How to Bid a Painting Job and Actually Profit

The paint is cheap. The labor is not. That one sentence is why most painters bid a job wrong. So let's go through how to bid a painting job the way that keeps you off the "I'm too busy but I'm broke" treadmill.

I've seen painters quote a whole interior off a gut feeling in the driveway, then spend three days sanding and patching walls they never accounted for. The customer got a steal. The painter worked for free. Let's not do that.

Measure the real surface area, not the floor

You don't paint floors, you paint walls and ceilings, so square footage of the room is only the start. For interior walls, measure the perimeter of the room times the wall height. A 12 by 14 room with 8 foot walls is a 52 foot perimeter times 8, so about 416 square feet of wall before you subtract big openings.

Ceilings, trim, doors, and windows each get counted their own way.

• Walls: perimeter times height.
• Ceilings: length times width.
• Trim, doors, windows: count them as units, because they're all prep and cut-in time, not roller work.

Exterior is the same idea. Measure the wall planes, count the soffit and fascia, and note every window and shutter that needs cutting around. Detail is time, and time is your real cost.

Prep is the number everyone lowballs

Here's the truth nobody wants to hear about how to bid a painting job. Prep is often more hours than the painting. Scraping, sanding, patching, caulking, masking, and covering floors. A repaint on a beat-up 1980s interior can be 60 percent prep and 40 percent paint.

Walk the job and grade the prep honestly:

• Light: clean walls, minor patching, a repaint of a well-kept home.
• Medium: nail pops, some cracks, caulking, a few problem areas.
• Heavy: peeling exterior, water stains, wallpaper removal, plaster repair, lead-safe work on old homes.

Put a separate labor line on prep. If you bury it inside "painting," you'll under-quote it every single time because your brain wants the job to sound easy. Price the ugly truth.

Coats and materials

Two coats is the standard for a reason. One coat over a color change or fresh drywall will flash and look cheap, and you'll be back fixing it for free. Bid two coats unless it's a light refresh in the same color, and even then be careful.

For materials, figure roughly 350 to 400 square feet of coverage per gallon per coat on smooth surfaces, less on rough or porous ones. So that 416 square foot room at two coats is around 2.5 gallons. Add primer where you're covering stains, patches, or a big color change.

Don't cheap out on the paint itself. A $60 gallon that covers in two coats beats a $30 gallon that needs three and still looks blotchy. The extra $30 in paint saves you an hour of labor, and labor is the expensive part. Then add your sundries: tape, plastic, caulk, sandpaper, roller covers, brushes. It adds up to real money on a full house.

The labor number that makes or breaks it

This is the whole game. Painters lowball labor because they quote what they think they can get, not what the work actually takes.

Estimate labor in hours, not vibes. Break the job into tasks: prep hours, cut-in hours, rolling hours, trim hours, cleanup. Then multiply by your loaded labor rate, which includes the painter's wage, taxes, workers comp, and insurance. A painter you "pay $25 an hour" actually costs you $35 or more once you count everything.

• Track how long a room actually takes your crew, then use that going forward.
• A typical interior room might be 6 to 10 labor hours all in, depending on prep and trim.
• Don't forget setup and teardown, and the drive.

Total your hours, multiply by loaded rate, and now you have a labor cost you can defend.

Build the bid and add overhead and profit

Stack it clean so nothing hides:

1. Materials (paint plus primer plus sundries)
2. Prep labor (its own line)
3. Painting labor (cut-in, roll, trim)
4. Overhead (truck, insurance, phone, marketing, spread across the job)
5. Profit on top

Overhead and profit are not optional. If you only cover materials and wages, you own a job, not a business. Aim for a real net profit after overhead, not the scraps left when everything else is paid. A lot of solid painting outfits target 20 to 30 percent gross margin and defend it.

One more thing that saves jobs: put your coats, colors, and prep scope in the written estimate. "Two coats, walls and ceilings, standard prep, customer supplies colors by X date." When they later want a third accent wall or a ceiling you didn't quote, it's a change order, not a favor.

Paint's the easy part. Bid the prep and the hours like a pro, price your overhead and profit like you plan to stick around, and you stop being the cheap painter who's always busy and never has any money.