How much to charge for exterior house painting

Exteriors are the jobs painters brag about landing and quietly regret by week two. The bid felt strong. The house looked straightforward from the driveway. Then the pressure wash came off and half the south wall started shedding paint like a husky in June, and suddenly the "three days of scraping" is six, and it rained twice, and the margin you priced in is living somewhere in the tarp pile.

I paint in Minnesota, where the exterior season is short and the weather has opinions, so I've had every version of that job. Exteriors aren't priced like interiors with taller ladders — they're a different animal, and the price has to be built around the two things that actually decide the outcome: prep and weather.

Here's the method, with numbers.

The worked example: a 1,900 sq ft two-story

Lap siding, previously painted, moderate peeling on the sun-beaten sides, standard trim, two coats on the body. Two-painter crew.

Step 1 — Walk the whole house and price the prep FIRST

On exteriors I estimate prep before I even think about paint, because prep is where the hours hide. Walk all four sides. Probe the sills. Look at the fascia where the gutters overflow.

Pressure wash + dry time buffer          ~8 crew-hrs
Scrape + sand the failing areas         ~24 crew-hrs
Spot-prime bare wood                     ~8 crew-hrs
Caulk gaps, minor putty work             ~8 crew-hrs
────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Prep                                    ~48 crew-hrs

Then the painting:

Body, 2 coats (brush/back-roll + spray) ~40 crew-hrs
Trim, doors, fascia                     ~20 crew-hrs
Masking, ladder/staging moves, cleanup  ~12 crew-hrs
────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Paint                                   ~72 crew-hrs
Total                                  ~120 crew-hrs

Sit with that ratio for a second: prep is 40% of this job. On a chalky, peeling, 1920s house it can pass 50%. Any exterior price that starts from "how much paint will it take" has already lost, because paint is the cheap, predictable part.

Step 2 — Cost the labor loaded

Wage plus the burden you actually carry — payroll taxes, workers' comp (higher for exterior/ladder work, by the way), insurance, vehicle. Burden runs 15–25% on top of the wage for most shops; my round loaded number here is $45/hour.

120 crew-hours × $45 = $5,400 true labor.

Step 3 — Materials

Quality exterior paint isn't where you save money — it's the difference between repainting in 10 years or 5, and your reputation rides on it.

~15 gal body + trim @ $55–65, primer, caulk, sundries ≈ $1,050.

Step 4 — Overhead, margin, price

Labor (loaded)          $5,400
Materials               $1,050
Overhead share (~$6/hr) $  720
──────────────────────────────
Job cost                $7,170

÷ (1 − 33% margin)   → $10,700
──────────────────────────────
Quote                 ~$10,500–11,000

For a two-story of this size and condition in the Twin Cities, honest exterior prices run somewhere in the $7,000–$16,000+ range — the spread is that wide because condition is that variable. A one-story rambler with sound paint might land at half of this; a peeling Victorian with rotten sills, double. Anyone quoting exteriors off square footage alone, sight unseen, is guessing with your money.

The exterior traps: prep blowout and the weather tax

Every surface has its own way of eating the painter — rooms bleed through fixed setup time, interiors through averaging, cabinets through process risk. Exteriors have two.

Trap one: prep blowout. You bid 48 hours of prep; the scraping reveals that "moderate peeling" goes down to bare wood across two full sides, and there's soft fascia behind the gutter. Prep is the least predictable line on the whole estimate, and it's also the one customers least want to pay for — nobody sees scraping in the after photos. Protect yourself twice: bid prep from a close inspection, not the driveway; and put rot and hidden-damage repair in writing as excluded, priced-on-discovery work. That sentence in the bid turns a fight into a change order.

Trap two: the weather tax. Rain days, dew that pushes the start to 10 a.m., heat that shuts down the sun side, wind that kills spraying. In Minnesota you might get five good months, and every crew-day lost to weather still costs you overhead and often payroll — while the schedule behind that job compresses. Weather risk belongs in the margin: exteriors should carry a fatter margin than interior work, because you will not bill for the Thursday it rained. If your interior margin target is 30%, your exterior target should sit a few points above it, not below. Painters do the opposite — they bid exteriors thin because the jobs are big and the number "feels high." The job size is exactly why the percentage matters more.

Structure the money like the job is big — because it is

An exterior is often the biggest single ticket a homeowner buys from a painter, and the biggest cash-flow exposure you carry. Two habits protect you.

Take a real deposit. On a five-figure exterior I want a meaningful deposit at signing — enough to cover materials and commit the schedule slot. A customer who balks at a deposit on a $10,000 job is telling you something worth hearing in April instead of August.

Use a payment schedule, not a lump at the end. Deposit at signing, a progress payment when prep is complete (which conveniently makes the invisible 40% of the job visible to the customer), balance at walkthrough. Multi-week jobs financed entirely by the painter are how short seasons turn into short bank accounts — you're already carrying the weather risk; don't carry all the float too.

The only way to trust your exterior numbers

Everything in my example rides on production rates — how fast your crew actually scrapes, primes, and sprays. You don't learn those from a blog. You learn them by comparing what you bid against what the crew actually clocked, on real finished jobs. Bid 80 hours, clock 96, and the overrun quietly ate $700+ of your margin — exteriors do that more than any other job type, and mostly in the prep lines.

So run the teardown on your last exterior: real crew-hours at the loaded rate, real materials, against what you collected. The “Did I make money?” calculator does it in a few minutes, free, burden included. In my experience one measured exterior teaches you more about your prep speed than a season of feeling busy.

The short version

Estimate prep first, from up close — it's 30–50% of most repaints and the least predictable line.
Load your labor (wage + 15–25%); exterior comp rates make skipping burden extra expensive.
Exclude rot/hidden damage in writing; price it on discovery.
Carry a higher margin on exteriors than interiors — weather risk is a real cost, and a short season means a blown exterior can sink the year.
Sanity-check against your local range, then trust your hour count over any per-square-foot rule.

Run your last exterior through the calculator and find out what it really netted after the rain days. And when you want real hours captured as they happen — crews clock in per job on their phones, geofencing keeps hours on the right job, quoted-vs-actual on one screen — start free on Painter's Log: free forever for small operations, 1% on payments while you're free, 0% on Pro. No trial clock, no credit card.

Pricing other work? See a single room, a full interior, and kitchen cabinets. New to building a price at all? Start with the beginner's method.