Painting estimating software
- Price at your margin
- $2,349.01
- Labor hours including prep
- 28
- Labour cost
- $1,064
Every figure here comes from the numbers you enter and the method stated beside it: your own wall area, your own coats, your own crew's production rate, your own fully loaded labour cost. This site publishes no book rate for painting and no price list. What a job should sell for in your town is your figure, not ours.
Painting estimating software has one job: turn a wall into a number you can defend when the customer asks how you got there. That means measuring area, choosing coats, applying the rate your own crew actually rolls at, adding the prep the job really needs, and then putting a margin on the total rather than on a guess. What follows is that arithmetic in the order an estimator does it, and where each step usually goes wrong.
Open the Painting cost calculator Free to use. No account, no card, no sign-up.
Measure the area before choosing a price
Wall area is perimeter times height, ceilings are length times width, and openings come off only when they are big enough to matter. Everything downstream is wrong if this number is a guess, and no software can repair an area that was estimated from a doorway.
Use your own production rate, not a published one
Rolling flat wall runs faster than cutting in, and a book rate averages both across crews you have never met. Time one real room in square feet an hour a coat and use that figure; it will change the estimate more than any other input on the page.
Price the prep separately, because it is where jobs are lost
Masking, filling, sanding and moving furniture do not scale with wall area and are not covered by a production rate. Estimated as its own line in hours, prep stops being the thing that quietly eats the margin on old houses.
Put the margin on the cost, then look at the price
Labor plus materials gives what the job costs you. Dividing by one minus your margin gives the price. Adding a markup to a number that already had a markup in it is the commonest way a painting business believes it is making more than it is.
Painting estimating software: common questions
What production rate should I use?
Your own, measured on a job you remember. If you have never timed one, start from the worksheet default, then correct it the first week you can time a room, because that single number moves the estimate more than the paint price does.
Does it include materials?
The painting cost calculator does: area and coats give gallons at the coverage on the tin you actually use, and gallons times your price gives the paint cost. The room worksheet is labor only, because on interior repaints labor is most of the number.
Is this a price list for painting?
No. This site publishes no book rate and no price per square foot. Every figure on these pages comes from the numbers you enter, and what a job should sell for in your town is your figure.
Will it do what you need for Painting estimating software?
Tell us how you run your painting business today and what keeps going missing between the estimate and the invoice.