HBP Painting Contractors prices interior house painting at $3 to $12 per square foot. That is a ballpark rather than a quote. Five things move the final number: the complexity of the work, the number of coats, the surfaces themselves, the amount of preparation, and the finishes you choose.
National market guides quote a wider band: about $200 for one small room, up to $15,750 for a 3,000 square foot house. The tables below show where those land.
What a Professional Interior Repaint Costs, and How It Is Priced
HBP prices interior house painting at $3 to $12 per square foot. Where a particular house lands inside that range comes down to five things. The complexity of the work. The number of coats. The surfaces themselves. The preparation the walls need. And the finish you settle on.
That spread is wide for a reason worth understanding before you collect bids. A repaint in a similar color on sound walls is one job. A color change over patched drywall, with ceilings and trim in the scope, is another. Both are sold as “painting the interior.”
The tables below are national market ranges of the kind industry cost guides publish, spanning every condition of house. They are not HBP prices. They are here so you can see whether a bid you have been handed sits inside the normal band or outside it.
For how the work itself is scoped and staged, see interior house painters.
Cost to Paint a Room, by Room Size
Room price tracks wall area and trim, so it climbs with room size. Per-room pricing carries a practical floor. Masking, protection, setup and cleanup cost about the same in a small bedroom as in a large one, and that fixed time sets a floor under the smallest jobs.
| Room Dimensions | Typical Total Range |
|---|---|
| 10×10 feet | $200 to $600 |
| 10×12 feet | $300 to $750 |
| 12×12 feet | $400 to $900 |
| 20×20 feet | $800 to $2,400 |
Nobody publishes what ranges like these include, so read them as walls and price everything else on top. Ceilings, trim, interior doors and closets are separate scope decisions, and each one you add to a room moves its price.
Cost to Paint a Whole House Interior, by Square Footage
Across every row below, the market ranges work out to a rate applied to home floor area. That is a different basis from the $3 to $12 per square foot HBP quotes against the surfaces actually painted.
Find your size in the table below. Within any row, the low end most likely reads as a light refresh, the high end as a color change with ceilings, trim and real repair in the scope.
| Home Size | Typical Total Range |
|---|---|
| 800 sq ft | $1,480 to $4,200 |
| 1,000 sq ft | $1,850 to $5,250 |
| 1,200 sq ft | $2,220 to $6,300 |
| 1,300 sq ft | $2,405 to $6,825 |
| 1,500 sq ft | $2,775 to $7,875 |
| 1,600 sq ft | $2,960 to $8,400 |
| 2,000 sq ft | $3,700 to $10,500 |
| 2,300 sq ft | $4,255 to $12,075 |
| 2,500 sq ft | $4,625 to $13,125 |
| 3,000 sq ft | $5,550 to $15,750 |
The 2,000 square foot row is calculated, not quoted anywhere. It is the same market rate the other rows run on, applied to 2,000 square feet, because that size is missing from the ranges the other nine rows come from.
Nothing about it should price differently from the sizes on either side of it.
One caution about the rate itself: it runs against your home’s floor area, so treat the result as a sanity check rather than a measurement of the work.
Take the row nearest your square footage as a budget bracket, then measure your own paintable area before you call anyone. Turning it into a number you can sign is what an interior painting estimate is for.
Why Two Quotes for the Same House Can Differ by Thousands
Two honest painters can price the same house thousands apart, and the gap is almost never markup. It is scope and coat count.
Until every quote names the same surfaces and the same number of coats, they are pricing different jobs. The lower number is then the smaller job, not the better deal.
What moves the number
When I walk a house I measure all four walls and the ceiling in every room, then check the surfaces before I price anything. Two rooms the same size can sit a long way apart.
A sound wall in flat acrylic covers in two coats. The same wall going from a dark color to a pale one needs a stain-blocking primer first. Hiding and adhesion are two different problems. One more coat of color solves only one of them.
Trim and doors cost more again: they are usually semi-gloss, they get brushed rather than rolled, and brushwork is the slowest thing in the house.
- Which surfaces are in scope. Walls, ceilings, trim, interior doors and closets are five separable jobs. A quote saying only “painting” is not cheaper than one naming all five. It is smaller.
- Coat count and color change. Coats multiply labor and material at once, so a color change costs more than a refresh in the same color even in identical rooms.
- Prep and surface repair. Nail pops, cracked corners and split caulk lines get corrected before coating, or they reopen through the new paint within a season. Sherwin-Williams publishes the same wall preparation sequence for its own products. On an older house, prep is the majority of the labor.
- Trim, doors and closets. Brushwork is the slowest production rate in the house, so these consume hours far out of proportion to their square footage.
- Texture and ceiling height. Knockdown and orange peel hold more paint per measured foot and roll slower than smooth wall. A vaulted ceiling or an open two-story stairwell turns ladder work into staged work.
- Paint grade and deep colors. Interior paint runs from about $15 a gallon to around $40. Saturated colors are mixed into tint bases that hide poorly, so a bold wall can need a tinted primer underneath or a third coat on top. Choosing the interior paint colors is a separate decision.
- Whole home against room by room. Setup, protection and cleanup repeat on every visit, so five rooms bought one at a time cost more than the same five bought together. An occupied house adds that same repetition daily.
- A price given without a measure. How often is it worth doing? Most interiors get repainted every five to ten years, and high traffic rooms sooner than bedrooms. If you are selling, ask whether the whole house is worth it or whether the entry, the kitchen and the main hallway carry the impression on their own. A number quoted over the phone rests on assumptions about square footage and surface condition, and assumptions are where change orders begin. What the price actually buys is further down.
Several items on an interior list are not wall painting at all. Wallpaper comes off before walls can take paint, so wallpaper removal prices as its own scope, and cabinet painting uses different preparation, products and sequencing.
Popcorn ceiling removal and drywall replacement are separate trades. Visible water staining is another: someone resolves the source before anyone coats over it, which is one honest reason a quote changes after an inspection.
Measure Your Paintable Square Footage Before You Call
The number on your tax record is floor square footage. Painters price paintable square footage, which is wall and ceiling area, and in most houses it is the larger of the two.
Arrive at the walkthrough with your own number instead of none. It takes about 30 minutes for an average house. You can work yours out in an afternoon with a tape measure:
- Measure the perimeter of each room in feet.
- Multiply that perimeter by the ceiling height to get the room’s wall area.
- Subtract the door and window openings in that room.
- Add the ceiling area, length times width, for every room whose ceiling is in the project.
- Count interior doors, window units and closets, and measure trim runs in linear feet.
- Note which rooms are textured, which ceilings are vaulted, and whether an open stairwell is on the list.
- Photograph wallpaper, nail pops, cracked corners, split caulk lines and any dull patches left by a previous repaint.
Now write the scope down once and hand the same sheet to every bidder, asking each for an itemized estimate that states:
- Which surfaces are included: walls, ceilings, trim, doors, closets.
- How many coats, named per surface.
- Which paint product line and brand, and which sheen on each surface.
- How the bidder prices prep and repairs: included, or an allowance, and what that allowance caps at.
- Who moves and covers the furniture.
- Who approves a change once work has started, and how it goes in writing.
- For a house built before 1978, how the bidder handles lead-safe work practices where the work disturbs old paint layers.
If one of the seven is worth insisting on above the rest, it is the number of coats. Two bids that agree on everything else can still land far apart on that single line.
Quotes that answer all seven compare on price. The next move is booking an on-site measure and giving every bidder the identical scope.
What a Professional Interior Painting Price Actually Buys
Labor is the biggest share of an interior repaint, not paint. Anything that slows a crew, whether staging, protection, repairs or an extra coat, converts directly into days and therefore into money.
A professional interior price covers the on-site measure and condition assessment, patching and caulking, sanding patched areas flush, and spot priming so those patches do not telegraph through the finish.
The price also covers two coats to uniform hide, cutting in every edge a roller cannot reach, and trim and door finishing in enamel.
Coverage extends to staging over stairwells and under vaulted ceilings, daily protection in an occupied house, a final walkthrough with a punch list, and a durable, washable finish.
Working a two-story stairwell or a cathedral ceiling means planks and scaffolding. That is fall-risk work, and insured labor carries it. It is the honest reason height shows up in a price.
The labor share shows up in what most interior painters charge for one room: $170 to $680 in labor. The starting labor on a five-room job runs around $850, which is five rooms at the bottom of that single-room figure.
Neither number is a project total. Materials and the rest of the scope sit on top of it.
The most useful way to read a quote is as crew days, so ask each estimate to name the crew days behind its number.
Interior Painting Cost: Frequently Asked Questions
If you have not read it yet, the room size table above answers most of these with a number.
Getting a Written Interior Painting Estimate
Two limits on all of this. Every figure above is a bracket rather than a quote, because your surfaces and your prep decide the number more than your floor area does.
And painting is not always the job. On failed drywall or rotten trim you do not need a painter at all. A fresh coat will not fix it, and the money is better spent on the repair first.
You now have a budget bracket for your own square footage and a scope sheet that makes competing quotes comparable.
HBP Painting Contractors is a fourth generation, family owned painting company, in business since 1983 and serving St. Louis and St. Charles County, Missouri.
Employee crews rather than subcontractors do the work, in Sherwin-Williams products, and the company is BBB accredited, fully insured, and a member of the Painting Contractors Association.
The next step is a free on-site consultation with no obligation. HBP measures the rooms involved, checks the condition of the walls, ceilings and trim, and gives you a real number against your own house instead of a range.
Bring your measurements and ask for the estimate itemized surface by surface. Nothing is expected of you afterward. Finished interiors are in the gallery. The case studies walk through whole projects, including what each one cost. Then Request your free consultation, or call 636-544-1254 to talk it through first.
If you want to see how the work itself is scoped and staged, the interior house painters page covers the process in detail.
