What should you charge for an interior paint job?

How do you price a paint job in five steps?

Every profitable bid is the same five moves in the same order. Skip one and the money leaks out of the same place every time.

• 1. Measure net paintable area. A room is 2 × (L + W) × ceiling height, minus openings at 21 sq ft per door and 15 sq ft per window. Sources disagree — doors run 20–21 sq ft, windows are quoted at 10, 12, 15 or 16 — so the deduction is a convention, not a measurement.
• 2. Convert area to painter-hours at a blended production rate, then add prep hours from the condition tier. Hours are what you sell; square feet are how you count them.
• 3. Apply your crew rate. Billed hourly runs $25–$45–$75; day rate $200–$350–$600 per painter-day.
• 4. Add materials. Paint at $20–$40–$80 a gallon, primer $20–$30–$50, sundries at 20% of the paint bill. Coverage is set by substrate, not sheen — the coverage chart has the per-substrate rates.
• 5. Add overhead, then take margin on price. Truck, insurance, phone and unbillable hours are yours to carry. None of the published cost bands on this page include them.

That last step is where painters lose money. A 30% markup on cost is a 23% margin — $100 of cost sold at $130 keeps $30, and $30 ÷ $130 is 23.1%. To keep 30% of the price, divide cost by 0.70: the same $100 has to sell at $143. Markup is a share of cost, margin is a share of price, and the gap widens with the size of the job.

What is a realistic production rate for painting walls?

Published rates conflict, and the conflict is not an error. paintpricing.com puts walls at 150–200 sq ft per painter-hour; HomeGuide puts them at 80–120 "of flat surface." Both are right. 150–200 is rolling only — open wall, cut-in already done by someone else. 80–120 is blended, with cut-in, masking and touch-up folded in. Bid with the blended rate. Use the rolling-only rate to schedule a second roller behind a cutter, never to price a room.

How much prep time should you bid?

Prep decides whether the job was profitable, and it is the line customers argue about because they cannot see it in the finished wall. Bid it as hours, separately from the coat hours, so a condition upgrade has a price you can show instead of one you absorb.

Heavier prep prices separately again: wallpaper removal $1.00–$3.50 per sq ft, patch and sand $1–$3 per sq ft, drywall repair $150–$325 per room. If the repairs need new board, price them off the drywall calculator instead of burying them in a prep tier.

What should a finished bid come out to?

These are checks, not a pricing method. Build the number from hours first, then see whether it lands inside the band. If it falls outside, one of your inputs is wrong — usually the production rate or the prep tier.

For whole-house scope, floor area converts to paintable wall at 2.52× at 8 ft, 2.88× at 9 ft and 3.23× at 10 ft walls only, or 3.52× at 8 ft including ceilings. A 2,000 sq ft house at 8 ft has 5,040 sq ft of wall, and full-scope interiors there run $5,000–$7,400–$12,500. Never reuse those multipliers on one room. Per room the ratio swings from 2.84× on a 10×10 down to 1.97× on a 15×15, so rooms have to be measured as 2 × (L + W) × H minus openings.

What do typical rooms bid at?

Use these to explain your number to a customer, not to produce it. A room landing far outside its band usually means the scope is different, not that the band is wrong.

What does a 12×12 bedroom bid at?

The calculator at the top of this page opens on exactly this job, so you can watch every line move as you change an input. Walls only, two coats, good condition, a $32 per hour loaded crew cost, $40 paint, 18% overhead and a 25% margin on price.

Stopping at direct cost would have quoted this room at $309. That is the single most common way a painting business runs busy and broke: the overhead and margin lines are $177 of the $486, and they are the only part you keep.

Run the three checks before you send it

• Per sq ft of wall: $486 ÷ 348 = $1.40 per sq ft of paintable wall, inside the $1.00–$3.00 published band and just under the $1.75 typical. Passes.
• Effective billed rate: $486 less materials and their share of overhead and margin, divided by 6.4 hours, is $50 per painter-hour — inside the $25–$75 range. Passes.
• Labor and overhead share: 78% of the bid, against the 75–85% norm derived from Thumbtack's own published jobs (82.0% and 82.1%). Passes.
• Job minimum: $486 clears the $250–$500 floor. A single accent wall at these rates would not, and gets quoted at the minimum instead.

On materials, 1.99 gallons is the closest call of any common room size — a 9-ft ceiling (2.26 gal), orange-peel texture (2.14) or one fewer window (2.07) all push a 12×12 past two gallons. An extra window pulls it further under, to 1.90, because an opening removes wall you would otherwise have to cover. With the 10% waste buffer this job needs 2.19 gallons, which buys as two gallons plus a quart rather than three gallons. A 5-gallon pail never wins below about 4.3 gallons at $35 a gallon against $150 a pail, so on single rooms, buy cans. The coverage chart has the full container-mix table.

What mistakes cost painters money?

• Confusing markup with margin. 30% on cost keeps 23% of price. Divide cost by (1 − your target margin); never multiply by 1 + it.
• Forgetting the job minimum. A closet is a $100–$300 add-on inside a bigger job. As a standalone visit it carries the same drive, setup, masking and cleanup as a full room, which is what the $250–$500 floor pays for.
• Deducting openings when cut-in is the expensive part. A window costs more labor per square foot than the flat wall it replaces, so deducting it removes area and leaves the expensive work. Homewyse prices gross area including openings for exactly that reason — a third denominator, and an upper bound only. If you deduct, hold the blended rate at the low end to pay for the cut line you gave away.
• Pricing kitchens and bathrooms by area. HomeGuide puts a kitchen at $150–$250 because cabinets, backsplash and appliances occupy most of the wall; Improovy puts it at $850–$1,350. They are not in conflict — one prices the small remaining area, the other prices the labor intensity of cutting around all of it. Do not average them. Price kitchens and bathrooms in hours.
• No test line on old houses. Lead testing on a pre-1978 home runs $200–$600, and asbestos testing on a pre-1986 popcorn ceiling runs $250–$850. These are gates, not fine print. Put them on the estimate as separate lines so the schedule and the liability sit with the customer's decision.
• Underpricing a drastic color change. Three coats instead of two, plus high-hide primer. Contractor practice is 1–2 gallons of primer at $35–$50 plus 2–3 labor hours per room, which works out near $150–$300, or 10–20% on the room. That uplift is derived from those inputs, not published — no major cost guide prints one.

Does sheen change how far the paint goes?

No. Sherwin-Williams ProMar 200 flat (PDS 101.81A) and semi-gloss (PDS 101.84) are both rated 350–400 sq ft per gallon. Volume solids and substrate texture drive spread rate: smooth primed drywall 400 at label rate, orange peel 325, knockdown 275, bare drywall 280, trim 250, popcorn ceiling 225. Sheen changes durability, washability and how much the wall shows its flaws — see the sheen guide — not how far the can goes. Bidding a semi-gloss trim job at reduced coverage gives back margin for nothing.

Nothing here is gated: no sign-up, no email, no contact form between you and the number. The production rates and prep tiers are published in full because they are trade arithmetic, not proprietary data. For gallons rather than dollars, use the quick gallons estimator; the visual room planner subtracts real doors and windows as you draw them; the cost per square foot page shows the source weighting behind these bands; and the renovation cost estimator puts the paint line next to the rest of the project.

Sources and method

Figures on this page were compiled in August 2026 from the sources below, whose own publication dates run from 2023 to 2026. Where they disagree, the disagreement is stated rather than averaged away.

• HomeGuide interior painting cost pages — the core page is bylined 28 August 2023 despite a 2026 title; a separate painter cost page updated September 2025 raises hourly rates from $20–$50 to $25–$75. Where the publisher's own pages conflict, the newer figure is used here.
• Angi and HomeAdvisor — counted as one source, not two: Angi owns HomeAdvisor and the tables are numerically identical. NerdWallet republishes the same figures and is not counted separately.
• Angi's $2,022 interior painting average is deliberately not used: divided by Angi's own $2.75 per sq ft of floor it implies a 735 sq ft home. It is an average across all interior jobs booked, mostly one to three rooms. Angi's own 2,000 sq ft figure is $4,000–$12,000.
• Homewyse — used as an upper bound only. It quotes gross area including door and window openings, a different denominator from every other source on this page.
• paintpricing.com — source of the 150–200 sq ft per painter-hour rolling-only wall rate, reconciled here against HomeGuide's 80–120 blended rate.
• Sherwin-Williams product data sheets: ProMar 200 Zero VOC flat (PDS 101.81A) and semi-gloss (PDS 101.84), both rated 350–400 sq ft per gallon — the evidence that sheen does not change spread rate.
• Thumbtack published job figures, used to derive the labor share of a bid: $4,420 labor against $972 materials is 82.0% of the total; $19,891 against $4,351 is 82.1%.
• Improovy and HomeGuide kitchen figures, published side by side rather than averaged, because they price different things.
• Fixr — excluded from every blended figure on this page as a 40–60% high outlier on a common basis. Its ceiling-height cost multipliers are the best available on that point and are the only Fixr figures used here.
• Compiled 2026. Underlying publisher pages were last updated between 2023 and 2026; every cost figure is a range with its basis and denominator named, never a single blended average.

This is an estimate for planning, not a quote or a bid. Confirm any figure against local contractor pricing before you commit money to it.