House Painting Cost Calculator

Painting a house costs about $1.50–$6.00 per square foot of floor area: a full 1,500 sq ft interior repaint runs $3,750–$9,000, and a single-story exterior about $2,250–$6,750. Heavy prep adds roughly 30%. Use the calculator below for your project type, size, prep level, and region.

How the estimate works

Painters usually price by the square foot, and for a homeowner the easiest input is your floor area — the same number you'd find on a listing. The calculator uses that floor square footage as a stand-in for paintable surface, then multiplies by a national installed rate (labor plus paint) that depends on what you're painting: walls only, a full interior with ceilings and trim, or an exterior.

From that base it applies a few real-world multipliers. Heavy prep — scraping, patching, priming — adds about 30%. A third coat for a big color change adds 25%. On exterior jobs, a second or third story raises labor 10–20% for ladders and staging. Finally your region scales the whole thing up or down. The result is an honest low-to-high range, because real painting bids vary that much.

The formula

Every estimate on this page is the same simple chain:

Cost = floor area × base $/sq ft × prep × coats × stories (exterior only) × region

The base rate is per square foot of floor area, not wall area — that keeps the input to a number you already know. Walls-only interior work runs $1.50–$3.50/sq ft; a full interior with ceilings and trim is $2.50–$6.00; an exterior repaint is $1.50–$4.50. Those bands already fold in labor and mid-grade paint. The multipliers then tune the job: light prep is ×1.0 and heavy prep ×1.3, two coats ×1.0 and three ×1.25, and region runs ×0.85 in low-cost areas up to ×1.25 in expensive metros.

Worked example

Say you're repainting the inside of a 2,000 sq ft home — walls, ceilings, and trim — and the surfaces need real work (old patches, some peeling), so you choose heavy prep, two coats, and an average market:

• Base: 2,000 sq ft × $2.50–$6.00 = $5,000–$12,000
• Multiplier: heavy prep ×1.3 × 2 coats ×1.0 × interior (stories n/a) ×1.0 × average region ×1.0 = ×1.3
• Estimate: $5,000 × 1.3 to $12,000 × 1.3 = $6,500–$15,600, midpoint ≈ $11,050

Drop to light prep and the same job is $5,000–$12,000. Switch the region to a high-cost metro (×1.25) and the heavy-prep version jumps to about $8,150–$19,500. That single prep choice — light versus heavy — moves the number more than almost anything else, which is exactly why painters insist on walking the space.

Cost by project type

Here's how the three project types compare, using a 1,500 sq ft home with light prep, two coats, one story, and an average market:

A "full interior" looks pricier per square foot than "walls only" because it's a genuinely bigger job — ceilings and trim are slow, detailed work. Exterior numbers above are for a single story; add 10% for a second story and 20% for three or more.

What drives the price

• Scope is the biggest lever — a full interior with ceilings and trim covers far more surface than walls alone.
• Prep is the wildcard. Peeling, bare, or damaged surfaces turn a fast job into a slow one.
• Coats and color matter — dark-to-light changes often need an extra coat to fully cover.
• Region swings labor by 40% or more between rural areas and coastal metros.

Common mistakes

• Underestimating prep. The cost difference between light and heavy prep dwarfs the cost of the paint itself.
• Pricing walls but forgetting ceilings and trim. A "full interior" is a much bigger job — choose the right project type.
• Assuming one coat covers a color change. Going lighter almost always needs two finish coats over primer.
• Taking one bid. Painting bids for the same job routinely vary 30–40%. Always get three.

When this calculator is the wrong tool

Use a pro walkthrough for: cabinet refinishing, lead-paint abatement on pre-1978 homes, stucco or specialty-coating work, lots of intricate woodwork, or commercial scope. Floor area is a proxy, so very high ceilings, huge windows, or open-plan layouts will skew the estimate — this tool is for a standard residential repaint.

Can you DIY it?

Because labor is 70–85% of a paint job, doing it yourself is where the real savings are — a room you'd pay $400–$900 to have painted might cost $80–$150 in materials. DIY makes sense for a single interior room, an accent wall, or touch-ups, especially if surfaces are sound and you're not changing colors dramatically. The work that trips up homeowners is cutting in clean lines, prepping peeling or damaged surfaces, and anything off a ladder. Hand a pro the jobs where mistakes are expensive or dangerous: two- and three-story exteriors, lead-paint-era homes (pre-1978), heavy water or smoke damage, and whole-house repaints on a tight timeline. A realistic middle path is doing your own prep and trim and hiring out the big roll-out — but agree on that split before the crew quotes.

Sources & how we keep this current

The per-square-foot bands and multipliers come from public 2024–2026 painting cost guides — Angi, HomeAdvisor, Fixr, and Forbes Home — cross-checked against manufacturer coverage data (a gallon of quality interior paint covers roughly 350–400 sq ft per coat, per Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore spec sheets). These are national averages; your local labor market and the actual condition of your surfaces move the number more than any single input here. We re-check the ranges against published guides a few times a year and update the data file when the consensus shifts. It's a budgeting tool, not a substitute for three written bids from licensed local painters.