Professional painting cost depends on scope and surface condition, with prep requirements playing an outsized role. A single interior room typically runs $300 to $900+, a whole-home interior lands in the several-thousand-dollar range, and a full exterior can reach low five figures on larger or more complex homes. The sections below break those numbers into pieces you can budget against.
Interior Room Costs
A standard 10x12 bedroom with 8-foot ceilings costs roughly $650 to $950 for a professional two-coat repaint. Larger spaces climb accordingly: a 15x20 living room runs $940 to $1,700, and a 14x16 primary bedroom with a walk-in closet can hit $750 to $1,260 before the closet add-on of $175 to $315.
Kitchens and bathrooms cost more per square foot than bedrooms despite often having less paintable wall area. The reason is labor complexity. A 10x12 kitchen runs $850 to $1,350 because painters spend extra time cutting in around cabinets and appliances. Bathrooms in the 5x8 to 8x10 range run $380 to $670, with moisture-rated paint adding a small material premium.
Labor accounts for 70 to 85 percent of a typical interior painting estimate. The BLS reports a median painter wage of $23.40 per hour, but contractor billing rates run $35 to $75 per hour once overhead and insurance are factored in. Materials, by contrast, usually add just $0.30 to $0.75 per square foot of wall area at standard coverage rates of 350 to 400 square feet per gallon.
Ceiling height moves the number noticeably. A 10-foot ceiling adds roughly 25 percent more wall area than an 8-foot ceiling in the same room footprint, which translates directly into more paint and more labor time on ladders. Rooms with cathedral or vaulted ceilings push even higher because of the access equipment and fall-protection setup involved.
Our room-by-room cost breakdown covers geometry-driven pricing in detail. For a quick dollar estimate on your own rooms, try the interior painting cost calculator .
Trim, Doors, and the Scope Creep Factor
Trim painting is almost always priced separately from wall painting, and the per-square-foot rate is two to three times higher than walls. The reason is simple labor math: baseboards, door casings, crown molding, and window trim all demand slow brush work and multiple coats.
Expect to pay $1 to $4 per linear foot for baseboard and casing, and $50 to $175 per side for a typical interior door. Six-panel doors land at $100 to $175 per side. French doors with glass panes push to $150 to $300 per side because of the masking time involved. For a typical 2,000-square-foot home, standalone trim and door work runs $2,000 to $4,000.
Bundling trim into a wall painting project usually lowers the per-unit trim cost because the crew is already on site and set up. A combined walls-plus-trim-plus-ceilings project for that same 2,000-square-foot home runs roughly $9,000 to $13,500 at $4.50 to $6.75 per square foot.
Full pricing tables and door-type breakdowns are in the trim and door painting cost guide .
Exterior Painting and the Repaint Cycle
Exterior projects carry higher price tags partly because of scale and partly because of access. Professional exterior painting for an average-sized home runs $3,000 to $10,000, with multi-story facades and heavy prep pushing costs above that range. Power washing, wood repair, caulking, primer work on bare substrate, and scaffolding all add labor hours that a simple interior repaint does not.
The repaint cycle matters for long-term budgeting. Wood siding needs fresh paint every 3 to 7 years. Stucco and aluminum last 5 to 10 years between coats. Fiber cement holds up best at 7 to 15 years, especially with a factory-applied finish carrying a 15-year warranty. A homeowner who paints wood siding three times over 20 years at $3,000 to $10,000 each cycle could spend $9,000 to $30,000 total on the same surface that fiber cement might need painted once.
Paint quality does shift the math. Premium exterior coatings ($70 to $90 per gallon) often deliver better UV resistance and color retention than economy products ($30 to $50 per gallon), but the material cost difference across an entire exterior is small relative to the labor bill. A premium product on well-prepped substrate simply lasts longer per cycle, which lowers the annualized cost.
Our exterior paint longevity guide maps repaint intervals by siding material and climate zone.
Prep: The Hidden Cost Everyone Underestimates
Surface preparation is the single largest source of bid variation. Two quotes for the same house can differ substantially — sometimes 30 to 50 percent — based solely on how much prep each contractor includes.
Corrective prep on a room with peeling paint or water-damaged drywall can double the labor hours, and exterior prep amplifies the gap further. Oil-based and water-based paints have different adhesion profiles, and choosing the wrong system for a surface condition leads to premature failure. Bubbling and peeling paint is almost always a prep or moisture problem, not a product defect.