Homeowners and discount competitors quote interior painting as a price per floor square foot. That number is easy to say and usually wrong. Floor area is not paintable area, and the surfaces that take the day — trim, doors, second coats, prep — barely show up on the floor plan.
The free painting bid calculator prices the job from production rates instead. Below is the same arithmetic on a typical 1,200 sq ft, 8-foot-ceiling, 3-bedroom interior, using the calculator's starting inputs so you can open the tool and change them.
Open the bid calculatorOn 1,200 floor square feet, $2/sq ft is a $2,400 job. That sounds like a day's work plus paint. It is not. The same house has roughly 2,400 sq ft of walls, 1,200 sq ft of ceilings, 320 linear feet of trim, eight doors, and ten windows. Those are the hours.
Using starting production rates — 200 sq ft of wall per hour on the first coat, 175 on ceilings, 50 linear feet of trim, 1.25 doors, 2.5 windows — and a 0.65 extra-coat factor:
That is about 64 labor hours. Trim and doors together rival the wall time, and they contribute almost nothing to the floor-square-foot figure the homeowner is arguing from.
At a $25 wage and 25% payroll burden, those hours are already about $2,000 in loaded labor before paint. Paint at 350 sq ft per gallon, two coats, 10% waste, and $45/gallon is another several hundred dollars. Overhead and a 25% target margin sit on top of that. The walk-away price — total job cost, before any profit — is above $2,400 on these inputs. A $2/sq ft bid is then a losing bid, not a competitive one.
Estimate surfaces, not floor plans. Time a few of your own jobs and replace the starting rates. Enter a price already on the table and see whether it clears your walk-away number. The calculator does that arithmetic in the browser and does not upload the job.
Price your next interior with the calculatorPrice per floor square foot cannot see trim, doors, coats, prep, or ceiling height. Those surfaces take labor hours that never appear in the floor plan, so a $2/sq ft bid on a typical 3-bedroom house can sit below the job's own cost.
Estimate each surface from a production rate (how much of that surface one painter covers per hour), add extra coats at a fraction of first-coat time, then add prep, paint, payroll burden, overhead, and the margin you intend to keep.