How this calculator works
Every price starts with labor hours. A production rate says how much surface a painter completes per hour — smooth walls roll at 210 square feet per hour on the first coat and 280 on each additional coat; a door takes about 45 minutes for the first coat and 15 for the second. Multiply your measurements by those rates and you get honest hours, not a guess.
Hours become labor cost(hours × wage × payroll burden — the taxes, workers comp, and insurance that ride on every wage hour). Paint is computed the way you buy it: square footage divided by coverage, adjusted per coat, rounded up to whole gallons per color. Add sundries (tape, plastic, patch) and tax, and you have your true cost. Divide by your labor-and-materials percentage — at the default 50%, a job that costs you $1,000 prices at $2,000 — and that's what you charge. The other half is not profit padding; it's overhead, warranty, and the salary you deserve. For the full method, read How to Estimate a Paint Job.
Why surfaces don't just add up
Here's the thing every simple calculator gets wrong: painting is not additive. Baseboards alone require taping and caulking a crisp line where they meet the wall — real time. But baseboards and walls together, same color and sheen? Paint the baseboards first and the wall coat covers the line — the line work disappears. The combined job is faster than the sum of its parts, and software that just adds surfaces overbids it every time.
Check "Same color & sheen" on a room above and watch the amber Smart-combo savingsbox appear — it names each skipped step and the hours it saved. That's not a discount; it's how a real crew works, priced correctly.
Where these rates come from
These aren't numbers off a forum. They were built inside a working painting company — a full month of on-site, task-by-task timing of real painters, then years of adjustment against real jobs and testing with thousands of painters. The same standards power the painting production rates reference and the estimates our own crews price with every week. If your crew runs faster or slower, that's what the wage and markup fields are for — the structure of the math stays right.
What a calculator can't do
This tool prices interior rooms with the most common surfaces. It deliberately doesn't handle cabinets, accent walls, primer, prep-heavy repaints, two-tone windows, sprayed trim packages, exterior work, or — most importantly — your own production ratessaved and reused on every estimate. It also can't turn the number into a signed job: options the customer picks from, a contract with e-signature at the kitchen table, a deposit collected before you leave, and work orders for the crew. That's the software: Paint Pals — $10/mo founding price, 30-day money-back guarantee.
Estimating interior work step by step? Start with How to Estimate Interior Painting. Just need to know how much paint to buy? The paint calculator gives you the gallons. Bidding the outside of a house? Use the exterior painting cost calculator — the 4-sides method with the same real math — or read How to Estimate Exterior Painting first.