How much does it cost to paint a house?

Almost every painting company in America answers this question with “it depends, let us come and look.” That is fair, because it does depend. It is also unhelpful when what you actually want to know is whether the quote in your hand is normal.

So this site works the number from the other direction. The federal government publishes what painters earn in every metro area in the country. From that you can build a defensible estimate of what an hour of painting should cost you, and from there what a job should cost. No form, no phone call.

The single most useful thing to understand

About 63% of a typical interior painting bill is labour. The paint is a minor line item.

That matters because paint costs roughly the same everywhere. A gallon at the trade counter in McAllen, Texas costs about what it costs in Manhattan. Painter wages, however, run from $12.48 an hour to $36.62 an hour depending on the metro. So essentially the entire difference between a cheap market and an expensive one is the local price of skilled time.

Two consequences follow. First, “get three quotes” is weaker advice than it sounds, because three painters in one metro are all buying labour at similar rates. If one bid comes in 40 percent under the others, the difference is usually the number of coats, the amount of prep, or whether the crew carries insurance. Second, a national cost guide quoting one range for the whole country is close to useless, because that range spans six different labour markets.

Interior painting by home size

At the national mean wage of $24.46/hr. Change job type or home size in the calculator.

What it costs in the largest metros

Ranked by how many painters actually work there, which is a better guide to market depth than population.

Ranked by how many painters work in each metro. Metros with their own page are linked.

Every metro, by state

The table above covers the 25 largest metros. Every one of the 359 metros this site tracks has its own cost breakdown, organised here by state.

The three jobs, and where they differ

Interior is the fastest work per square foot, because the surfaces are flat, dry and at a comfortable height. See interior painting cost.

Exterior is slower for the same area. Prep is heavier, ladders and staging eat hours, and the weather decides the schedule. See exterior painting cost.

Cabinets are priced per door rather than per square foot, and they are the most labour-heavy job in the trade at around 80 percent labour. See cabinet painting cost.

If you want to see the hourly figures underneath all of this, including the wage spread between the 25th and 75th percentile in each metro, read what painters charge per hour. If you want to check our arithmetic, every constant is published on the methodology page.