Access and staging
Include lifts, scaffolding, mobilization, daily setup, protection, and movement between phases or occupied areas.
Free commercial estimating tool
Build a commercial painting bid from the costs up.
Estimate labor, paint, equipment, overhead, contingency, and target margin without relying on a guessed square-foot price.
Calculate commercial bid02
Commercial painting bid calculator
Price the complete scope
Use measured paintable area and your crew's production rate for a transparent starting bid.
Recommended commercial bid
Total selling price$0$0.00 per sq ft
Total man-hours0 hrs
Crew duration0 days
Paint needed0 gal
Expected profit$0
Bid breakdown
Labor$0
Paint and waste$0
Equipment and other$0
Overhead and contingency$0
Use the result as a planning baseline. Verify takeoff quantities, access, schedule, contract requirements, and local costs.
Commercial bid guide
Costs commonly missed in commercial bids
Schedule restrictions
Night, weekend, shutdown, and accelerated work can reduce productivity and increase hourly labor cost.
Specification requirements
Confirm coatings, dry-film thickness, surface preparation, testing, documentation, and closeout requirements before pricing.
Risk and cash flow
Review retainage, payment timing, bonds, insurance, change-order rules, and a realistic contingency for uncertain scope.
Commercial estimating notes
How to turn the calculator result into a bid you can defend
Start with measured scope
Commercial painting prices become unreliable when the estimate begins with a guessed square-foot price. Measure paintable wall area, ceiling area, trim, doors, exposed steel, and any surfaces that need specialty coatings. Keep deductions consistent so future jobs can be compared against the same method.
Adjust production before profit
Access, masking, tenant hours, lift movement, color changes, and surface repairs affect labor before overhead or profit is added. If a crew can normally cover 300 square feet per hour but the project has occupied areas or night work, lower the production rate first instead of hiding that risk in a larger margin.
Separate direct and indirect costs
Labor, paint, sundries, equipment, mobilization, supervision, insurance requirements, and cleanup should be visible as separate assumptions. This makes the bid easier to review and helps you explain change orders when the scope grows after the first walkthrough.
Use the result as a review sheet
Before sending a proposal, compare the calculated man-hours with the schedule, crew size, and site restrictions. If the calculator says the job needs 320 labor hours, a four-person crew working eight-hour days needs roughly ten working days before weather, access delays, or inspection time.
Step-by-step method
How to estimate a commercial painting job before you touch this calculator
Commercial bids fail more often from missing scope than from bad math. Before entering numbers above, work through five steps in order.
1. Read the scope before you measure anything
Pull the drawings, finish schedule, coating specifications, alternates, and exclusions first. Confirm whether the contract expects prep, primer, patching, caulking, protection, touch-up, and closeout documentation, since each of those is easy to assume away until a customer points at the contract.
2. Build a takeoff by surface, not one blended number
Separate walls, ceilings, exposed structure, doors, frames, railings, exterior surfaces, and any specialty coatings. A single "paintable area" number hides the fact that ceilings, trim, and open walls move at very different production rates.
3. Estimate labor from production rate, then add what the rate doesn't cover
Start from a production rate for the dominant surface, then add separate hours for mobilization, masking, high access, moving lifts, cleaning, supervision, and punch-list work. These line items are exactly what the "additional prep hours" field above is for — don't fold them into a lower production rate where they become invisible.
4. Price equipment and schedule restrictions as their own line
Lifts, scaffolding, containment, parking, travel, safety equipment, background checks, and night or weekend work are common on commercial jobs and easy to underprice. The after-hours premium field above exists because occupied-building work routinely costs more per hour than the same work in an empty space.
5. Add overhead, contingency, and margin — in that order
Overhead and contingency protect the business from real costs the takeoff doesn't capture. Profit margin gets applied after those, not before. Before submitting, also check payment terms, retainage, insurance, bonding, warranty obligations, change-order rules, and whether sales tax applies to labor or materials in the project location — none of that shows up in a labor calculator, but all of it affects whether the number you send is actually the number you collect.
Worked example
Occupied office repaint: 18,000 sq ft, after-hours access
An occupied office repaint has 18,000 square feet of paintable wall area, standard eggshell finish, two finish coats, minor patching, and work scheduled after normal business hours so tenants aren't disrupted. Doors, frames, and specialty coatings are excluded from the base scope.
| Item | Assumption | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Paintable wall area | 18,000 sq ft | Measured from drawings and confirmed during walkthrough |
| Coats | 2 | Color change from light gray to warm white |
| Production rate | 300 sq ft/hr | Open commercial walls with some occupied-area slowdown |
| Prep hours | 28 hrs | Minor patching, corner repairs, and protection setup |
| After-hours premium | 25% | Work occurs after tenants leave |
18,000 square feet at two coats is 36,000 coated square feet. At 300 square feet per labor hour, the painting portion alone is 120 labor hours. Add the 28 prep hours and the base becomes 148 labor hours. At a $48 loaded hourly labor cost with a 25 percent after-hours premium ($60/hr effective), labor cost is 148 × $60 = $8,880 — direct labor only, before materials, equipment, overhead, contingency, or profit.
For material: at 350 sq ft/gal and two coats, the job needs roughly 103 gallons before waste; a 10 percent waste and touch-up allowance raises that to about 114 gallons, or $4,788 at $42/gal. Equipment and other job costs (lift/ladder staging, floor protection, mobilization, small supplies) are budgeted separately at $1,800.
| Cost line | Estimated amount |
|---|---|
| Labor | $8,880 |
| Paint | $4,788 |
| Equipment and sundries | $1,800 |
| Subtotal direct cost | $15,468 |
| Overhead and contingency at 18% | $2,784 |
| Cost before profit | $18,252 |
| Suggested selling price at 20% margin | $22,815 |
That works out to about $1.27 per coated wall square foot — but the number is driven by labor hours, after-hours work, paint gallons, equipment, overhead, and profit, not by a flat per-foot rate. A second 18,000-square-foot project with high ceilings, heavy patching, multiple colors, or unrestricted daytime access could price very differently. The customer-facing proposal should still list included areas, excluded doors and frames, assumed working hours, patching limits, coats, coating line, color count, and change-order triggers, so a later request for stairwells, accent walls, weekend work, or heavy wall repair prices as a change order instead of quietly eating the margin.
A faster comparison: a 12,000 sq ft tenant improvement
For contrast, a 12,000 square foot tenant improvement repaint at the same two coats and 300 sq ft/hr produces 80 painting hours before prep. Add 20 hours of patching, masking, mobilization, and daily cleanup and the estimate starts at 100 labor hours — a four-person crew can usually clear that in about three working days with open access, though occupied space or night work stretches the calendar. At 350 sq ft/gal, the 24,000 coated square feet needs about 69 gallons before waste. The shape of the estimate is the same as the office example above; only the scale and access conditions changed the inputs.
FAQ
Adapting these examples to your job
What if the office is empty during the work?
Remove or reduce the after-hours premium and improve the production rate if access is open. Empty space usually lowers protection and coordination time, but still include setup, cleanup, and walkthrough time.
What if the job has many colors?
Multiple colors reduce productivity because of cut-in, cleaning, layout, and touch-ups. Lower the production rate or add a separate color-change labor line before applying margin.
Should material markup be separate from labor margin?
Some contractors mark up materials directly; others recover material cost through overhead and margin. Either works as long as it's consistent — don't sell materials at cost while also failing to recover overhead on them.
How do I know if my crew plan matches the calculated hours?
Compare the calculator's total man-hours with your planned crew size and calendar. If the job needs 240 hours and the customer wants completion in five nights, the crew plan and premium pay need to be built into the price before profit is added — not discovered after the crew falls behind.
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