How Much Money You Can Expect To Spend Painting A Home's Entire Interior

When you're looking to brighten your home with inspiring paint colors, it can be exciting to dream up different ideas and styles for the whole house. Then comes the hard part — figuring out whether your plans will fit within your budget. The cost to paint a home's interior ranges from $300 to $4,700, depending on the number of rooms, size of the house, the type of paint used, the condition of the walls, the cost of labor in your area, and whether you decide instead to do the job yourself.

Although the easiest DIY paint projects take less than an hour, you'll probably need two to three days to paint a typical room yourself. If you do go DIY, though, you can save a lot on labor costs of hiring a pro, potentially $1,800 on average. They do tend to move quickly: It can take professionals five to six hours to paint one 12-by-12-foot room. If you have 10 rooms, the pro might need 50 to 60 hours to complete the entire house, charging $20 to $50 per hour.

However, if you need to rent non-standard equipment to paint your home's interior, the DIY cost savings will diminish. For example, you might need to rent a 4-foot rolling scaffold for tall ceilings, which costs around $20 per day. The safest type of ladder to use when painting a stairwell is a multi-position or combination ladder with adjustable legs. You can expect to pay around $30 for the first four hours to rent this ladder design. If you hire professionals, they already have all this equipment.

An average house has three to four bedrooms and two to three bathrooms, along with a kitchen, living room, family room, and dining room for 9 to 11 total rooms. Each room costs a different amount for labor and paint when you hire a professional. For example, a typical bedroom costs $300 to $750 for a pro to paint, although a larger master bedroom might cost up to $950 because it may have higher ceilings. The cost to paint a bathroom ranges from $200 to $500. Some areas of the bathroom, such as behind the toilet, can be extremely difficult to reach, which can complicate the work and make it take longer even for a professional. Painting a kitchen can cost $300 to $960, but if you're only painting the walls and not the cabinets, you'll probably pay less. Open-floor-plan homes might only have one wall in a kitchen, for example.

To figure out the DIY cost of paint for a room, calculate the walls' square footage. If painting the ceiling, don't forget to include that in your count. A 10-by-10 bedroom with 10-foot tall walls would have almost 400 square feet of coverage area on the four walls (minus the square footage of doors, closets, and windows). One gallon of paint should cover 350 to 400 square feet, so it should be enough for one coat on four typical bedroom walls (you may need to factor in two coats, or a primer). A gallon of interior house paint costs $20 to $100, although you usually can buy professional-grade materials for $40 to $60 per gallon.