Burden belongs with labor
Employer payroll taxes, workers compensation, unemployment insurance, benefits, paid time, and supervision support can make a $30 wage cost much more than $30. Treat burden as part of direct labor before adding overhead.
Business cost calculator
Find the hourly rate your painting labor needs.
Base wages rarely cover the true cost of field labor. Add burden, overhead allocation, billable hours, and margin to create a more realistic billing rate.
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Hourly rate calculator
Convert payroll cost into a billing rate
Use this page before pricing labor-heavy work, service calls, small jobs, or change orders where an hourly rate matters.
Target billing rate
Recommended hourly rate$0per billable labor hour
Loaded labor$0
Overhead per hour$0
Break-even$0
Rate building notes
Why a low hourly rate quietly loses money
Billable hours are limited
A full-time painter is not billable every paid hour. Training, travel, callbacks, shop time, estimates, weather delays, and admin time reduce the hours available to recover overhead.
Overhead needs a home
Vehicles, insurance, software, phones, bookkeeping, marketing, rent, and management time must be recovered through jobs. Allocating overhead by billable labor hour is one practical way to keep small jobs from being underpriced.
Margin is not markup
A 20 percent margin means profit is 20 percent of the selling price, not 20 percent added to cost. This calculator uses margin math so the result lines up with job profitability reports.
Hourly rate FAQ
Questions to review before using the rate
Should every painter have the same billable rate?
Not always. Some companies use one blended field rate for easier estimating, while others separate apprentice, journeyman, lead painter, and supervisor rates. A blended rate is simpler, but it should be based on the actual mix of labor used on jobs.
What counts as overhead?
Common overhead includes insurance, vehicles, office time, estimating time, software, phones, bookkeeping, rent, marketing, training, and non-billable management. Materials and job-specific equipment are usually estimated separately.
Why do billable hours matter so much?
Overhead must be recovered from hours that customers actually pay for. If weather, callbacks, travel, and admin time reduce billable hours, the required rate rises even when the wage stays the same.
Worked rate example
Example hourly rate for a small painting company
Assume a painter earns $30 per hour and the company estimates labor burden at 35 percent. The loaded labor cost is $40.50 per paid hour. If the business needs to recover $4,200 per month in overhead and expects 120 billable field hours, overhead recovery is $35 per billable hour. The break-even labor rate becomes $75.50 before profit.
At a 20 percent target margin, the billing rate is $75.50 divided by 0.80, or about $94 per billable labor hour. This does not mean every customer sees an hourly line item. The rate can be used inside fixed-price estimates, change orders, service calls, small-job minimums, and production-rate calculations.
The most important input is billable hours. If the same company only bills 90 hours in a slow month, overhead recovery becomes $46.67 per hour and the target rate rises. This is why contractors who price only from wage plus a small markup often underprice small jobs, callbacks, and projects with heavy travel or setup time.
Sanity check
Turn this rate into a square-foot price — and use it as a check, not a shortcut
Once you have a billable hourly rate, the basic square-foot formula is simple: labor price per square foot = labor selling price ÷ paintable area. If the labor portion of a bid is $1,750 on 2,500 paintable square feet, the labor selling price is about $0.70 per square foot. That number is useful for comparing jobs, but it should come from your own cost structure above, not from a copied market rate — a single square-foot price can be dangerous because two jobs with the same wall area can require very different labor. Furniture, repairs, high ceilings, trim detail, masking, color changes, and occupied spaces all affect production, so it's worth comparing by task before averaging everything into one number: interior wall rolling may be fast, while trim, doors, stairwells, cabinets, and exterior detail work can be much slower.
The safest workflow is to estimate man-hours first, add the loaded labor cost and hourly rate from this calculator, add overhead and profit, and only then calculate the square-foot price as a final sanity check. If that number looks unusually low or high compared with similar past jobs, review production rate, coats, prep level, and crew size before assuming the market rate is simply different — the issue is often hidden in access, surface condition, or a scope item that wasn't measured.
Worked example: a repaint has 3,000 paintable square feet and the labor calculator produces a labor selling price of $2,100 — 70 cents per square foot, labor only. Add $900 for paint, sundries, equipment, travel, and contingency, and the project selling price becomes $3,000, or $1.00 per square foot. That final number should be compared with similar past jobs, not with every painting job in the market: open walls in a vacant space may be profitable at a lower number, while a furnished home with stairwells, repairs, trim, and customer protection may need a higher one. Save the final labor hours, square footage, crew size, and actual time after each job — over several projects those notes become a local production-rate library that's more useful than any national average.
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