How Much to Charge to Paint Cabinets: Price the Hours, Then the Door

How much should you charge to paint kitchen cabinets? The formula

Charge your break-even divided by one minus your target margin. Break-even on a cabinet job is the hours to strip, prep, coat and rehang every piece at your loaded labour rate, plus materials, plus that job's share of your yearly overhead.

Most search results for this question are forum threads and national averages, and many quote a flat number per door. A flat number carries someone else's spray setup, wage, overhead and kitchen size. I'm not a contractor - I build the pricing math - so this page gives you the five lines that turn your own count and hours into a price, and shows every figure's working.

1. Count the doors, drawer fronts and the face frames or box faces you will coat.
2. Hours = pieces × your hours per piece + frames + setup, masking and cleanup.
3. Labour = hours × people × loaded rate (wage × (1 + burden %)).
4. Break-even = labour + materials + hours × people × overhead per sellable hour.
5. Price = break-even ÷ (1 − margin). Price per door comes last: price ÷ pieces.

Walls and ceilings use the same method with square feet instead of pieces; the guide to bidding a painting job covers rooms. This page covers cabinets only.

How many hours does it take to paint one cabinet door?

There is no fixed answer; it depends on your finish method, your drying setup and the condition of the cabinets. The table below is an assumed breakdown for one door, both sides, so you can see what goes into the number. Time a few of your own doors and replace it.

Drawer fronts have one show face and no hinges, so the examples assume 0.75 hours sprayed and 1.0 hour brushed. Face frames and box faces stay in the kitchen and are coated in place; the examples treat them as a block of hours (8 sprayed, 10 brushed) rather than per piece. Setup is the line people forget: masking the kitchen, building a drying rack, a spray area, daily cleanup. The spray example assumes 6 hours of it; the brush example 3.

Cabinet painting pricing calculator: try it on your kitchen

Enter your total hours, crew, wage, materials and overhead, and the calculator below returns break-even and the price to quote. It starts on the spray example, so it should show $3,140.19.

The calculator takes hours, not pieces. Work out the hours with the table above, then type the total. The defaults assume one painter at a $25 wage with 30% burden, which is a loaded $32.50 an hour (the labour burden guide builds that percentage line by line). Overhead is $14,520 a year spread over 1 person × 220 billed days × 8 hours = 1,760 sellable hours, which is $8.25 an hour.

The working: 41.5 hours × $32.50 = $1,348.75 of labour. Overhead is 41.5 × $8.25 = $342.38. Add $350 of materials and break-even is $2,041.13. Divide by 0.65 and the price to quote is $3,140.19, leaving $1,099.07 of profit.

How much to charge to paint cabinet doors: price per door as an output

Price per door is the job price divided by the pieces you counted. On the spray example it is $3,140.19 ÷ 30 = $104.67 per piece, and that figure already carries the frames, setup, materials and overhead.

That is why a per-door number only travels to a kitchen that looks like this one. Use the hourly view instead when you want a per-door line. One painter's hour costs $32.50 loaded plus $8.25 overhead = $40.75, and at a 35% margin that hour sells for $40.75 ÷ 0.65 = $62.69. The table prices the labour and overhead on one door at different hours per door, before materials, frames and setup.

Read across: if your doors take 1.5 hours, the labour alone on each one sells at $94.04 before a drop of paint. Then add materials per door and spread the frames and setup across the pieces, which is how the spray example reaches $104.67 a piece. Your number will differ because your hours will.

Spray vs brush: how much to charge to spray paint kitchen cabinets?

On these assumptions spraying prices lower than brushing because the finish coats go faster, even though it needs more setup and masking. Sprayed, the kitchen is $3,140.19; brushed, it is $3,784.23.

Brushed, the same 30 pieces work out at $126.14 each ($3,784.23 ÷ 30). The gap comes from hours: 53 against 41.5. The brush example assumes $50 less material for masking film, tips and filters, which narrows the gap only slightly because labour is most of the cost.

Do not read this as a rule that spraying is always cheaper to quote. If you spray on site and mask the whole kitchen every time, your setup hours rise; if you have a shop and a rack system, they fall. Time one job each way and put your own hours in. The price follows the hours.

One rule applies whatever the method: if the home was built before 1978, paid work that disturbs painted surfaces falls under the EPA Lead Renovation, Repair and Painting Program, which requires certified firms and lead-safe work practices. Cabinet sanding can count, so price the extra containment and cleanup hours into the job.

How to add cabinet painting to a painting estimate spreadsheet

The painting estimate spreadsheet does not have a per-door or cabinet mode, so enter cabinets as rows. Its Job Pricer takes up to 12 rooms or surfaces, and each row takes square feet, labour hours and a primer switch.

• Put each batch on its own row: "20 doors", "10 drawer fronts", "face frames", with your hours for each.
• Set square feet to the area you will coat so gallons work out from your coverage rate, and set paint cost per gallon to your cabinet enamel price.
• Use the primer switch on rows that need primer.
• Put setup and masking hours on their own row, or in drive time if that is how you track it.

The sheet then adds overhead per crew-hour, shows break-even, and gives the price to quote at your target margin, plus the same figure as a markup. Per door is still something you derive: divide its price by your piece count. Its market check compares price per floor square foot against a band built for interior walls, so it does not apply to cabinets; ignore that line on a cabinet bid. The same goes for the per-square-foot figures in the painting price per square foot guide, which are for walls.

The common mistake: a per-door number with nothing behind it

The costly error is pricing doors and drawer fronts and forgetting everything that is not a door. On the spray kitchen, pricing only the 27.5 hours of doors and drawers drops the quote to $2,262.50, which is $877.69 below the full price.

The missing 14 hours are the face frames and the setup. They do not show up in a door count, but you still spend them in the kitchen. The same trap catches anyone who borrows a per-door figure from a forum post: it may have been set by someone whose frames were in a separate line, or who charged for prep elsewhere.

The second mistake is markup. Adding 35% to the full break-even gives $2,755.52, which keeps only 25.93% margin. Dividing by 0.65 gives $3,140.19. That is $384.67 less on one kitchen, or $20,003.03 a year at one kitchen a week. The markup vs margin guide has the full conversion chart.

Excel formulas for a cabinet painting estimate calculator

A spreadsheet version needs one row per piece type and a few rates. The formulas below use this layout: B2 = doors, B3 = hours per door, B4 = drawer fronts, B5 = hours per drawer front, B6 = frame hours, B7 = setup hours, B8 = wage, B9 = burden %, B10 = materials, B11 = overhead per hour, B12 = target margin %.

Leave B3 and B5 as inputs, not constants, so you can update them after you time a job. If you would rather start from a tested file, the painting estimate spreadsheet ($14.99 one-time, Excel and Google Sheets) handles labour, materials, overhead, break-even and margin, with your cabinet batches as rows. For one quick number, the free painting estimate calculator runs in your browser with no signup.

Calculator, app or spreadsheet for pricing cabinet jobs?

Use whichever tool makes you enter your hours, materials and overhead before it shows a price.

What to put on your cabinet painting price sheet

A cabinet price sheet is a short list of your own rates that turns a piece count into a price in a few minutes.

• Hours per door and hours per drawer front, by method (spray, brush), from your own timings.
• Frame hours per linear run or per kitchen size, kept separate from doors.
• Setup and masking hours per job, and extra hours for pre-1978 lead-safe work.
• Materials per job: primer, enamel, abrasives, degreaser, masking, tips and filters, from your receipts.
• Loaded labour rate and overhead per sellable hour.
• Target margin, applied by division, not added as markup.
• Add-ons: new hinges, filling hardware holes, an island, crown or end panels, each as hours plus materials.

Show the customer a price per job. Keep price per door as your internal check that a quote is not out of line with your last one.

Step-by-step: How Much to Charge to Paint Cabinets: Price the Hours, Then the Door

1. Count the pieces. Count doors, drawer fronts and the face frames or box faces you will coat. Note islands, end panels and crown separately.
2. Set hours per piece. Time one door and one drawer front through every stage: remove, degrease, sand, prime, two coats, rehang. Use your spray or brush figure.
3. Add frames and setup. Add hours for frames coated in place, plus masking, drying racks and daily cleanup. These are real hours even though they are not doors.
4. Cost labour and overhead. Multiply total hours by your loaded rate (wage × (1 + burden %)) and by your overhead per sellable hour.
5. Add materials for break-even. Add primer, enamel, abrasives, degreaser and masking bought for this job. Labour plus overhead plus materials is break-even.
6. Divide by one minus margin. Price = break-even ÷ (1 − margin). Then divide by the piece count if you want a per-door figure to check against past jobs.

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