How much does it cost to paint a room?
Published survey ranges put a single room at roughly $1,000–$2,900, or $2–3 per square foot. The spread is wide because a room is not a unit of work — its height, trim and surface condition matter more than its floor area.
What a single room actually involves
Two rooms with identical floor plans can differ by double. A bedroom with flat walls, one door and a standard ceiling is the cheap end. The same footprint with nine-foot ceilings, crown moulding, a chair rail, two windows and a dark existing colour needing three coats is the expensive end.
Ceilings and trim are usually priced separately from walls, because they take different products and different labour. If you are comparing quotes, check whether each one includes them — that single difference explains a great many confusing bids.
Doing it yourself changes the maths sharply, because you are removing the 85% that is labour. An average bedroom needs two to three gallons for two coats plus a gallon of ceiling paint and a quart of trim enamel, so materials for a straightforward room typically land in the low hundreds.
Work out your own quantity from the room's perimeter rather than guessing — our paint calculator does the arithmetic and shows the formula.
How we sourced this
This answer is composed from our knowledge base, which holds only what a regulator, a standards body or a manufacturer supports. The sources behind it are listed below with the date we accessed each one. If a claim on this page has no source under it, that is a bug — tell us and we will fix it.
Where a figure is product-specific — coverage, dry time, recoat time, temperature limits — we point you at the manufacturer's technical data sheet rather than printing a general number as though it were a specification. That distinction is the most common error in this trade, and it is the one that costs people a repaint.
Common mistakes
- Assuming floor area sets the price. Ceiling height, trim and existing colour matter more.
- Not checking whether the quote includes the ceiling and trim, which are usually priced separately.
- Forgetting that a dark existing colour can add a whole coat.
- Buying paint for one coat because the room "only needs freshening".
Related questions
Sources
- Aggregated third-party cost surveys. US painting cost ranges (accessed 2026-08-17).
- Sherwin-Williams. Paint calculator (accessed 2026-08-17).
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