Painting estimate calculator

Put the rooms in and your rates. It works out the wall area, the paint as whole cans and buckets, primer where the walls need it, labour on the area you actually paint — and prints the lot as a one-page quote with your company on top. It all runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.

Your company and the customer

Company

Phone, email or licence

Customer

Job address

Quote number

Date

Rooms — in feet

Surface Coats

Ceilings Trim & baseboard Doors Windows

Paint and prices

Wall paint, sq ft per gal 1 gal can 5 gal bucket

Ceiling paint, sq ft per gal 1 gal can 5 gal bucket

Primer, sq ft per gal 1 gal can 5 gal bucket

Your rates

Labour per sq ft painted Trim, per ft Per door Per window Tax % Tax applies to

A rate left at 0 prints no line at all — a quote should never show a free item you then charge for.

Your company, prices and rates stay in this browser for the next job. Nothing is sent anywhere.

How the quote is built

Each room's walls, net of the holesRound the room times the height, less 20 sq ft a door and 12 sq ft a window. The ceiling is the floor area. Trim runs the perimeter less the doorways.
Paint bought as containersGallons = area × coats ÷ coverage, with the coverage cut down for texture or bare board. Each room's paint is then bought as the cheapest mix of cans and buckets that covers it — the quote shows what you will carry in, not a fraction of a gallon.
Primer only where it belongsNew drywall gets one coat of primer over everything being painted, at the primer's own spread rate.
Labour on the painted areaYour rate times the walls — plus the ceilings if they are in the job. Doors, windows and trim are priced by the piece and the foot, the way the trade prices them.
Tax, then the totalEvery line, subtotal and the tax are rounded to the cent before they are added, so the printed quote always adds up on paper.

What a painting quote should say

Which rooms and which surfaces. "Living room walls and ceiling, two coats" is a scope. "Downstairs" is an argument waiting to happen.
The paint. Product and sheen. If the customer later picks a different line, this is the sentence that says what was priced.
Prep, stated. Filling, sanding, caulking, masking. Heavy repair is its own line or is written out as excluded.
How long the price holds. Paint prices move; a quote without a validity date can be held against you months later.
Old paint. In the US, work that disturbs paint in a home built before 1978 can fall under the EPA's lead Renovation, Repair and Painting rule. If it applies to the job, the quote should say so — and so should the price.

Where the numbers come from

The wall arithmetic, the coverage factors, the cheapest-fill rule and the rounding are ported from PaintQuote's own estimating engine, and this page runs against the same test numbers as the app. The only thing it adds is the typing: in the app, a LiDAR scan measures the room and finds the doors and windows itself.

Just want the gallons? The paint calculator answers "how much paint do I need" with nothing else attached.

Last reviewed 22 September 2026