Key takeaways
- Price painting jobs from labor hours, using your own production rates and a fully loaded labor cost, not from a competitor’s square-foot price.
- Know the difference between markup and margin. A 50% markup is only a 33% gross margin.
- Plan the year around seasonality: book exteriors before spring, push interiors and commercial work in the slow months, and track backlog in weeks.
- Ten numbers reviewed in one hour a month will tell you more than any end-of-year tax return.
Many painting companies with 5 to 50 employees run on two numbers: the bank balance and how full the schedule looks. Both are useful. Neither tells you whether you priced last month’s jobs correctly, which marketing is paying for itself or whether you can afford a fourth crew.
The market makes this more urgent. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies projects that spending on improvements and maintenance of owner-occupied homes will hold around $519 billion through mid-2027, with growth of 0.5% a year (JCHS, July 2026). When the market is not growing, you cannot count on volume to cover sloppy pricing. Here is how to run a painting company by the numbers.
Price from hours, not from square feet
Square-foot pricing is fine as a sanity check. It is a poor way to set your price, because two 2,000-square-foot homes can need very different amounts of prep, trim work and ladder time. Labor is your biggest cost, so price from labor hours.
Step 1: Know your production rates
Track actual hours on every job for one season, by task: prep, walls, ceilings, trim, doors, cabinets, exterior body, exterior trim. After 20 or 30 jobs, you will have your own rates, such as hours per standard bedroom or per linear foot of exterior trim. Your rates are better than any published table, because they reflect your crews, your products and your standard of prep.
Step 2: Calculate a loaded labor cost
BLS reports that the median wage for construction and maintenance painters was $23.75 an hour in May 2025 (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook). Your wage is only part of what an hour of labor costs you. Add payroll taxes, workers’ compensation, any benefits, paid time off and non-billable time such as driving to jobs and picking up materials. Your accountant can help you calculate the exact burden for your state and payroll.
Illustrative example: a painter earns $24 an hour. Payroll taxes, workers’ comp and other burden add 30%, so the cost is $31.20 an hour. If only 85% of paid hours are spent on the job (the rest is travel and supply runs), the cost per productive hour is about $36.70.
Step 3: Build the price
Illustrative example of an interior repaint:
| Line | Calculation | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Labor | 64 crew hours × $36.70 | $2,349 |
| Materials | Paint, primer, caulk, tape, plastic, sundries | $650 |
| Direct job cost | Labor + materials | $2,999 |
| Target gross margin | 45% | |
| Price | $2,999 ÷ (1 − 0.45) | $5,453 |
| Gross profit | Price − direct cost | $2,454 |
That gross profit has to pay for your overhead (office staff, estimator, vehicles, insurance, software, marketing, rent) and leave a net profit. To set your target margin, add up a year of overhead, divide by the revenue you expect, and add the net profit you want to keep. Use your own figures; the 45% here is only for illustration.
Markup is not margin
This mistake costs painting companies a lot of money. If you add 50% to your costs, you do not have a 50% margin.
| Markup on cost | Resulting gross margin |
|---|---|
| 25% | 20% |
| 50% | 33% |
| 67% | 40% |
| 82% | 45% |
| 100% | 50% |
Pick a target margin, then divide costs by (1 − margin) to get the price, as in the example above.
Try this Take your five most recent completed jobs. Compare estimated hours to actual hours. If actual hours were more than 10% over on most of them, your production rates or your estimates need work before you spend another dollar on marketing.
Plan the year around seasonality
BLS notes that jobs involving outdoor painting may be seasonal (BLS). How seasonal depends on your climate. In northern markets, the exterior season may be a few months. In the South and Southwest, heat and rain shape the calendar more than cold. Either way, the goal is the same: keep crews busy all year without discounting.
- Late winter: Sell exteriors. Email past customers, run your exterior campaigns and fill the first weeks of the season before the phone gets busy.
- Peak exterior season: Protect margin. When backlog is long, quote real start dates and do not discount to win work you cannot schedule.
- Late fall and winter: Push interiors, cabinets and commercial work. Property managers often have turnover and common-area projects that are not weather-dependent.
- All year: Use the slow weeks for training, equipment maintenance and following up with past customers.
Track backlog in weeks, not dollars
Backlog weeks = sold work not yet completed ÷ the revenue your crews can produce in a week.
Illustrative example: you have $120,000 of sold jobs on the calendar and your four crews can produce $30,000 of work a week. That is four weeks of backlog. Decide your comfortable range, for example three to six weeks. Below it, increase marketing and follow up harder on open estimates. Above it, raise prices or hire, because customers will not wait forever.
Know what a customer costs and what a customer is worth
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) = marketing and sales spend in a period ÷ new customers in that period. Include ad spend, mailers, signs, software and the share of your estimator’s or office manager’s time spent on sales.
Customer lifetime value (LTV) = the gross profit you expect from a customer over the years, including repeat jobs.
Illustrative example: you spend $6,000 in a month on marketing and sales and win 20 new customers. Your CAC is $300. A typical new customer’s first job brings $2,000 in gross profit. If, on average, your customers buy one more project worth $1,500 in gross profit over the next several years, their lifetime gross profit is $3,500. That is more than 11 times what it cost to win them, before counting referrals.
A healthy LTV-to-CAC ratio gives you room to invest in marketing. If your ratio is low, the fix is usually on the retention side: more repeat work, more referrals, better follow-up after the job.
The 10-line monthly scorecard
Review these on the same day every month, ideally with your office manager and lead estimator. One hour is enough.
| # | Metric | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Leads by source | Shows which channels are working |
| 2 | Median response time to new leads | Speed to lead drives booking rate |
| 3 | Estimates issued | The top of your sales pipeline |
| 4 | Close rate, by job type and estimator | Finds sales and estimating problems |
| 5 | Average sold job size | Shows whether options and upsells are working |
| 6 | Revenue completed | What you actually produced |
| 7 | Gross margin on completed jobs, estimated vs. actual hours | Shows whether pricing and production match |
| 8 | Backlog in weeks | Tells you when to market harder or raise prices |
| 9 | Cost per booked job and CAC by channel | Decides where marketing money goes |
| 10 | Repeat and referral share, and new reviews | Shows whether retention is working |
How to run the meeting
- Look at the trend, not one month. Compare this month to the same month last year, because painting is seasonal.
- Pick the one number that is furthest from where you want it.
- Agree on one action, an owner and a deadline. For example: “Close rate on exteriors fell to 24%. Ana will run the full follow-up sequence on every open exterior estimate this month.”
- Check that action first at next month’s meeting.
Where to get the data
You do not need an expensive system to start. Your job management or CRM software should capture lead source, estimate dates, sold and lost status and job value. Your bookkeeping should separate direct job costs (labor and materials) from overhead, so gross margin is real. Your crews need a simple way to log hours by job. Many owners start with a shared spreadsheet and move to software once the habit is in place.
The companies that grow steadily are rarely the ones with the best painters. They are the ones that know, every month, what a job really costs, what a customer is worth and which numbers need attention.
If you are not sure which of these numbers to fix first, the free Growth Assessment gives you a starting score in a few minutes.