The house
One row per surface. Production rate is how much of that surface one painter covers per hour on the first coat — pick a type to start from a common figure, then replace it with a rate timed from your own jobs.
Your costs
Extra-coat factor is second-coat time as a fraction of first-coat hours — not a second full first coat. Ceiling height only slows wall rows; trim and doors stay on their own rates. The common $/sq ft field is the rule of thumb homeowners quote; it is scored against your cost, not recommended as a price.
Your bid
- Labor hours
- Loaded labor cost
- Paint (gallons)
- Paint cost
- Travel & other
- Overhead
- Total job cost
- Job profit
- Price per floor sq ft
- Price per paintable sq ft
- Effective hourly rate
- Walk-away price
Where the labor goes
Transparent arithmetic from your own inputs. The starting production rates are common ballpark figures, not an industry standard, a benchmark, or a guarantee — time your own jobs and replace them.
Common questions
How much should I charge per square foot to paint a room?
Per floor square foot is the number that loses painters money, because trim and doors take a large share of the day and almost none of the floor area. This tool works the other way round: each surface is divided by its own production rate — walls in sq ft per hour, trim in linear feet per hour, doors and windows and cabinet pieces per hour — and the price comes out of those hours. If you enter the floor area anyway, it shows you the resulting $/floor sq ft, and it will score a rule-of-thumb $/sq ft figure against your actual cost so you can see whether the competitive-looking number is below break-even.
Why isn't a second coat double the labor?
Because it usually isn't. Extra coats are priced at a fraction of first-coat hours — 0.65 by default, which you can change — since there is less cutting and wet-on-dry rolls faster. Paint quantity, on the other hand, does scale with coats: gallons are paintable area × coats × (1 + waste) ÷ the coverage per gallon. So a second coat adds about 65% of the labor and 100% of the paint.
How does ceiling height change the price?
Through a ladder-and-staging factor on wall hours only: 1.0 up to 9 ft, 1.12 to 10 ft, 1.3 to 12 ft, and 1.55 above that. The square footage of a tall wall is already in the quantity you entered; the factor is for the time lost setting up to reach it. It does not apply to ceilings, trim, doors, windows, or cabinets, because those are not slowed by wall height in the same way. The steps are a coarse starting adjustment, not a scaffolding quote.
Where do prep and setup hours go?
They are separate lines, added to the surface hours before anything is priced — patching, sanding, caulking, and masking in prep, and daily setup, protection, and cleanup in setup. Keeping them out of the production rates is the point: a rate timed on clean walls stays reusable across jobs, and the repaint of a hundred-year-old house is priced by its prep hours rather than by quietly inventing a slower rate you then forget to undo next time.
Why isn't a 25% margin the same as adding 25% to my cost?
Margin here is a share of the final price — price = job cost ÷ (1 − margin) — because that is how the customer's number reads and how your books read it. Overhead is different: it is a markup on the direct cost of the job, applied before margin and never to itself or to the profit. Marking a $4,000 cost up 25% gives $5,000, which is a 20% margin. Targeting a 25% margin gives $5,333. On a full-season book that difference is several weeks of pay.
Is my pricing data uploaded anywhere?
No. No account, no network requests — the calculator runs entirely in your browser, and the shareable link carries your inputs in the URL rather than through a server. The business details saved for the printed proposal live in this browser's local storage and "Forget my business details" clears them. The optional local usage counter records only which features were used and the day, never your rates, wages, or prices.
Hand the customer a proposal
The price above is for you. This is the page you print or save as a PDF and give to the customer — your details, their details, the scope, the deposit split, and a line for them to sign. Your business details are saved on this device so you only type them once; the customer’s details are never saved.
Everything on the printed page is text you typed or a number this calculator worked out. It contains no warranty, lien, or cancellation wording — those depend on your jurisdiction and your contract, and this tool is not the place to invent them.