How to Bid a Painting Job

The price on a painting bid comes from hours, and the hours come from what you see on the walkthrough. The bid is your crew's time, the paint, overhead and profit, written as a quote the customer signs before you start, listing what's in and out. Then whatever the walls hide is a change you bill for, not an argument.

Price the Hours, Use the Square Feet to Check

In a thread on r/paint, one commenter wrote that “square footage should mostly only be used to help you calculate how much material you are going to need,” and warned: “Stay away from creating formulas to come up with quotes, you will get yourself in big trouble eventually doing this.”

When you do measure, measure the walls and ceilings, not the floor. A painting contractor quoted in Benjamin Moore's estimating article puts it plainly: the difference between an 8-foot ceiling and a 10- or 12-foot one “will be hundreds of extra square feet of wall space to paint per room.” The same article says interiors can take 2 to 3 times as many hours as the same exterior square footage, so keep one rate for inside and another for outside.

Your production rate is the square feet of wall your crew finishes in an hour, and the only one worth bidding from is your own. Time your next few rooms: wall area divided by the hours spent rolling and cutting in, with one rate for one coat and another for two. Track prep, setup and cleanup on their own, so a room full of nail holes doesn't throw off your painting rate. An article on the Painting Contractors Association's site, written by a software vendor, works one example: 425 square feet of repainted walls, two coats, in 5 hours, or 85 square feet an hour. That's one painter on one job, not a number to bid with.

If you're wondering what an hour of painting should cost the customer, keep two numbers apart. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median wage for employed painters at $23.75 an hour (May 2025). That's what a painter earns. What a customer pays per hour also has to cover overhead, profit and the hours nobody pays for, like estimates and driving. In the bid below, we assume labor costs you $40 an hour, and the customer pays about $83 for each hour on the job ($65 if you leave out the paint and sundries).

And what should 1,000 square feet cost? Angi, a cost guide for homeowners, puts interior painting at $2 to $6 a square foot, which would be $2,000 to $6,000. But Angi's room table multiplies floor area. You paint walls. The bedroom below has 168 square feet of floor and more than twice that in wall, plus the ceiling. Treat Angi's range as what your customer may have read before you showed up, not as your price.

A Worked Bid: One 12 by 14 Bedroom

The room is 12 by 14 feet with 8-foot ceilings, one 3 by 7 door and one 3 by 5 window. The walls run 52 feet around, 2 × (12 + 14), so they cover 416 square feet (52 × 8). Take off the door (21 square feet) and the window (15) and you have 380 square feet of wall. The ceiling is 168 square feet.

Paint

Coverage comes from the paint's data sheet. Sherwin-Williams' ProMar 200 Zero VOC flat lists 350 to 400 square feet per gallon, at the paint thickness the sheet recommends. Bid the low end, since rough or thirsty walls take more than the sheet assumes. Two coats on the walls is 760 square feet, and 760 ÷ 350 is 2.17, so buy 3 gallons. The ceiling gets one coat: 168 ÷ 350 is 0.48, so 1 gallon. Walls and ceiling are usually different colors, so round each up on its own: 4 gallons in all.

This bid assumes a repaint. On new drywall, the same data sheet calls for a coat of primer before the two finish coats, and that's more paint and more hours.

Hours

Hours are the number only you know. The formula is wall area ÷ your production rate for that many coats, the same for the ceiling, then prep, setup and cleanup on top. For this example, say your painter spends:

ProMar 200's sheet says to wait 4 hours before the second coat (at 77°F and 50% humidity), so plan the day around that wait, or plan two visits and count the extra drive.

Cost

Assume an hour of labor costs you $40. Labor comes to 10.5 × $40 = $420.

For the paint, we used $37.98 a gallon, what one Connecticut Home Depot charged for Behr Premium Plus interior eggshell on October 21, 2026. It stands in for your own supplier's price on whatever paint you spec. Four gallons is $151.92. Add sundries (tape, plastic, patch and caulk), which for this example we'll call $40. Materials and sundries come to $191.92, and the job costs you $420 + $191.92 = $611.92.

Overhead and Profit

Overhead is everything the business pays for that isn't this job: insurance, the truck, your phone, the evenings you spend on estimates. Figure overhead and profit as shares of the price, not of your cost. For this example, say overhead takes 20% of the price and you want 10% profit. Then divide your cost by the 70% that's left:

Price = cost ÷ (1 − 0.20 − 0.10) = $611.92 ÷ 0.70 = $874.17

Round up to $875 (we round to whole dollars from here). Of that, overhead gets $175, profit gets $88 and your cost is the other $612. Mark up your cost by 30% instead and you'd bid $795.50, where overhead and profit come to about 23% of the price, not the 30% you meant.

Your own books are the best guide to those shares. For scale, NAHB found remodelers spent 23.6% of revenue on operating expenses and netted 6.3% in 2024. That's remodelers, not painters, so treat it as a rough check on your own numbers. One more check: the bid works out to about $5.21 per square foot of floor, inside Angi's homeowner range above.

The Quote the Customer Sees

A line for every task invites the customer to strike the ones they think they can do themselves, and gives the next bidder your prices. A poster on the Fine Homebuilding forum put it this way: “Giving the homeowner full pricing leads to cherry picking nightmares.” So price by surface, with the prep, setup, paint and cleanup inside each line, and put the full scope in the notes.

The ceiling's paint and hours are roughly a fifth of the job, so it carries $175 and the walls carry $700. If the customer wants to drop the ceiling, re-price the walls instead of deleting the line, because the setup and cleanup don't get any smaller.

Homes Built Before 1978

In general, if you're paid for work that disturbs paint in a home built before 1978, the EPA's Renovation, Repair and Painting rule applies. Your firm needs EPA certification, sole proprietors included, and a certified renovator has to be on the job. Give the owner the Renovate Right pamphlet no more than 60 days before you start, and keep your records for 3 years. Testing the paint is optional, but unless you have documentation that it isn't lead-based, the rule applies.

The minor-repair exception covers 6 square feet or less of disturbed paint per room inside, or 20 square feet outside. It never covers window replacement or demolition, and jobs in the same room within 30 days count as one job.

In the bedroom above, the patching and sanding are what disturb paint, so whether the exception covers you depends on how much of it there is. Ask what year the house was built at the walkthrough. If it's before 1978 and the work goes past the exception, price the lead-safe work in, on its own line, so the customer sees why the number moved.

Put the Scope in Writing, Including What's Out

The written bid is what the customer signs, so write it to answer the questions they'd otherwise ask halfway through the job. It names the surfaces and coats, the paint and colors, the prep you included, and what you left out, the way the notes on the bedroom quote do. It says how long the price holds. That's your call: pick a window and write the date. In Invoice Goat, that's the quote's Expires date, 14 days out on your first quote and after that the gap you used last time. And it states the payment terms, including any deposit. How to invoice as a contractor covers deposit limits.

Some states spell out what a home improvement contract needs:

• In California, a contract over $500 has to be in writing and signed before work starts, and the down payment can't be more than $1,000 or 10% of the price, whichever is less. On the bedroom bid, that's $87.50.
• In New York, a contract over $500 has to be in writing, signed by both of you, and tell the owner they can cancel until midnight of the third business day after signing.
• Anywhere in the US, a sale of $25 or more signed at the customer's home can fall under the FTC's Cooling-Off Rule, which calls for a written notice that the customer can cancel within three business days. If you sign bids at the kitchen table, check whether it applies to you.

That's what the rules say, not legal advice for your job.

When the Walls Hide Something

Some problems only show once you start: soft drywall behind an old patch, rot under the paint on a sill. Anything you could have seen at the walkthrough belongs in the bid. A commenter on r/Construction put it bluntly: “It will be hard to get a change order for something the low bid missed.”

What you couldn't see is extra work you bill for, and it goes best in this order. Stop. Take a photo. Send it to the customer with what the fix will cost, and wait for their OK in writing before you do the work. Your bid's notes already said you'd handle surprises this way, so nobody's hearing the plan for the first time.

The extra work then goes on the invoice as its own line. In Invoice Goat, you add it to the invoice you make from the signed quote, and the quote stays as signed, so you can compare what you priced with what you billed.

Doing This in Invoice Goat

Invoice Goat runs in any phone browser, so the bid can go out before you leave the driveway. As of September 2026, across all trades, 64% of Invoice Goat's quotes were approved in under 24 hours.

• Build the quote from lines like the two above, with the square feet in each line's description. Save the ones you use on every job in your Price Book.
• Attach photos of the walls you walked. The customer sees them on their online quote.
• Write deposit terms in the notes. When the deposit comes in, record it on the invoice with Add Payment.
• The customer taps Approve Quote and signs on their own phone. The PDF shows the signature with the date, time and IP address.
• If the quote sits, re-send it. The nudge comes from Invoice Goat, not from you.

Your first quote and first invoice are free, with every feature and no credit card. After that, one price covers everything: see Invoice Goat pricing. For a one-off PDF quote, use the free quote and estimate maker.