How to price a painting job (step by step, with a worked example)

Paint is the part of a painting quote everyone thinks about. The hours are the bigger part, and prep hours are the ones that hide. Price a painting job off a gut feel per room and the house with fifty windows costs the same as the open-plan one. Here is a way to price it from the surfaces instead.

It is the painting version of how to price a job, which covers the pricing methods for any trade, and how to quote a job as a tradie covers putting the price in writing, with a free quote template.

1. Walk the job and write the scope

Go through every room and elevation with a checklist and take photos. Write down:

• Every surface to be painted: walls, ceilings, trims, doors, windows, eaves, fascias, gutters, fences
• The condition of each: sound, flaking, cracked, water damaged, previously painted or bare
• Colours and the number of coats, including any colour change that needs an extra coat
• Access: ceiling heights, stairwells, two-storey walls, whether you need scaffold or an elevated work platform
• Who moves the furniture, whether anyone is living there, and when you can work
• How old the existing paint is. If it might contain lead, the prep method and the time it takes change completely, so find out before you price

Then write the scope as included, excluded and assumed. "Walls sound, minor filling only" is the line that turns a bad wall into a priced variation instead of free work.

2. Measure surfaces, not rooms

Every surface becomes an area, a length or a count:

3. Turn surfaces into hours with your own production rates

A production rate is how much you paint in an hour: square metres of wall per coat, linear metres of skirting, hours per door. The only production rates worth pricing from are your own, because they already include how you work, your gear and your crew. Get them from past jobs: hours logged on the walls divided by the area painted.

Estimate prep separately, by condition, after the walk-through. Prep is where a quote goes wrong: two rooms with the same area can take very different hours if one needs patching and sanding. Add set-up, protection and clean-up time each day as well.

4. Work out the paint and sundries

Paint is area x coats / spread rate. The spread rate, in square metres per litre, is on the tin or the manufacturer's data sheet, and bare or porous surfaces take more than a wall painted before. For 432 square metres of walls, two coats, at an example spread rate of 14 square metres per litre: 432 x 2 / 14 = 61.7 litres, so order 62 or round up to the tin sizes you buy. Add sundries (tape, plastic, drop sheets, filler, caulk, sandpaper, rollers) as an allowance set from what past jobs really used.

5. Add access, overhead and a real margin

Price scaffold, planks or an elevated work platform as their own lines, including delivery. Then cost the hours at your true hourly cost, which includes your overheads; the painter example on the tradie hourly rate calculator comes to about $74 an hour once wages, super, overheads and the van are counted. Finally, add your margin by dividing: for 20%, divide the total cost by 0.8.

A worked example: a four-bedroom interior repaint

Walls, ceilings, trims and doors in a four-bedroom house, two coats throughout, with walls in fair condition. The production rates and prices are illustrative, not a benchmark: use your own.

Labour is 85% of the cost here, so the hours estimate matters far more than the price of paint. Ten hours out is $740 of cost; ten per cent off the paint price saves about $150. As a sense-check, $14,210 over the 582 square metres of wall and ceiling is about $24 a square metre with the trims and doors folded in. Compare that with past jobs, but price from the hours.

How to price a painting job when the client wants a number on the spot

Give a range and a date, not a single figure: what similar houses have come in at, what could push this one higher (prep, colour changes, access), and when the written quote will arrive. Then measure it properly and send the quote on that date. A range on the day is an estimate, not a quote; quote vs estimate covers how to word each one.

Deposits, stages and variations

On bigger jobs, take a deposit before you order paint and book scaffold, and claim strata or multi-week jobs in stages, such as by building or by elevation. Deposit limits for home building work differ by state, and progress claims and payment stages lists them. When the client changes a colour after the first coat, adds a room or wants the ceilings done after all, price it in writing on the day and get a yes before you start. Variations: how to price them and get them approved covers how.

The mistakes that cost you the most

• Pricing by the room instead of by the measured surfaces
• Guessing production rates instead of using your own from past jobs
• Folding prep into the painting hours, so you never see what it really costs
• Forgetting the extra coat a strong colour change needs
• Pricing access as an afterthought, or not at all
• Sundries at nothing, because each item is small
• Taking on a colour change or an extra room without a written price

Price this way and track the hours against each job, and your quotes get more accurate with every house. Logging prep and painting hours separately, from the phone, against the job is exactly what TrackYaTradie is built for painters to make easy.