How to quote a painting job

Quote the surfaces, not the room

A room is not a unit of work. Two rooms of identical floor area can be an hour apart because one has a four metre ceiling, or six doors, or skirting that needs filling along its whole length.

So the first move is always the same: break the job into surfaces and measure each one. Walls in square metres, skirting and architrave in linear metres, doors and window frames counted as items.

• Walls — perimeter × height, in square metres
• Ceilings — length × width
• Skirting and architrave — linear metres
• Doors, door frames, window frames — counted, each
• Anything unusual — stairwell voids, high ceilings, feature walls — noted separately

Price the labour from a rate you can defend

There are two honest ways to price labour and they arrive at the same place. Either you know how long a surface takes you and multiply by your hourly cost, or you know what you charge per square metre and multiply by the area.

Most painters carry the second in their head — "walls are about twelve dollars a metre" — because it is faster and it already has the first one baked into it. Both are fine. What is not fine is pricing the job as a whole from a feeling, because a feeling cannot be checked afterwards against what the job actually took.

The test of a rate is whether you can look at a finished job and say whether it beat the rate or lost to it. If you cannot, you are not pricing — you are guessing and finding out later.

Add the preparation honestly

Preparation is where quotes go wrong, because it is the part you cannot see from the doorway and the part the customer least expects to pay for.

Price it as its own line against each surface — light, moderate or heavy — rather than folding it into a wall rate. Fold it in and every clean job subsidises every filthy one, and you will win the wrong work.

Materials, then margin — and margin is not markup

Add the paint and the sundries at what you actually pay, then apply your margin. This is the second place painters lose money, and it is worth being precise because the mistake is invisible.

A forty percent margin is not cost plus forty percent. Cost plus forty percent is a markup, and it produces a twenty-nine percent margin. To make forty percent you divide by 0.6.

On a $6,000 job the difference is $1,600. A painter who thinks they are running at forty percent and is actually running at twenty-nine will not find out from any single job — only from a year that felt busy and finished thin.

Write it so it can be said yes to

A quote that lists every surface at its own price invites a negotiation line by line. A quote that is one number invites a comparison against another single number, and the cheaper one wins.

A price per room, with preparation and materials as their own allowance, is usually the right middle. It shows the customer where the money goes without handing them a spreadsheet to argue with.

Then say plainly what is not included. Furniture moving, structural repairs found once you open the surface up, colour changes after the deposit. Every one of those is a conversation that is cheap now and expensive later.

Give it a use-by date

Paint prices move and so does your availability. Thirty days is the usual, and it does two things: it protects you from a customer accepting in March at February prices, and it gives you a reason to follow up that is not "just checking in".