How Much to Charge to Paint a Room, and How to Bid a Painting Job

October 19, 2026 · Pricing a service business

To work out how much to charge to paint a room, measure the wall area after doors and windows, turn it into gallons and into hours at your own painting speed, cost the labor and materials, then divide by one minus the margin you want. In the illustrative example below, a 14 by 12 foot bedroom with 8-foot walls takes 11.24 hours and $215.00 of materials, costs $608.28, and prices at $940 at a 35% margin. The same method bids a two-story exterior at $6,810.

Nothing here is a market price or a claim about how fast anyone paints. The room size, coverage, production rates and labor cost are one made-up example. Replace each with your own.

The painting estimate formula

wall area   = 2 x (length + width) x height - doors and windows
gallons     = wall area x coats / coverage x (1 + waste), rounded up
hours       = prep + wall area x coats / your rate + ceiling + trim + cleanup
cost        = hours x labor cost an hour + materials
price       = cost / (1 - margin)

Margin is profit as a share of the price. That last line is where bids go wrong, and there is a section on it below.

Step 1: wall area and gallons

The room needs 2.16 gallons for 2 coats, so you buy 3. The 350 sq ft a gallon is the example’s figure; take yours off the label of the paint you are buying, and lower it for rough or porous walls or a big color change.

Step 2: hours at your own speed

The example painter rolls and cuts in 150 sq ft of wall an hour per coat. That is the input to replace first: time yourself on a wall you have measured. Ceilings and trim go slower and get their own rates.

The walls themselves are 4.59 hours. Prep, trim and cleanup are 5.25, 47% of the job. A quote built from wall area alone misses nearly half the hours in this room, and the gap grows with every foot of baseboard and casing.

Step 3: the price of the room

Labor is costed at $35.00 an hour: your own pay, or a painter’s wage plus payroll costs. Materials are at what you pay.

At $940 the room leaves $331.72 above cost. In this sheet the margin carries the overhead (insurance, vehicle, advertising) as well as profit; the exterior bid below costs overhead separately, which is better for big jobs.

How to bid a painting job: margin, not markup

The example exterior is 2,780 sq ft of siding after openings, 2 coats, 22 gallons and 85.8 person-hours: 6 days for a crew of 2, ladder setup counted each day. Labor is $3,001.67 and materials $1,390.00, so the job’s direct cost is $4,391.67.

Overhead of $15,000 a year spread over 40 jobs adds $375.00, for a full cost of $4,766.67. The painter wants a 30% margin. Here are the two ways to apply it:

Dividing by 0.70 gives $6,809.53, which rounds to a bid of $6,810. Adding 30% on top of cost gives $6,196.67, which is only a 23.1% margin and leaves $612.86 off this one bid. A 30% margin needs a 42.9% markup. The room has the same trap at a smaller size: adding 35% to its $608.28 gives $821.18, $114.64 short of the $935.82 margin price before rounding. The markup vs margin chart lists the pairs side by side.

The insight: markup on materials earns less than it looks

A 15% markup on the $1,390.00 of exterior materials adds $208.50 to the bid. Buying and picking them up took 1.5 hours, $52.50 at the labor cost, so the markup leaves $156.00. On the billed materials price that 15% markup is a 13.0% margin. A markup on materials is worth charging, but it pays for the shopping first, and it is not where a painting business makes its margin. The hours are.

That is also why the last step matters more than the first.

After the job: check the hours

The bid expected 85.76 person-hours and $2,043.40 of profit, a 30.0% margin. The timesheets said 97 hours, 13% over, and receipts showed $1,455 of materials. Profit came in at $1,585.00, a 23.3% margin: $458.40 less than the bid planned.

The job still made money. But if the same overrun shows up on the next few jobs, the production rates in the estimate are too fast for this crew. Multiply future hour estimates by 1.13, or lower the rates until estimate and timesheet agree. The same habit of pricing from measured time runs through how to price pressure washing by surface.

How these were calculated

Wall area is the room’s perimeter times wall height, less doors and windows. Gallons are area x coats / coverage x (1 + waste), rounded up to whole gallons. Hours are prep + area x coats / production rate for walls and ceiling + trim feet / trim rate + setup and cleanup; the exterior adds setup per person per working day, with days rounded up. Cost is hours x labor cost + materials, and price is cost / (1 - margin), rounded up to the next ten dollars. The markup comparison is full cost x (1 + margin). Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program, and the two agree to the cent. Room size, coverage, production rates, labor cost, overhead, margins and the actual hours are illustrative inputs, not market rates or measured speeds. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice.

To run this on your own rooms, rates and overhead, the pack below has the same seven calculators linked together, from gallons to the job check.