall-area history	Faster once the rooms actually repeat
Ceilings	Floor square feet	Different paint, overhead reach, slower per foot
Trim, base, crown	Linear feet	Cut work does not scale with wall area
Doors, windows, shutters	Per unit	Fixed time each, regardless of room size
Exterior siding	Wall square feet plus a story and access factor	Ladders and staging are hours, not area
Kitchen cabinets	Per door, per drawer front, per box	The doors are the job; the boxes are the smaller half

Cabinets deserve the separate treatment. A kitchen with 22 doors and 9 drawer fronts is 31 pieces that each get degreased, sanded, primed, and sprayed on two sides with dry time between every step. Counting cabinets in square feet buries that.

How do I get the wall square footage?

Perimeter times ceiling height, minus the openings. Add the four wall lengths, multiply by the height, then deduct doors and windows over about 15 square feet and ignore anything smaller — the surface you save is paid back in cutting around it. A 12 by 14 foot room with 8-foot ceilings has a 52-foot perimeter and 416 gross square feet of wall before deductions.

For a whole house, take the takeoff room by room and total the columns. Doing it that way gives you ceiling area and baseboard footage for free, and those are separate lines with separate rates.

Room	Perimeter × height	Gross wall	Openings	Net wall	Ceiling	Base
Bedroom 1, 13 × 15	56 × 9	504	86	418	195	48 lf
Bedroom 2, 11 × 12	46 × 9	414	57	357	132	40 lf
Bedroom 3, 10 × 12	44 × 9	396	57	339	120	38 lf
Hallway, 4 × 22	52 × 9	468	105	363	88	37 lf
Total		1,782	305	1,477	535	163 lf

How much paint does that square footage need?

The label says 350 to 400 square feet per gallon per coat. That figure assumes smooth, sealed, previously painted drywall and a roller. The surface in front of you decides how much of it you actually get.

What you are painting over	What it does to the label figure
Smooth, sealed, previously painted	You get the full figure
Orange peel or knockdown texture	Plan on 15 to 30 percent less
Popcorn ceiling	Can drink close to twice a flat ceiling
Bare or freshly patched drywall	Prime it, or the first finish coat disappears into the board
Spraying instead of rolling	More material per coat, fewer hours — trade one for the other deliberately
Dark going to light	Coverage per coat is unchanged; the coat count is what changes

Two coats is the standard. For the takeoff above: 1,477 net wall square feet at two coats is 2,954 square feet of coverage, which at 375 gives 7.9 gallons — buy 8. Ceilings at 1,070 square feet of coverage need 3.1 gallons at 350, the low end of the range because flat ceiling paint over a lightly textured surface does not stretch, so buy 4 or a 5-gallon pail if the same white repeats on your next job. Price what you buy, not what ends up on the wall.

How many hours is the work?

This is where the money is decided, and it is the number nobody can give you. Start from figures like these, then time three of your own jobs and overwrite every one of them.

Task	Starting figure, one painter
Cut in and roll walls, per coat	175-225 sq ft per hour
Roll ceilings, per coat	150-200 sq ft per hour
Brush base and casing, per coat	40-60 linear feet per hour
Door — both faces, edges, jamb, casing, per coat	0.6-0.9 hour
Prep on a lived-in repaint	25 to 50 percent of total job hours
Daily mask and unmask in an occupied home	0.5-1.0 hour per room, every day

Prep is the line that separates painters who make money from painters who stay busy. Filling, sanding, caulking, masking, and moving furniture do not show up in a photo of the finished room, and they routinely outweigh the rolling. On the takeoff above, the hours come out like this: walls 14.8, ceilings 6.1, baseboard 6.5, four doors 6.0, prep 12.0, masking and cleanup 6.0 — call it 52 hours.

What does an hour actually cost me?

Not the wage. The cost of an hour of production is the wage plus everything that rides on it, and then a share of the money the business spends whether or not anyone picks up a brush.

Component	Per worked hour
Base wage	$26.00
Employer payroll taxes	$2.60
Workers’ compensation — painting classifications run high and vary enormously by state	$5.20
General liability, vehicle, tool replacement	$2.40
Paid time off, training, unbillable shop time	$5.80
Burdened cost per worked hour	$42.00

Overhead is the second layer and it is charged per billable hour, not per job. Add up the truck payment, fuel, insurance, phone, software, licensing, advertising, the accountant, sprayer maintenance, and the hours you spend estimating work you do not win. Say that lands at $34,000 a year. Billable hours are never 2,000 — driving, buying material, quoting, and rain days are not billable — so 1,700 is an honest divisor. That is $20 an hour of overhead before a single gallon is opened.

One overhead line is specific to this trade. If you take paid work disturbing painted surfaces in housing built before 1978, the EPA’s Renovation, Repair and Painting program requires firm certification and lead-safe work practices. Certification renewal, training, and containment supplies are overhead; the containment labor on a specific job is a job line.

Markup or margin — which one am I adding?

These are not the same number and confusing them is the most common quiet leak in a painting business. Markup is a percentage of your cost. Margin is a percentage of the price you charge.

Markup you add to cost	Margin you actually keep
15%	13.0%
20%	16.7%
25%	20.0%
33%	24.8%
50%	33.3%
100%	50.0%

To keep a real 25 percent, divide your cost by 0.75 rather than multiplying by 1.25. On a four-thousand-dollar job that difference is a few hundred dollars, every job, all year. And margin is not take-home either — income tax and self-employment tax come out of it, which is the arithmetic in how much to set aside for 1099 taxes.

What does the whole calculation look like on a real house?

Three bedrooms and a hallway, 9-foot ceilings, occupied repaint, walls and ceilings in two coats, baseboard and four doors in enamel. The rates below are placeholders from one market — swap in yours.

Line	Math	Amount
Labor	52 hr × $42.00 burdened	$2,184.00
Paint — walls	8 gal × $52.00	$416.00
Paint — ceilings	4 gal × $38.00	$152.00
Paint — trim enamel	2 gal × $64.00	$128.00
Sundries — caulk, filler, tape, plastic, paper, liners, abrasives		$145.00
Overhead	52 hr × $20.00	$1,040.00
Total cost		$4,065.00
Price at a 25% margin	$4,065 ÷ 0.75	$5,420.00

Had you added 25 percent as markup instead, the price would be $5,081 and the margin would be 20 percent — $339 handed back for no reason. The finished number works out to $104 an hour sold, $2.69 per square foot of painted surface, with materials at 15.5 percent of the price.

What do published painting prices actually tell me?

Only whether you are wrong by a factor of two. Regional wages, workers’ comp rates, drive distances, season, and job difficulty move real prices further than any average admits, and an exterior quoted in October is not the same job as the identical exterior in June. Use ranges as a smoke alarm, never as a price list.

These four checks are better than any published figure:

Check	Where it usually lands on an interior repaint
Materials as a share of price	15 to 20 percent — above 25 means you undercounted hours
Labor plus overhead as a share of price	60 to 70 percent
Price divided by hours	Compare it to your burdened cost plus overhead; a thin gap means no margin
Your own last five jobs	Better market data than any national average — if this one is 40 percent off, find out why before sending it

How do I know afterward whether the price was right?

By comparing the job you priced against the job you actually paid for, which requires the receipts and the hours to survive the week. Most painters find out they underbid a house eleven months later, at tax time, from a pile of paper.

Keel is an iOS app that runs entirely on your device — no account, no bank connection, no cloud, no login, with an App Store privacy label that reads Data Not Collected. It will not do the takeoff for you. What it does is close the loop: photograph the paint store receipt at the counter and Apple Intelligence reads it on the phone, so the $841 you assumed for material is checked against the $841 you actually spent. Trips to the supplier and back are logged as mileage, which is both a real cost per hour and one of the plainer self-employed tax deductions. The invoice goes out from the driveway on the last day with your logo, your numbering, and a payment link as a QR code, so the balance is collected before the ladders are on the rack — the practical half of how to get clients to pay. At year end it exports as one file, or as the Accountant Pack: a CSV plus a one-page summary PDF. Free is $0 with unlimited invoices, receipts, and mileage; Keel Pro is a one-time $249.99 Lifetime purchase, not a subscription.

Frequently asked questions

Do painters charge by the square foot or by the hour?

Most price the job, not the hour, but they build the number from square feet and hours behind the scenes. Walls get priced by net wall square footage, ceilings by floor area, trim by linear foot, and doors per unit. Hourly billing shows up mainly for prep of unknown depth, wallpaper removal, and repair work where nobody can scope the finish line in advance.

How do I calculate paint needed for a whole house?

Total the net wall area room by room, multiply by the number of coats, and divide by the coverage figure for that surface — 350 to 400 square feet per gallon on smooth sealed drywall, less on texture. Do ceilings separately using floor area, and trim separately by linear foot. Round up to whole containers and price what you buy, not what you use.

What percentage of a painting job is labor?

Labor and overhead together typically carry 60 to 70 percent of the price on an interior repaint, with materials at 15 to 20 percent and the rest margin. Exteriors shift further toward labor because scraping, sanding, and setting ladders take hours that add no material cost. If your material line is pushing 30 percent, the hours were probably undercounted.

How much should I charge per hour as a painter?

Rather than picking an hourly figure, calculate the one you must recover: your burdened labor cost, plus annual overhead divided by realistic billable hours, then margin on top. A solo painter with $34,000 of overhead across 1,700 billable hours carries $20 an hour before wage. Publish a job price to the customer and keep the hourly number for yourself as a check.

What is the difference between markup and margin in painting?

Markup is added to your cost; margin is measured against the price. A 25 percent markup produces only a 20 percent margin, and a 50 percent markup produces 33 percent. To hit a target margin, divide cost by one minus that margin — $4,065 divided by 0.75 gives $5,420. Painters who multiply instead of dividing lose a few hundred dollars on every job.

Should I charge more for a two-story exterior?

Yes, and as a stated factor rather than a vague bump. Second-story work adds ladder and staging setup, slower movement, fall protection, and time lost repositioning that has nothing to do with surface area. Price the wall square footage as usual, then apply an access factor and add scraping, priming bare wood, and caulking by the linear foot as their own lines.

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This article is general information, not professional or tax advice.