Cost to Paint a House Painting Companies

House Painting Costs at a Glance

Painting is priced by scope, and the ranges below assume a professional crew, two coats, and standard prep:

• Single bedroom or living room: roughly $300 to $1,000
• Kitchen or bathroom: roughly $250 to $700 - smaller, but slower per foot
• Whole interior, 2,000 sq ft home: roughly $4,000 to $9,000
• Full exterior, single story: roughly $3,500 to $7,000
• Full exterior, two story: roughly $5,500 to $9,500 and up

Per square foot, interiors quote around $2 to $6 of wall area and exteriors $1.50 to $4.50 of siding, with condition and access moving the number inside those bands.

Interior Pricing: Per Room and Per Square Foot

Bedrooms, living rooms, and open plans

Simple rectangular rooms with standard 8-foot ceilings sit at the bottom of the range. Open floor plans price by wall area rather than room count - fewer corners, but taller sight lines that demand cleaner work.

Kitchens and bathrooms: why smaller costs more per foot

Cabinets, tile, fixtures, and windows turn a small room into an obstacle course of cutting in. A bathroom may hold two gallons of paint and a full day of masking, which is why its per-foot price runs high while its total stays modest.

Ceilings, trim, and doors: the line items that surprise

Adding ceilings typically raises a room quote 20 to 30 percent. Trim and doors are slower still - enamel work rewards brush skill - and a six-panel door repaint commonly runs $75 to $150 on its own.

Exterior Pricing: What Drives the Number

Stories, siding material, and access set the base. A walk-around single story on smooth fiber cement is the easy case; a two-story with peeling wood siding, landscaping against the walls, and steep grades is not. Condition is the multiplier: heavy scraping, sanding, and priming can add 30 to 50 percent, because failing surfaces demand the prep hours that make the next paint job last.

The 80/20 Secret: Labor and Prep Dominate Your Bill

On a typical professional job, 75 to 85 percent of the invoice is labor, and a large share of those hours happen before any color appears. An hour of washing, scraping, and priming buys years of adhesion; skipping it is how a paint job fails at year two instead of year ten. When a bid comes in far below the others, prep hours are almost always what got deleted - see what those hours actually purchase on the exterior painting process page.

Paint Quality Tiers: Where Better Paint Pays Back

Contractor-grade lines run roughly $25 to $40 per gallon, premium lines $60 to $90. On a whole-house job the difference is often only a few hundred dollars, but premium resins cover better, touch up cleaner, and hold color longer. Mid-tier is the smart buy for low-wear bedrooms; kitchens, baths, trim, and exteriors reward the upgrade.

Coats, Colors, and Coverage Math

Two coats are non-negotiable over new drywall, over repairs, and on any meaningful color change. Dark and saturated colors carry a hidden coat tax: deep reds and navys can need a tinted primer plus two finish coats, adding a third or more to a room's labor.

What Painters Charge Near You

Painter day rates run roughly $350 to $600 per painter depending on the local labor market, which is why identical houses price differently across state lines. The labor benchmark above shows the national median - pick your state in the sidebar for local figures and crews.

Sample Budgets: Three Houses, Three Numbers

A single-bedroom refresh - walls only, light patching, mid-tier paint - lands near $450. A whole-interior repaint of a 2,000-square-foot home with ceilings and trim included, moderate repairs, and premium paint in wet rooms prices around $7,500. A two-story exterior with sound siding, full wash and spot-prime, and a color change books around $7,000 to $8,500.

Ways to Trim the Bill Without Buying a Failure

Book the off-season: interior calendars open in winter and discounts of 10 to 15 percent are common. Do the safe prep yourself - moving furniture, removing switch plates, light patching - and say so during the walkthrough. Bundle rooms into one mobilization instead of phasing them over a year. What never pays is deleting prep or dropping to bargain paint on high-wear surfaces; both come back as a repaint you fund twice. When bids arrive, compare them line by line, and see how top-rated painting companies price real projects.