Price a paint job in about a minute - paint, labour, overhead, break-even and the number to quote. Free, no signup.
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In short: Price a painting job from cost, not a going rate. On the defaults below, 16 hours at a $32.50 loaded rate is $520.00, plus $240.00 of paint and materials, plus $132.00 overhead, gives a $892.00 break-even. At a 35% margin the price to quote is $1,372.31. Change any number to see yours.
Send the result to yourself along with the free Job Pricing Starter — the same maths as a spreadsheet you can keep, in Excel or Google Sheets. No card, no trial.
No black box. Five steps, in order — check every one of them against your own job.
Per area, per coat: paint worked out from the coverage rate, labour, overhead, break-even and price - saved per job, not retyped. This page does one job at a time and forgets it. The spreadsheet keeps every job, works offline in Excel and Google Sheets, and is a one-time purchase.
Get the painting estimate spreadsheet →It depends on the area, the number of coats, prep, your loaded labour rate and your overhead. Take your painting hours at your loaded rate, add paint and materials, add overhead - that is your break-even. Divide it by one minus your target margin to get the price to quote.
The rate you charge is not the wage you pay. A painter you pay $25 an hour costs you about $32.50 an hour loaded, once payroll tax, workers comp, insurance and paid time off are in. Charging $32.50 would mean zero overhead recovery and zero profit.
Work paint out from the coverage rate: area, divided by the spread rate on the tin, times the number of coats. Pricing paint per square foot bakes in whatever coverage assumption you made the last time and hides it from you on every job after.
Then it is worth twenty minutes. I am not a contractor — I do the arithmetic. On the call you tell me how you price now, and at the end I tell you honestly whether a model built on your numbers would help you or whether this calculator is already enough. Both answers happen.
Book a 20-minute call →No cost and no obligation. What I will not promise you is more won jobs — a correct price sometimes loses work, and that is the method working, not a fault in it.
