How to Price a Painting Job in Australia

Short answer: Price the job, not the hour. Measure the work, estimate the hours for each part of it (prep, cutting in, coats, clean-up and travel), multiply by a rate that covers your pay and your business costs, add paint and materials, then add 10% GST if you're registered. Quote the customer one fixed total. When the job's done, work out what it really paid you per hour, and use that number on the next quote.

A lot of pricing guides stop at the quote. The bit that helps you get better at pricing is what happens after the job.

1. Start with the rate you need, not the rate you've heard

Copying another painter's rate tells you nothing about your own costs. Work it out from your side:

1. What you want to pay yourself for the year, before tax (and include super if you pay yourself super).
2. Your yearly business costs: ute, fuel, insurance, tools, ladders and drop sheets, phone, software, your accountant.
3. The hours you can actually bill. Quoting, driving, supplier runs, rain days and admin all eat into the week, so this is always fewer hours than you work.

Pay plus costs, divided by billable hours, is the lowest rate you can work for. Anything under that and the business is going backwards, even if the bank account looks busy.

2. Measure and break the job into parts

Walk the job and write down what's really there:

• Rooms, walls, ceilings, doors, trims, windows, and the square metres of each.
• Surface condition: patching, sanding, stain blocking, mould, flaking paint.
• How many coats, and whether you're changing colour (dark to light usually means more).
• Access: high ceilings, stairwells, scaffold, furniture to move, a house still lived in.
• Travel time and how many trips you'll need.

Estimate hours for each part, not for the whole job. "Patch and sand hallway, 3 hours" is easy to check later. "Two and a half days" isn't.

3. Work out paint and materials properly

List paint by product and litres, plus primer, fillers, caulk, tape, rollers, sundries and any equipment hire. Use current supplier prices. If you're registered for GST, count paint and materials ex GST, because you can claim the GST back. If you're not registered, count what you actually paid, GST included, because that's your real cost. Use the same basis when you check the job later.

4. Build the price

Hours × your rate, plus paint and materials, plus any margin you add on materials. That's your price before GST.

If you're registered for GST, add 10% and show the customer the GST-inclusive total. If you're not registered, don't charge GST. You must register for GST once your GST turnover reaches $75,000 a year (or is likely to), and you have 21 days to do it. The ATO's GST registration page explains how to work out your turnover.

What published cost guides show

These are prices published by consumer cost guides for hiring a painter. They are someone else's published figures, not a target and not a pass mark for your own pricing. Your rate still comes from your own costs and hours (step 1).

Prices vary by job, region and season. These are published cost guides from the sources linked, checked 12 Oct 2026. They aren't quotes, aren't price advice and aren't Trackexa data.

5. Quote a fixed total, with a clear scope

Many homeowners would rather have one number than an hourly rate and a guess. A fixed price gives them certainty, and your scope protects you:

• What's included, room by room.
• What's not included (for example, ceilings, doors, minor carpentry).
• How variations are priced and approved before you do them.
• Deposit, payment terms and how long the quote is valid.

If part of the job is genuinely unknown, like what's under old paint, say so in the quote and explain how you'll price it if it turns up.

6. After the job: what did that job really pay you?

This is the step a lot of painters skip, and it's the one that shows you where your pricing is off.

When the job's finished and paid, take the price (ex GST if you're registered), take off paint and materials (on the same basis as step 3), and divide by every hour you put in, including quoting, travel, the supplier run and the touch-up visit. That's what the job actually paid you per hour. We call it the after-job number.

Do this on every job and patterns start to show. Some job types will keep coming in under your target. Those are the ones to reprice.

Joel Walters, the Cairns painter who founded Trackexa, saw this in his own jobs: "Trackexa showed me some 4-bedroom interior repaint jobs were returning around $65/hr after paint/materials, while other work was around $100/hr. That changed how I priced those jobs." (His own jobs, before overheads, tax and super.)

You can check your last job right now with the free Job Return Calculator. No signup, and nothing you type is saved. For the full maths and a template, see how to calculate profit per hour.

Try the Smoko Challenge: which job returned the most per hour?

Common pricing mistakes

• Pricing from feel. If you don't know what your last five jobs paid per hour, you're guessing on the next one.
• Leaving hours out. Quoting, travel and the touch-up trip are real hours. Leave them out and every job looks better than it was.
• Mixing inc and ex GST. Compare like with like, or your numbers drift.
• Only checking the big jobs. Small jobs and certain job types can quietly pay the least.

Questions painters ask

General information only, not financial or tax advice. For GST or tax questions about your business, check with the ATO or your accountant, tax agent or BAS agent.

See also: Trackexa for painters · Profit per hour tracker