How Much Does Interior House Painting Cost?

Reviewed by Joe Roberts remodeling expert. Written by Fixr.com.

Average house interior painting costs

Is your home’s interior feeling a little drab lately? Or worse, is your drywall cracked and peeking through the old paint job? In either case, it’s probably high time you repaint your home. A fresh coat of paint can immediately refresh a space and make your home feel entirely new. Of course, home improvement projects of this scale are never cheap.

The price you’ll pay to hire interior painters will depend on factors such as the size of your space, the amount of prep work they’ll have to do, and the type of paint they use. On the low end, you could pay as little as $172 to paint the walls of a small bathroom. If you need your painters to sand, prime, and paint your entire home with high-quality paint, your total costs could exceed $30,000, depending on the square footage of your home.

To learn more about interior painting prices, keep reading. We’ll break down the typical pricing factors to help you predict the overall costs for your painting project.

Factors that affect interior painting costs

Square footage

On average, professional painters charge between $5.75 and $10.70 per square foot of a home’s floor space to prime, paint, and seal walls. These include all labor costs for standard sanding, caulking, and damage patching. They also include the material costs for every gallon of paint, dropcloth, paintbrush, and painting supply the job will require.

To find a price range for painting your home’s walls, you can multiply these prices by your home’s square footage. Alternatively, you can use this table to find a size close to your home and estimate a ballpark price that way: 

Entire house painting costs by home size

Which room you’re painting

If you’re painting walls for an individual room instead of your whole house at once, you’ll pay significantly less for this job. The size of the room you’re painting will determine your price, so you can estimate a likely price range by measuring the square footage of the room’s floor and multiplying it by the square footage prices we listed above. 

To give you a quick idea of what you might pay, though, we’ve provided typical price ranges for common room types below: 

Painting service costs by room

Paint type

Generally speaking, oil-based paints are less expensive than water-based paints. They’re also a little more durable once dry but release more volatile organic compounds while drying. This makes them much more toxic than water-based paints and less suitable for use on large interior walls, so water-based paints are usually the better option for painting your whole home, even though they are more expensive.

On top of its composition, a paint’s lustrousness will also factor into its price. Glossless matte paints are typically your cheapest option. Eggshell or satin paints cost a little more, and semi-gloss and high-gloss paints cost the most.

Finally, different paint colors come at different prices, but they’re primarily determined by supply and demand. If, say, off-white shades of blue are a particularly popular wall color in your region, you may pay more for these paints than you would for those in shades of beige. 

The condition of your walls

When you hire professionals to repaint your home, they’ll typically handle light patchwork. Jobs like filling nail holes with putty and applying new caulk along baseboards and crown molding are usually included. But if your home has excessive damage like mold or large holes in the drywall, you’ll spend more to repair your walls before they can be painted. 

The height of your ceilings

High ceilings mean more surface area to paint, so the height of the walls in your home will factor into your final price. The table below lists the typical price ranges for painting 2,200 square-foot homes with different ceiling heights: 

Whole-house painting costs by ceiling height

Interior painting pricing tiers

The budget option

You can save money while refreshing your home’s paint job by narrowing the scope of the project. Instead of repainting every wall in your home, limit the job to key areas like your living and dining rooms. That way, your home’s refreshed paint will still impress your guests and make the space feel new without costing tens of thousands of dollars.

You can also save money on this project by only using low-end oil paints, though this isn’t always an option. Oil-based paints are limited in some states because they carry more volatile organic compounds. If you can use oil-based paint inside your home, talk to your painters about the safety measures required to do so responsibly.

Whatever else you do to cut costs, you should still hire pros to paint your home for you. While many homeowners opt for DIY painting, these projects can have poor results, like streaky surfaces, drips, spots on the carpet, and flaking or blistering paint.

The mid-range option

To get a better-quality paint job without breaking the bank, ask your painters about their different paint options and choose a water-based paint in an affordable color. This might mean you have to opt for a color you don’t like as much, but it will ensure you can give your whole home a fresh coat of paint while working on a more limited budget. 

The high-end option

If your home improvement budget is ample enough, you can let the interior decorator inside you run wild and choose your paints based on taste instead of price. This might mean opting for a single color of extremely high-end paint, but it could also mean choosing varied paint colors to use for accent walls and different rooms. Painting with multiple colors can add significant costs to this project, but it will give every part of your home a distinct personality.

We also recommend getting multiple coats of paint. A greater number of coats will mean a greater price, and it will also make the project take longer, but it will ensure the new paint looks great for many more years. 

How to pay for your fresh coat of paint

If you can’t afford to pay for your painting project upfront, the best way to cover the costs is to finance through your painting company. The exact terms and conditions for painter financing will depend on your situation and the company you hire, but contractor financing typically comes with the best interest rates.

If your painting company doesn’t offer financing or you don’t like the terms of the financing they do offer, these are a few of your other options:

• Take out a personal loan.
• Take out a home equity loan.
• Open a home equity line of credit.

Even if none of these payment methods work for you, you should avoid paying for this project with a credit card if your costs exceed $1,000. Credit cards tend to have the worst interest rates of all the options we've listed, so they’re a bad option for financing large home improvement jobs. It’s better to save up for a few years than to use a credit card for large painting projects. 

Other factors to consider

Cabinetry

Kitchen cabinets and other cabinetry can alter your painting project costs in two ways. If you don’t want to get the cabinets painted, then painting a room with cabinets can cost less than painting one without them since there will be less total surface area to paint. 

If, on the other hand, you want to get your cabinets painted as well, your project costs will actually be higher than average. This is partially because a cabinet has more surface area than a bare wall, but it’s also because painting a cabinet is more difficult than painting a flat surface. 

Caring for your paint

Once your home’s new interior paint is dry, you’ll need to take care of it to ensure it lasts as long as possible. Otherwise, you’ll have to pay to repaint it sooner.

Exact care tips will depend on what type of paint you get and what sealant was used, so be sure to discuss long-term care with your painters. That said, you can’t go wrong with these general care guidelines:

• Frequently clean areas you touch often, but be sure to use gentle cleaning implements and solutions.
• When you don’t need them open, keep your drapes closed to prevent UV rays from causing your paint to fade.
• Hold onto some leftover paint so you can touch up scuffs and scrapes yourself.

Getting your home’s interior painted

While getting a fresh coat of paint for your home won’t be free, it will almost certainly be worth it. New paint will freshen up your home’s decor and increase the place’s resale value. Now that you know how much you’re likely to pay to hire professional painters, the next step is to contact a well-rated painting company in your area for a quote.