There's no single price, but there are honest ballparks. Interior repaints often run a few dollars a square foot, a single room a few hundred, a whole interior into the thousands. Where an hourly rate shows up it's usually a loaded rate, not take-home. The real number always comes from prep, height, coats and your local market.
- Interior: ~$2 to $6 / sq ft of wall
- Hourly: ~$40 to $70, loaded
- A room: ~$300 to $800
- Most pros price the job, not the hour
"How much do painters charge" has no clean answer, because the same room can be a $300 job or a $900 job depending on the prep, the height and the number of coats. What there is, instead, is a set of honest ranges, plus the handful of things that decide where in those ranges a job lands. Here's both, whether you're a homeowner sizing up a quote or a painter trying to set your own rates.
Every number on this page is an illustrative ballpark, not a quote, and not an industry standard. Prices vary widely by region, surface and crew. If you're pricing a job, price it from your own costs.
The short answer
If you want a single set of numbers to anchor on, these are the rough ranges most interior repaints fall into. Treat them as a starting point, not a price list.
| How it's measured | Typical range (illustrative) |
|---|---|
| Per square foot of wall (interior) | $2 to $6 |
| Per hour (loaded rate, where used) | $40 to $70 |
| Per room | $300 to $800 |
| Whole interior, average home | $3,000 to $8,000+ |
Per square foot
The most common way to talk about painting cost is per square foot, and the thing people miss is that it's usually per square foot of wall area, not floor area. A 12 by 14 room has about 168 square feet of floor but closer to 468 square feet of wall to paint, so a "per square foot" number only makes sense once you know which surface it's measuring.
| Interior surface | Typical range (illustrative) |
|---|---|
| Walls, repaint with light prep | $2 to $4 / sq ft |
| Walls, heavy prep or new drywall | $3 to $6 / sq ft |
| Ceilings | $1 to $3 / sq ft |
| Trim, doors & windows | priced per piece or linear foot |
Heavy prep, dark-to-light color changes and extra coats push a job toward the top of the range. A clean, same-color repaint sits near the bottom. Trim and doors usually come off the per-square-foot model entirely and get priced per unit, because a six-panel door takes far longer than its area suggests.
Per hour
When painters quote an hourly figure, it's commonly somewhere around $40 to $70, and the first thing to understand is that this is a loaded rate, not what the painter takes home. The hour you're billed covers a lot more than wages.
Illustrative split of an example rate. Your real breakdown depends on your wages, insurance and overhead.
That's also why most established painters don't sell by the hour. Hourly billing quietly punishes the best crews: the faster and more skilled you are, the less you earn for the same result. A flat price for the job gives the customer a number they can trust and pays the painter for the outcome, not the clock.
Hourly pricing pays you to be slow. Flat pricing pays you to be good.
Per room and per house
Homeowners usually think in rooms, so it helps to translate. These are rough whole-room and whole-house ranges, walls and ceiling, average prep, before any heavy repairs.
| Job | Typical range (illustrative) |
|---|---|
| Bathroom | $200 to $500 |
| Bedroom | $300 to $700 |
| Kitchen (walls & trim) | $400 to $900 |
| Living room | $500 to $1,000 |
| Whole interior, average home | $3,000 to $8,000+ |
| Exterior, average home | $4,000 to $12,000+ |
What actually moves the price
Two identical-looking rooms can be hundreds of dollars apart. Here's what's driving it:
- Prep and condition. Cracks, peeling, old wallpaper and heavy patching can rival the painting itself in hours.
- Height and access. Stairwells, vaulted ceilings and second-story exteriors mean ladders, scaffolding and slower, safer work.
- Coats and color changes. Going dark to light, or covering bold color, adds a coat or a primer to every surface.
- Trim and detail. Crown molding, built-ins and multi-panel doors are slow, careful work priced per piece.
- Finish and product. A premium paint and a flawless finish cost more than a builder-grade refresh.
- Market and season. Rates run higher in expensive metros and during peak exterior season.
Interior vs exterior
Exterior work often looks cheaper per square foot but carries more cost everywhere else. There's more prep, scraping, sanding, priming bare wood, more equipment and ladder time, and a hard weather window that compresses the schedule. Interior work is steadier and cleaner but heavy on cut-in, trim and protecting the customer's space. Neither is simply "more expensive", they're priced from different risks.
For painters: how to set your own rate
If you're a contractor, the ranges above are the market's voice, not your price. Your price comes from your costs. Add up your loaded labor rate, your materials, your prep hours and your overhead, then apply the profit margin you want to run. That bottom-up number is what keeps you in business, and the market range is just the sanity check you hold it against.
Then quote the job, not the hour. A flat, confident price on a clean proposal wins more work than an hourly rate the customer has to guess at, and it rewards you for getting faster instead of penalizing it.
Copying a competitor's price is how shops go broke politely. Their costs aren't yours. Price from your own numbers and let the market range tell you only whether you're roughly in the right neighborhood.
Price from your numbers, fast.
BrushBid saves your rates and prices the job by the square foot, so every bid is consistent and profitable. Start free, no card.