Painting is labour with a thin coat of materials on top. A painter earns a median of $23.75 an hour, which is a whisker under the $24.51 that every occupation in America earns, and the paint itself is a rounding error beside the days of work around it. Put your own wall area, your own tin and your own quote in, and watch the materials shrink.More
Take the defaults. Four hundred square feet of wall, two coats, a tin that covers 350 square feet, at $40 a gallon: that is three gallons and $120 of paint. Set against a quote of $800 it is 15% of the bill, and if you tracked down the identical colour at half the price you would save $60 on the job. Meanwhile a third coat adds $40 of paint and an entire extra pass of the room, which is the expensive half. That is the whole argument of this page. Haggling over the brand of paint is a rounding error; changing the SIZE of the job is not. Coats, prep, filling, sanding, masking, cutting in, the trim, the ceiling and whether anybody has to come back tomorrow: those are the levers, and every one of them is time. There is a second thing worth reporting plainly. BLS puts the occupation at $23.75 an hour and $49,400 a year, against $24.51 an hour for all occupations, and 225,190 painters are counted on somebody's payroll. That is within a dollar of what the country as a whole is paid, which is a good deal closer than several of the trades on this site manage: a house cleaner is at $17.07. Whatever else is going on in a painting quote, an unusually cheap worker is not the explanation. And a third thing, which is a correction. This page used to say nobody publishes a national price for a gallon of paint. The Census does: interior water-thinned paint and tinting base left the factory at $13.34 a gallon in 2022, on gallons and dollars it prints side by side. That is a factory gate rather than a shelf, so it is not the number to type into the box, but it makes the finding harder still to argue with. The three gallons in the default job are about $40 of manufactured product in total, against an $800 quote.
What the paint actually costs
$120
The paint, at your price and the coverage printed on your tin$120
Everything else: the labour, and the business that sends it$680
The paint is the cheap part, and it is not close. On the defaults, 400 square feet of
wall in two coats needs three gallons, which at $40 a gallon is $120 of paint. Against an $800 quote that is 15% of
the bill. Find the identical colour at half the price and you have saved $60. Painting is labour, and labour is
time.More
So negotiate the JOB, not the tin. The levers that move the number are coats, prep, filling,
sanding, masking, cutting in, the trim, the ceiling, and whether anybody has to come back the next day. On the
defaults a third coat adds $40 of paint and an entire extra pass of the room, and the pass is the expensive half.
Ask what comes off if you fill and sand the walls yourself, with one caution: if the house was painted before 1978 the
paint underneath may be lead, and sanding is precisely what turns it into dust you can breathe. Test it, or leave the
prep to somebody equipped to contain it. Ask what comes off if the trim stays as it is. Ask what
it costs to do two rooms at once, because the setting up and the packing away happen once instead of twice. Arguing
about the brand of paint is arguing about 15% of the bill, and you will not win all of it.
WHAT IS LEFT AFTER THE PAINT IS NOT A MARKUP. A painter earns a median of $23.75 an hour, so the
sixteen hours in the default quote are $380 of wage. The rest of the money is a business: liability insurance, the
van, the ladders, the sprayer, the dust sheets and the tape, the hours spent quoting and fetching paint and driving
that nobody pays for, the payroll tax an employer pays and a self-employed painter pays both halves of, and the weeks
with no work in them. There IS a measured rate for the trade, and we print it rather than pretend it is missing:
the painting class billed a national mean of $79.49 a field hour in 2025 dollars, net of materials. That is a fact
about a bucket of firms and not about anybody in particular. It runs $57.41 to $97.86 across the states with a clean
cell, and those state figures are themselves averages of firms. We do not grade your quote against it, we do not know
what the painter quoting you earns, and we are not going to imply you are being overcharged.
And the wage is worth a sentence of its own. $23.75 an hour, $49,400 a year, 225,190 people counted.
Against $24.51 an hour for every occupation in America. That is within a dollar of the national figure, and several
of the trades on this site come nowhere near it: a house cleaner is at $17.07 an hour. Whatever is happening in a
painting quote, an unusually cheap worker is not the explanation.
§ 02 Where the money in a painting quote goes
What the paint costs, at your price and your tin's coverage$120.00
Share of the quote that is materials15%
Left per hour of work, for the labour AND the business$42.50
Saved if you found the same paint at half the price$60.00
The wage is BLS's and it is exact. The trade's billed rate ($79.49 a field hour, 2025 dollars) and the factory-gate price of a gallon ($13.34, 2022 dollars) are the Economic Census's, and this page previously claimed both were unpublishable, which was false in both cases. The coverage on your tin is YOURS, because a coverage figure is a product specification and nobody publishes one. So is the shelf price, and so is the quote. This page still prints no price per square foot for painting, because the Census counts receipts and hours but no unit of work, and there is nothing to divide by.
Recommended next steps
Materials are somewhere between a tenth and a quarter of the bill, which is the ordinary shape of a painting quote and the reason this page exists. The paint is real money and it is not the money. Negotiate the coats, the prep, the trim and the ceiling, because that is where the hours are, and the hours are the quote.
A painter earns a median of $23.75 an hour and $49,400 a year, against $24.51 an hour for every occupation in America.More
BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, SOC 47-2141 (Painters, Construction and Maintenance), May 2025, with 225,190 people counted. The tenth percentile is $18.00 an hour and the ninetieth is $37.89. What makes it notable is how close it sits to the national figure, within a dollar of it. A house cleaner, on the same BLS survey, is at $17.07 an hour, a long way below. A painter is paid roughly what the country is paid.
On the defaults, the paint is $120 of an $800 quote. That is 15% of it.More
Four hundred square feet of wall, two coats, is 800 square feet to cover. At a tin claiming 350 square feet a gallon that is three gallons, because paint comes in whole tins, and at $40 a gallon that is $120. Every one of those inputs is yours to change. Change them and the share moves. It does not move much.
A gallon of interior paint leaves the factory at $13.34, and this page used to tell you nobody publishes that.More
It was wrong. The 2022 Economic Census product file prints both the gallons and the dollars for interior architectural coatings (NAICS 325510), so the price divides straight out: interior water-thinned paints and tinting bases shipped at $13.34 a gallon at the plant gate. The three gallons in the default job therefore leave a factory somewhere for about $40 in total, which is the price of ONE tin on the shelf. That is a factory gate and not a shop, and the gap between them is freight, the distributor, the store, the tinting machine and the premium lines a shelf carries. We have not measured it, and we are not calling it a markup. What it does do is drive the finding further home: the material in a painting job is barely there.
Halving the price of the paint saves $60. Adding a coat costs $40 of paint and an entire extra pass of the room.More
That asymmetry is the page. One of those levers is a rounding error and the other one is the job. Prep, filling, sanding, masking, cutting in, the trim, the ceiling and a second visit are all time, and time is what a painting quote is made of. If you want the number down, take work out of the job. Arguing about the brand of paint is arguing about the smallest line on the bill.
What is left after the paint is not a markup, and this page will not call it one.More
It is the painter's own wage plus a business. Liability insurance. The van. The ladders, the sprayer, the sheets, the tape and the filler. The hours spent quoting, fetching paint and driving, which nobody pays for. The payroll tax an employer pays, and which a self-employed painter pays both halves of. And the weeks with no work in them. We do not know what the painter quoting you earns, and we will not imply you are being overcharged.
The painting trade bills a national mean of $79.49 a field hour, and that is a fact about a bucket of firms, not about your painter.More
It is measured, from the 2022 Economic Census: the value of construction work NAICS 238320 performs, divided by the construction-worker hours behind it, carried to 2025 dollars on a labour index. So it is net of materials, and the unit is a WORKER-hour, which means two painters for an hour is two field hours. An earlier version of this page told you no such rate could be built, which was false and was disproved by a file we already had. Now the limits, and they are the whole reason this number is dangerous. It is the mean of a CLASS that is 76.4% painting contractors and the rest wall covering, bridge and ship painting and a little drywall. Across the states with a clean cell it runs $57.41 to $97.86, and those are averages of firms, so the spread between actual firms is wider again and nobody publishes it. It does not bound what anyone may charge you, we do not divide it into your quote, and a page that did so would be telling you something it cannot know.
2 more
The wage spreads 2.83 times across the country, from $11.57 an hour to $32.80.More
Puerto Rico at the bottom and Hawaii at the top, across the 54 areas for which BLS publishes a median for this occupation. A missing area is a suppressed cell rather than a zero, and we do not read it as one. If you want a sharper local sense of the labour in your quote, that spread is the reason a national median can only ever be a starting point.
The occupation code is wider than the job, and the industry code is wider still.More
SOC 47-2141 covers exterior, commercial and industrial painting and the maintenance painter in a plant, not only the person doing your hallway. And the Economic Census class for painting and wall covering contractors is 76.4% painting contractors, the rest being wall covering, bridge and ship painting and a little drywall. Both are buckets. Reading a bucket as a job is the mistake this site has made before, and the honest fix is to tell you the bucket is a bucket.
Sourced: the wage, the trade's billed rate, and what a gallon leaves the factory at.
BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, SOC 47-2141 (Painters, Construction and Maintenance):
225,190 employed, median $23.75 an hour, $49,400 a year, tenth percentile $18.00, ninetieth $37.89, against $24.51 an
hour for all occupations. The 2022 Economic Census: the painting class bills a national mean of $79.49 a field hour in
2025 dollars, and interior water-thinned paint shipped at $13.34 a gallon at the factory gate in 2022. Ours, and
declared on the controls themselves: the 400 square feet of wall, the 350 square feet a gallon, the $40 tin,
the sixteen hours and the $800 quote. Every one is a placeholder. Yours: all six of them, and the
page is built to be re-run.More
We are not going to guess the coverage of your paint, and we will not pretend the price is unknowable
either. The tin states its own coverage, and it is a manufacturer's claim about a good surface: bare plaster
and new drywall drink the first coat, and a smooth primed wall gives it back. Nobody publishes a coverage figure,
because it is a product specification rather than a statistic, so that one stays yours. The PRICE is a different
story, and this page had it wrong. The Economic Census counts gallons as well as dollars for interior architectural
coatings, so there IS a national price per gallon: $13.34 at the factory gate in 2022. It is not a shelf price, and
the distance between the two is freight, the distributor, the store, the tinting machine and the premium lines a
shelf carries. We have not measured that distance and we are not calling it a markup. Your shop's price is still the
right number to type in.
THE SOC CODE IS WIDER THAN THIS PAGE. "Painters, Construction and Maintenance" holds exterior
painters, commercial and industrial painters, and the maintenance painter who repaints a factory, alongside the
person doing your hallway. It is a bucket, and reading it as "the person who paints living rooms" is the exact
mistake this site has made before and written rules against. The same goes for the Economic Census class: painting
and wall covering contractors is 76.4% painting contractors, with wall covering, bridge and ship painting and a
little drywall making up the rest.
AND BLS EXCLUDES THE SELF-EMPLOYED. "Does OEWS have occupational employment estimates that include
the self-employed? No." That is BLS's own FAQ, verbatim. A great many painters work for themselves, so the 225,190
counted are the ones on somebody's payroll, and the wage is the wage of the employed ones. We do not divide anything
by that employment count, and neither should anybody else.
What this page will not do, and what it will no longer pretend is missing. It will not print a price
per square foot for painting: the Economic Census counts receipts and hours but no unit of work, no square feet and no
rooms, so there is nothing to divide by, and a price per square foot built from it would be a fabrication with a
footnote. What it WILL print is the thing an earlier version of this page wrongly said could not be built at all. The
Economic Census does publish construction-worker hours, and on them the painting class (NAICS 238320) billed a
national mean of $79.49 a field hour in 2025 dollars, net of materials, running $57.41 to $97.86 across the states
with a clean cell. Read it as what it is: a CLASS mean, from a bucket that is 76.4% painting contractors, and a bound
on nobody. State means are averages of firms, so the firm-to-firm spread is wider still and nobody publishes it. We do
not set that rate against your quote to grade it, because it could not answer that question and pretending otherwise
is how this site has hurt readers before. We would rather do honest arithmetic on the quote you were actually handed.
Where every number above comes from
Wage data
BLS, Current Employment Statistics, series CEU2023832002: average weekly hours, NAICS 238320 (painting and wall covering contractors), 2006 to 2026. This page does NOT use it, and cites it anyway, on purpose. This page once told readers the Economic Census gives receipts 'with no HOURS and no denominator, so no billed rate can be built'. That was false twice over: the Census DOES publish construction-worker hours in sector 23 (which is where our $79.49 a field hour comes from), and BLS publishes hours for this exact NAICS as well. We name the series that would have disproved us, because the cost of asserting an absence should be writing down the thing that could refute it. We prefer the Census's column because it counts FIELD workers, while CES counts all employees including the office, so the CES denominator would be too large and the rate too low
BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, national. Painters, Construction and Maintenance (SOC 47-2141): 225,190 employed, median $23.75/hr, $49,400/yr, 10th percentile $18.00/hr, 90th percentile $37.89/hr. All occupations (SOC 00-0000): median $24.51/hr. Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners (SOC 37-2012): median $17.07/hr
BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, by state. Painters, Construction and Maintenance: a median published for 54 areas, from $11.57/hr in Puerto Rico to $32.80/hr in Hawaii
BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics FAQ: 'Does OEWS have occupational employment estimates that include the self-employed? No.' Many painters work for themselves, so the employment count above is the painters on a payroll, and nothing on this page is divided by it
US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, EC2223KOB (Kind of Business). Painting and wall covering contractors is 76.4% painting contractors, the rest wall covering, bridge and ship painting and a little drywall. It reports receipts, and it counts no unit of work: no square feet, no rooms, no jobs, which is why this page prints no price per square foot
US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, EC2223BASIC (the billed rate). NAICS 238320, Painting: a national mean of $79.49 a field hour in 2025 dollars, $57.41 to $97.86 across the states with a clean cell. This survey DOES publish construction-worker hours, which an earlier version of this page denied
ECI, construction, total compensation (the deflator that carries the billed rate to 2025 dollars: a labour index, because the billed rate has materials removed from it)
US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, EC2200NAPCSINDPRD (the products file). NAICS 325510, paint and coating manufacturing, publishes shipped gallons AND dollars for interior architectural coatings: interior water-thinned paints and tinting bases work out at $13.34 a gallon at the factory gate. A factory gate is not a shelf
Every one of these is a place the number could be off. They are here because you should be able to check our working, not because we are hedging.
The coverage and the SHELF price are READER INPUTS, and our defaults are ours.
350 square feet a gallon and $40 a gallon are round stand-ins, they are declared as ours on the controls themselves, and they are not measurements of anything. The tin tells you its own coverage and the shop tells you its own price, and those two numbers beat any average we could publish. Note the word SHELF, though, because we got this wrong once: there IS a published national price for a gallon of interior paint, at the FACTORY GATE, and it was $13.34 in 2022. It is not what you pay, and it is not the number this box wants.
If the house was painted before 1978, do not sand it yourself on our say-so.
This page tells you to take work out of the job, and doing your own prep is the most tempting way to do it. Here is the caveat that belongs beside the advice: older paint may be lead-based, and sanding is the one operation that turns it into a dust fine enough to breathe and to settle on everything a child touches. Test first, or hand the prep to somebody set up to contain it. Saving a few hours of somebody else's labour is not a reason to take that on unknowingly, and a cost calculator that stayed quiet about it would be selling you a saving with a hidden price.
Gallons are rounded UP, because paint comes in whole tins.
Two and a bit gallons is three gallons, and the third one sits half-used in a garage for a decade. That rounding makes the paint look slightly dearer than the arithmetic would, which cuts against the page's own finding, and we would rather it did that than the other way round.
The money left after the paint is labour AND a business. It is not profit.
Insurance, the van, the ladders, the sprayer, the tape, the sheets, the unpaid hours quoting and fetching and driving, the payroll tax, and the weeks with no work. Calling the remainder profit would be the easiest lie on this page and it is not one we are going to tell.
Hours means PERSON-hours. Two painters for a day is sixteen hours.
Forget the multiplication and you halve the apparent rate. If a quote will not tell you how many people are coming and for how long, you cannot compare it with another quote, and you cannot compare it with this page either.
SOC 47-2141 is wider than a person painting your hallway.
It holds exterior painters, commercial and industrial painters and the maintenance painter in a factory. It is an occupational bucket, and the wage is the bucket's median. And BLS excludes the self-employed, so the 225,190 it counts are the painters on somebody's payroll.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to paint a room?
Nobody publishes a national price for the JOB: the Economic Census counts the trade's receipts and its hours, but no square feet and no rooms, so there is nothing to divide by. This page does something more useful than making one up: it shows you what the paint costs and lets you see how little of the bill it is. On the defaults, 400 square feet of wall in two coats takes three gallons, which at $40 a tin is $120. Against an $800 quote that is 15%. The other 85% is time, which is why the answer to what a room costs is really an answer about how big the job is: the coats, the prep, the trim, the ceiling, and whether anyone has to come back.
Is expensive paint worth it?
Possibly, and the point of this page is that the question matters far less than it feels like it should. On the defaults, halving the price of the paint saves $60 on an $800 job. Doubling it costs you about the same. Worth knowing what the stuff actually costs to make: the average gallon of interior water-thinned paint left its factory at $13.34 in 2022, on the Census's own gallons and dollars, so the three gallons in the default job are about $40 of manufactured product between them. Everything above that is freight, the shop and the sheen you chose, and none of it is the reason your quote is $800. Better paint can cover in fewer coats, and a coat is real money in labour, so a dearer tin that saves a pass of the room can pay for itself several times over. That is the argument for good paint, and it is an argument about TIME rather than about the tin.
What does a painter actually earn?
A median of $23.75 an hour, or $49,400 a year, from BLS's survey of employers (SOC 47-2141, Painters, Construction and Maintenance, 225,190 counted). The US median across every occupation is $24.51 an hour. That puts a painter within a dollar of the national figure, which is worth saying plainly, because a good many of the trades on this site come nowhere near it: a house cleaner is at $17.07 an hour. Two warnings. The occupation code is wider than residential interior work: it includes exterior, commercial and industrial painting. And BLS excludes the self-employed, so the count is the painters on somebody's payroll.
Am I being overcharged to have a room painted?
We do not know, and we are not going to imply it. There is no published price for painting a room to set your quote beside, and the one measured rate that does exist cannot answer the question: the painting trade as a whole bills a national mean of $79.49 a field hour, and that is the average of a bucket of firms, not a ceiling on any of them. It says nothing about the person who came to your house, and dividing it into your quote would be arithmetic dressed up as a verdict. What the page CAN tell you is what the paint costs, what share of the bill that is, and what is left per hour of work. And the thing left over is not profit: out of it come the painter's wage, liability insurance, the van, the ladders and the sprayer, the tape and the sheets, the hours spent quoting and fetching paint and driving, payroll tax, and the weeks with no work in them.
How do I actually get a painting quote down?
Take work out of the job, because the work is the bill. Ask what comes off if you clear and cover the room yourself. Ask what comes off if you fill and sand the walls, with one real caution: if the house was painted before 1978 the old coats underneath may be lead, and sanding is what turns lead into breathable dust. Test before you start, or leave the prep to somebody equipped to contain it. Ask whether the trim really needs doing. Ask whether one coat will do over the same colour, and accept the answer if it will not, because a dark colour going light genuinely needs the coats. Ask what two rooms cost together, since setting up and packing away happen once rather than twice. What will not help is arguing about the paint: on this page's own defaults that is 15% of the bill, and you will not win all of it.
How much paint do I need?
Take the perimeter of the room, multiply it by the ceiling height, subtract the doors and windows, and that is your wall area. Multiply by the coats. Divide by the coverage printed on the tin, and round up, because tins come whole. The calculator above does exactly that and nothing cleverer. We deliberately do not supply a coverage figure of our own: the tin states its own, it varies with product, sheen, colour and surface, and bare plaster will drink a good deal more than a smooth primed wall.
