Data checked August 13, 2026 · source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics

How much does it cost to paint the interior of a house?

A 1,600 square foot house, walls and ceilings, two coats — priced from gallons and production rates rather than from a dollar-per-square-foot figure with nothing behind it.

Where the money actually goes

The low column takes the cheapest verified material at every line and the fastest labour figure our sources support. The high column takes the most expensive material and the slowest labour. Nobody's real quote is all-low or all-high, so treat the two columns as the edges of the plausible range rather than as quotes.

How we got the labour hours

Built from published production rates, and here is the whole sum so you can check it. Walls: 4,000 sq ft at two coats is 8,000 sq ft, at 150-200 sq ft an hour, is 40-53 hours. Ceilings: 1,600 sq ft at two coats is 3,200 sq ft, at 100-130 sq ft an hour, is 25-32 hours. Prep at 2-4 hours a room across eight rooms is 16-32 hours. That is 81 low, 117 high, 99 in the middle. Trim and doors are not in this figure — they are in the scope table.

Sources: Alpine Painting - estimating an interior job (150-200 sq ft per hour on walls) · ProJobCalc painting estimate guide (ceilings 100-130 sq ft/hr, trim 20-30 lf/hr) · Home Depot - how to prepare a room for paint (2-4 hours per room). Where a source gives a crew size and a duration but not man-hours, we multiply the two ourselves and say so.

What the permit costs

None, anywhere we could find in the United States. Interior repainting is finish work and the model code exempts it — Massachusetts writes it out explicitly as "painting, papering, tiling, carpeting, cabinets, counter tops and similar finish work", and New York City lists painting among ordinary repairs. What can apply is the EPA lead rule below, which is a certification requirement rather than a permit.

Source: Massachusetts 780 CMR 105.2, work exempt from permit.

Where our wall-area number comes from, and why we are labelling it an assumption

Every published method for measuring a room is additive: perimeter times ceiling height, minus about 21 sq ft per door and 15 per window. Nobody publishes a shortcut multiplier from floor area to wall area. We looked, and we want to say plainly that we did not find one.

So here is ours, and the arithmetic behind it. Fixr's worked example takes a 12 × 12 room with 8 ft ceilings, two doors and two windows: perimeter 48 ft × 8 ft = 384 sq ft, minus 72 for the openings, leaves 312 sq ft of wall over 144 sq ft of floor — 2.17×. A whole house is higher than a single room, because interior partition walls get painted on both faces. We use 2.5×. That is our number, not a sourced one, and if you think it should be 2.3 or 2.8 the material lines above scale with it directly.

Percentages are our arithmetic on Fixr's published table for the same 2,200 sq ft home at four ceiling heights.

What else you can add, and what it costs

The figure at the top of this page is walls and ceilings. Here is what the usual additions run, from published per-unit prices rather than from our model:

HomeGuide, HomeGuide trim, CertaPro (cabinets, per piece), Fixr (3-5 hours per interior door) and Angi (1-3 hours). Note the two door-time sources disagree by a factor of three and neither explains its method.

Three published sources give five different answers for this job, and we are not going to hide it

Fixr's floor, $9,200, sits above the entire range HomeGuide publishes for the whole interior of this house, $4,800–$6,400. There is no figure all six rows agree on. HomeGuide alone appears three times, from $4,000 to $12,000 — a 3.0× spread inside a single publisher. None of them shows enough method to reconcile any of it.

Ours overlaps four of the five published ranges, which is worth exactly as much as it sounds. The part that matters is that we can show you which gallons and which hours produced it, and none of the other three can.

One consistency check worth noting: our $5,415–$11,584 works out to $3.38–$7.24 per square foot of floor area, against the $3–$7 HomeGuide publishes on that same basis — the fourth row above. We got ours from gallons and hours and they got theirs some other way, and the two land close. Encouraging rather than conclusive: HomeGuide alone appears three times above with three different answers spanning 3.0×, so landing near one of its rows proves little.

What a gallon costs

All of these cover 400 sq ft a gallon to the manufacturer's own spec, give or take. On this house the choice between the cheapest and the most expensive is a $940 swing on 28 gallons — real money, but under a fifth of the labour bill.

Source: Benjamin Moore Regal Select page; Behr prices linked individually below, checked 2026-08-13.

Specific products, with the price we saw

Not a recommendation and not an affiliate link. These are the listings we checked on 2026-08-13, so you can see whether the equipment line on your quote is close to retail.

Retail prices move. If one of these is wrong now, tell us and we will fix it with the date.

Parts list

What this job costs in 49 US metro areas

Materials cost roughly the same everywhere. Labour does not. The wage column is US government data; the labour column is that wage run through our published multiplier; the total applies it to the job above. On the same work San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont comes out 34% higher than San Antonio-New Braunfels at the top of the range and 35% higher at the bottom — the two differ because materials, permits and disposal do not move with the wage.

Wages: BLS OEWS May 2025, SOC 47-2141 — public domain. Metros where BLS suppressed the figure are left out rather than estimated. Totals are FieldPricing calculations from the parts and hours on this page — they are not quotes and no contractor has agreed to them.

What did you actually pay?

Everything above this line is arithmetic on public data. It is honest, and it is not the same thing as a real invoice. If you have had this work done, the number on your invoice is worth more to the next reader than anything we can calculate.

What did you pay in total? Just the number is fine. $1,850, or "about 2 grand". Where? City and state. We publish this; it is the whole point.

When? Month and year is enough. What did it cover? Materials included? Permit? Removal of the old work? Anything unusual? This is the part that makes your number useful to somebody else. Email — optional Only used if we need to ask you one question before publishing. Never shown, never sold, never mailed to.

Website

Send it in

No account, no login, no newsletter. A person reads every submission before it appears, so it will not show up instantly. If we cannot make sense of one, we leave it out rather than guess — and if you would rather just email it, that works too.

What actually moves the price

Labour, which is most of it

70-85 percent of the bill according to HomeGuide and 75-85 percent according to Bob Vila. On this job we calculate $4,251-$8,864 of labour against $1,164-$2,720 of paint. Trading down a grade of paint saves a few hundred dollars on this job. Trading down a painter can cost you the whole thing twice.

How many coats, which is not always two

One coat is enough only when you are refreshing the same colour. Two is the normal case. Three is plaster, repaired walls, trim in a new colour, and going light to dark. Dark to light wants tinted primer and then three coats. Each additional coat on this house is 32-43 more hours and 14 more gallons.

Prep, which is where a good job and a cheap job separate

A national painting franchise calls prep 70 percent of a quality paint job. Whether that means 70 percent of the time or the value is not stated, so we did not use the figure in the arithmetic. What we did use: 2-4 hours a room, which across eight rooms is 16-32 hours — a fifth to a quarter of the total.

Ceiling height

Roughly 8 percent for every extra foot: 8 ft to 10 ft adds about 17 percent, to 12 ft about 35 percent. The wall area grows and the work slows down at the same time, and past 10 ft you are into staging rather than ladders.

Whether the house was built before 1978

If it was, and you are paying someone, the EPA lead rule applies. Firm certification is $300 for five years and the work practices add time. Interior jobs disturbing under 6 sq ft per room are exempt; window replacement never is.

Trim and doors, which are priced by the piece and not by the square foot

Trim runs 20-30 linear feet an hour — slow work. An earlier version of our research had 50-80 lf/hr, which turned out to be unsupported and would have understated trim labour by two to three times. We corrected it rather than shipping it.

Code requirements that cost money

These are the things an inspector will look for, and each one is a line on the invoice that a homeowner often reads as padding. Mostly it is not.

• EPA Renovation, Repair and Painting rule — pre-1978 housing — Anyone paid to disturb paint in housing built before 1978 must be certified. Firm certification is $300 and lasts five years. The interior minor-repair exemption is under 6 sq ft of disturbed paint per room; exterior is 20 sq ft; window replacement is never exempt regardless of area. Source.
• No permit — finish work exemption — Massachusetts writes the model code language out in full: painting, papering, tiling, carpeting, cabinets, counter tops and similar finish work are exempt from permit. That is the standard model-code wording, which is why the exemption is near universal. Source.
• No permit — New York City — Painting is listed among minor alterations and ordinary repairs under Administrative Code 28-105.4.2, so no permit is required. Source.

The lead rule is federal and applies in every state; a few states run their own authorised programmes with additional requirements. Your jurisdiction adopts its own version of the model code — check locally before relying on any of this.

What we could not verify

We publish this list because a cost page that never admits a gap is not telling you the truth.

• Any published floor-area to wall-area multiplier. We checked Angi, Bob Vila, HomeGuide, Fixr and the manufacturer calculators; all of them use the additive method and none publishes a shortcut. The 2.5x above is ours and is labelled as ours.
• Prep as a percentage of labour. CertaPro's "70 percent" does not say 70 percent of what, so we used per-room prep times instead.
• A doors-per-hour production rate. Only total hours per door exist, and the two sources we found disagree by 3x (Fixr 3-5 hours, Angi 1-3).
• Sherwin-Williams SuperPaint shelf price. Sherwin-Williams gates pricing behind a store sign-in and SuperPaint is store-exclusive, so no third-party listing exists. A secondary source quotes $75.49 without stating the container size; we are not putting that in the table.
• Valspar and other Lowe's paint prices. Lowe's renders price client-side.
• Tape, plastic sheeting, drop cloths, roller covers and brushes. Real costs, not priced here, and therefore missing from the materials total.

How we got these numbers

• Wages — BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, SOC 47-2141 (Painters, Construction and Maintenance), pulled through the BLS public API. US federal data, public domain.
• Billed rate — wage × 1.3 labour burden × 1.70–2.454 overhead and profit, so 2.21×–3.19× the wage. Our assumption, published in full on the methodology page so you can disagree with it.
• Equipment and parts — retailer and supply-house listings, each linked above, checked 2026-08-13.
• Labour hours — Alpine Painting - estimating an interior job (150-200 sq ft per hour on walls) · ProJobCalc painting estimate guide (ceilings 100-130 sq ft/hr, trim 20-30 lf/hr) · Home Depot - how to prepare a room for paint (2-4 hours per room).
• Permit fees — Massachusetts 780 CMR 105.2, work exempt from permit.

We do not use RSMeans or Craftsman cost data. Their licences forbid building a database from them, so every number here traces to a public source or a public listing you can open yourself.

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