How painters actually price a whole-house repaint
How painters calculate a repaint quote — prep, coats and trim — so you can tell a fair price from a padded one.
A painter's quote for a typical Australian home lands around $6,500 ($5,050 – $8,450), and the number is built the same way every time: area to be painted, multiplied by prep and coats, plus trim and a materials allowance, plus GST. If a quote doesn't break those out separately, you can't tell whether it's fair — you're just trusting a total.
The formula behind the number
Painters price a job on labour hours × their hourly or day rate, plus paint and sundries, then check the total against what similar jobs are fetching locally. For a standard house, that comes down to a few variables:
- Area — wall area (and ceiling area, if included) in square metres, not the floor area of the room.
- Coats — most jobs need two coats on walls; a colour change from dark to light, or new plasterboard, can need three.
- Prep — filling nail holes and cracks, sanding, masking skirting and light fittings, and washing down surfaces before a single coat goes on. On an older home with hairline cracking or old oil-based paint, prep can be close to half the job.
- Trim and doors — skirting boards, architraves and doors are priced separately because they're slower to cut in than a flat wall, and they usually need oil or hard-wearing enamel rather than wall paint.
- Access and height — raked ceilings, stairwells and anything needing scaffolding or a plank-and-trestle setup add time before a brush is even loaded.
Multiply the hours by the local trade rate, add materials, and that's the quote. It's also how we build our own estimate: labour hours × local rates plus materials, then checked against market prices and real trade quotes, rather than a single "$ per square metre" rule of thumb that ignores prep and trim.
Why scope is the first thing to nail down
"Repaint the house" means different things to different painters, and that's where quotes stop being comparable. The scope you ask for should match what's written on the quote:
- Walls only: typically $4,700
- Walls and ceilings: typically $6,500
- Walls, ceilings, trim and doors: typically $8,450
If one quote covers walls only and another covers the full works, comparing their totals tells you nothing. Ask every painter to itemise scope the same way before you compare prices — it's the single most common reason two quotes for "the same job" come in far apart.
What should be itemised on the page
A quote that's genuinely comparable should show, at minimum:
- Rooms and surfaces included (walls, ceilings, trim, doors — named, not lumped together)
- Number of coats on each surface
- Prep work included — filling, sanding, masking, washing down — and what counts as "extra" if more is found once work starts
- Paint brand and grade, since a budget acrylic and a premium low-VOC paint can double the material cost on a large house
- Whether GST is included in the total (it should be — quotes to Australian households include 10% GST, and our figures already do)
If any of these are missing, ask for them before you sign. A verbal "it'll be about $X" isn't a quote — it's a guess, and it's the version most likely to grow once the job starts.
Where the padding usually hides
The gap between a lean quote and an inflated one is rarely in the paint — it's in prep and trim. A painter who quotes a fast two-coat job on walls that actually need three coats, or who prices trim at wall rates instead of the slower cut-in rate, will either blow the budget mid-job or cut corners to hit the number they gave you. Walking the house with the painter before they quote, and asking them to point out anything that will need extra prep, is the cheapest insurance you can buy.
If you've already got a number and aren't sure it stacks up, our "is my quote fair" tool checks it against the same labour-and-materials model we use for these figures. For the full cost breakdown by paint grade and job size, see our Interior painting guide. If the repaint is part of a bigger refresh, our guides to New flooring and Rendering cover the other jobs that often get quoted at the same time — and the same rule applies: get the scope written down before you compare a single dollar figure.