Priced the way Painter work is billed
A interior repaint and a trim & doors don't get quoted the same way, so why would every trade? SideWRK prices Painter the way the work is really billed: per square foot, all-in — about $3.50 a square foot. Tap the work, put in the numbers, and the line prices itself — no napkin math, no undercharging a job because you rushed the quote.
What Painter jobs actually run
These are the starting numbers SideWRK loads for common Painter work — researched to be realistic, so you can send an estimate that isn't a guess. Adjust any of them to your market in a tap.
Typical starting prices in the app — your area, your materials, and your reputation move them. You set your own; these just keep you from undercharging on the first quote.
Exterior repaint, priced out
Numbers only mean something on a real job, so here's how SideWRK builds the ticket on a common one:
SideWRK puts the parts on at what you actually paid — so the $2,850 of labor is what you clear, not a marked-up parts total dressed up as profit.
What moves a Painter price
Two Painter jobs that look the same on paper can be a hundred dollars apart once you're on site. Here's what actually changes the number — the things to size up before you quote:
- Prep — patching, sanding, and priming a beat-up wall is most of a good paint job, so never quote the topcoat alone.
- Coats and color change — dark-to-light or a full two coats is more paint and more time than a refresh.
- Trim, doors, and ceilings — cut-in work is slow, skilled, and shouldn't be lumped into the wall rate.
What a Painter job puts on the record
Every trade documents something different, and Painter is no exception. SideWRK captures the scope — interior, exterior, cabinets, deck and the rest of what your work needs on the record — the details that protect you and make the invoice stand up:
- the scope — interior, exterior, cabinets, deck
- a pre-1978 lead flag
- EPA lead-safe firm certification and the Renovate Right pamphlet, plus OSHA lead and VOC-limit notes
Example note on a job: "One coat at customer request — advised coverage may vary."
How to price a Painter job in SideWRK
- 1
Start the job and add your work
Open a Painter job and tap a suggestion like "Interior repaint" or "Exterior repaint" — the common work is already loaded, so you tap instead of type.
- 2
Price it per square foot
Enter the numbers and the line prices itself, per square foot, all-in — about $3.50 a square foot. Put parts on at your cost so what you clear is real profit, not just the Painter ticket total.
- 3
Note the details
Add a plain-English note — for example, "One coat at customer request — advised coverage may vary." — and a photo of the work.
- 4
Log what the job needs
Capture the Painter-specific records: the scope — interior, exterior, cabinets, deck, and a pre-1978 lead flag.
- 5
Send it and get paid
Send the Painter estimate for approval. Your customer approves from their phone, the invoice goes out, and you get paid — card or Apple Pay, on the spot.
Staying on the right side of the rules
SideWRK documents your Painter work — it doesn't make you licensed, and it says so plainly. What to know: EPA lead-safe (RRP) work once you disturb more than six square feet inside, twenty outside, or any window on a pre-1978 home — plus VOC content limits. The app flags the permit and license triggers so they never surprise you mid-job.
Painter pricing — common questions
How do I price a Painter job in SideWRK?
You bill per square foot, all-in — about $3.50 a square foot. Add the work — Interior repaint, Exterior repaint, Single room — enter the numbers, and each line prices itself. Parts go on at your cost, so you see real profit and not just the total.
What does a typical Painter job cost?
It depends on the work, but as a realistic starting point a common job like exterior repaint runs about $3,800 in the app — roughly $2,850 of that is your labor and about $950 is parts at your cost. Common Painter work ranges from about $250 to $3,800. Those are defaults you can change — you always set your own prices.
What does SideWRK document on a Painter job?
The records Painter work actually needs: the scope — interior, exterior, cabinets, deck; a pre-1978 lead flag; EPA lead-safe firm certification and the Renovate Right pamphlet, plus OSHA lead and VOC-limit notes. They stay on the job as you work, so the paper trail is built instead of reconstructed later, and the disclosures this trade needs print on the estimate and invoice themselves.
Do I need a license to do Painter work?
That depends on your state and the job, but here's the shape of it: EPA lead-safe (RRP) work once you disturb more than six square feet inside, twenty outside, or any window on a pre-1978 home — plus VOC content limits. SideWRK documents the work; it doesn't certify you. It flags the permit and license triggers so nothing sneaks up on you.
Does SideWRK work for trades other than Painter?
Yes — it runs all 42 trades, each priced and documented its own way. If you run more than one, the Multi-Trade plan unlocks them all and switches between them in a tap.
Your first jobs
Exterior season ends on the weather's schedule, not yours. Most of the country gets ten or twelve more weeks of it after the first week of August, and then the decision is taken out of everybody's hands until spring. That deadline compresses something true all year into something impossible to miss: a homeowner choosing between two painters in October cannot see either one's cut line yet. They are not comparing craftsmanship. They are comparing which of you sounded like you already knew what the job was.
Where those first customers come from is its own subject and it has its own page — how to get your first painting customers, which costs a 12 × 12 bedroom out line by line and follows the money down to the hourly wage hiding inside the quote. This chapter is the other half of that. What the app does between "let me get you a number" and yes.
- The question that goes in before the price does. A painting job in SideWRK hangs off a property, and the property asks four things: what to call it, the service address, the scope you are quoting — interior, exterior, cabinets and trim, deck and fence — and one more that almost no quote in this trade asks out loud. Was it built before 1978? That is not paperwork for its own sake. The answer decides whether this is an ordinary repaint or a job with federal lead-safe rules sitting on top of it, which changes the crew, the sanding and the number. Asking it in the driveway, before you say a figure, is most of the difference between a painter and somebody with a sprayer. The answer stays on your record; it is not something the customer has to read.
- Writing the estimate is a tap, not an evening. Open a painting job and the six work titles from the table at the top of this page sit as chips under the description, so naming the work is a pick rather than a sentence you compose. Type the footage and a running This work = total moves while you type. Each piece of work saves as its own group: the labor line, any material, one plain-English note, a photo. The note is labelled where you type it, because it shows on the estimate and the invoice, and the photos travel out with the estimate so the customer is looking at the same wall you are. Your business name is on the document before you start; your license number joins it as soon as that number is saved in Settings.
- They approve it by typing their name. The customer opens the link on their phone, reads the lines, and types their name to accept. What they typed is then part of the document, dated. The moment they open it your phone gets a push, or an email instead if you have never registered a push on that phone. One or the other, never a matching pair, and never twice on the same job inside six hours. In an October where the customer is deciding this week, that ping is the whole game: your number is on their screen right now, and the painter who rings while it is still there books the work.
- The deposit is taken at yes. Waived, 10, 25, 33 or 50 percent on the estimate itself, or a default set once in Shop that every job after it starts from. On an exterior that is not a test of the customer's character, and the arithmetic for why 25 is usually the right one is two chapters down.
Repeat business
Fifteen of the forty-two trades in SideWRK carry a recurring plan you can sell, a cadence the app files a pre-filled job against every cycle. Painting is not one of them and this page is not going to invent one. A wall does not need you back on a schedule, and a painter who tries to sell one sounds like they are reaching. The repeat work in this trade is real; it is just shaped differently. It is the house that gets done a room at a time, the landlord whose units turn over, and the estimate somebody said no to in April.
- The house that is not finished. Almost nobody paints a whole house at once. They do the living room this year because company is coming, then the hallway, then eventually the kitchen they have been arguing about since the spring. The property carries the notes you took while you were in there — surfaces, prep, colors, access — which is why "what did we put on the hallway trim" is a lookup two years later instead of a call to the paint counter hoping somebody wrote it on a lid. That record is what makes the second quote take four minutes and land higher than the stranger's.
- Two taps for the room on the other side of the hall. A job that is done, paid, or lost carries a Do this again button. It opens a fresh estimate on the same customer and the same property with the title, the lines at their same prices, and the notes carried across; payments and photos stay behind on the old job. So the identical second bedroom is an estimate before you have left the driveway. And on a lost one it is the move most painters never make: the exterior nobody said yes to in April, re-sent in September at your number, with nothing retyped.
- The landlord's list, imported instead of typed. A property manager hands you eleven units on a spreadsheet, a PDF, or a photograph of a printed page. All three go in the same way. Drop the file and it comes back as an editable preview with the duplicates flagged, which you correct before a single row is written, and the addresses come along with the names.
- The ask happens once, on its own. A finished job emails the customer a review request by itself, then one reminder a few days later, and that is the cap. Two, not a campaign. It is a switch in Shop if you would rather do the asking yourself.
Nothing in here sends the same message to a list, and the platform never sends a text message at all. A text to a customer goes from your own phone, with your thumb on it.
How painting bills
Add work to a painting job and you get two boxes, Square feet over Rate ($/sq ft), the rate already carrying $3.50 and the footage greyed at 1,200 until you type over it. Everyone argues about the rate. Almost nobody argues about the box above it, which is the one that decides whether the quote was any good, because a painting job has two honest square-foot numbers in it and they are nowhere near each other.
So start with which footage the $3.50 is against, because the box will not ask and the rate does not care. It is the floor: the square footage of the space, the number the homeowner already knows because it is on their listing. Our own painting calculator says so in as many words. Quote off the floor square footage, because in a normal-height room it tracks the wall area closely enough to hold, and price the actual wall surface only when the job is a single accent wall or a stairwell, where the shortcut stops working.
You can check that the menu at the top of this page was built the same way. Divide any of those prices by $3.50 and the size of the job it was priced for falls back out. Single room, $450, is 129 square feet of floor, a bedroom somewhere around 11 × 12. Interior repaint, $2,200, is just under 630, which is a small condo and not a house. Exterior repaint, $3,800, is a little over 1,085. Those six numbers are not fees. They are one rate held against buildings of three different sizes, which is why the box above the rate is the one carrying the estimate.
Now the number that is not the floor. A 12 × 12 bedroom is 144 square feet of floor, so $504 at the default rate. That same bedroom, under an eight-foot ceiling, has 384 square feet of wall before you deduct anything, and 352 once a door and a window come off at the sizes the calculator uses, 20 square feet and 12. Put the same $3.50 against the wall number and the bedroom quotes at $1,232 — roughly two and a half times the job. Nothing in the app stops you. The rate box has no idea which figure went into the one above it, and no warning fires for a bedroom quoted at two and a half times the work in it. Pick the denominator before you pick the rate, and never mix the two inside one estimate.
Here is the season's job worked all the way out: a 1,400 square foot single-story ranch, exterior, two coats, with the trim entered on its own line at the price the menu already carries for it.
Two lines, one estimate. At the researched split, $4,200 of that total is your hands and $1,400 is material. And $1,400 is also exactly 25 percent of $5,600, which is the argument for the deposit picker sitting on the estimate: a quarter down on an exterior buys the paint with their money before you open a can, on a job where the material goes on the wall in week one and the balance does not land until week three. The percentage is not a preference. It is the material line.
Your rate is saved once in Shop and every painting job after that opens holding it. There is a floor to set beside it, which matters more in this trade than in most: the smallest thing on the menu is a $250 patch, and a patch on the far side of town is a morning gone. When a ticket lands under the floor you set, the job tells you how far under, and one tap puts the difference on as a Shop minimum row the customer can see, instead of you inflating a real line to get there. From there it is the same short road as any other job on the painter app: add the work, send it, get paid.
Multiplying jobs
Painting is the trade where the customer stands next to the work for three days. Everything that could be added gets thought about out loud: the ceiling that now reads yellow against a fresh wall, the closet nobody opened, the shutters that will look wrong beside a new body color. The only question is whether those thoughts become lines on a document or an argument on the last afternoon.
- Put the extras on the estimate and let them decide. A line can be marked as an optional add-on, which turns it into a tick box on the approval page with the total sliding up and down as they change their mind. The porch ceiling, the shutters, the closet interiors, the garage door nobody mentioned at the walk: priced, visible, and picked by the person paying for them, in writing, before anyone opens a can.
- The number cannot creep. Add work that carries a job past the figure the customer already agreed to and the job flags it, showing the old number against the new one and offering two exits: record that they said yes to the extra, or send the estimate again. It stops nothing and permits everything. All it insists on is that the increase be seen by somebody, which on a trade built out of "while you're in here" is the entire difference between a change order and an argument on the last afternoon.
- You know the second they open it. Loading the estimate pings your phone: a push, or an email if no push is registered, one or the other and never both, quiet on anything already approved or declined and never twice on a job inside six hours. An estimate nobody answers then follows itself up by email at three days and again at seven. Two, then it stops. Silence is rarely a decision — it is usually an estimate that arrived on a Tuesday and got buried by Wednesday.
- Money still owed asks for itself. A wrapped job carrying a balance sends a reminder at three days, seven, and fourteen. Three, and that is the end of it. Each one carries a pay link, which settles by card or Apple Pay from the customer's own phone. The other route is a payment request you send by hand, which settles into a handle you saved rather than through a checkout, customer to you. Read the note SideWRK puts up as you save each handle: the apps have their own rules about taking money for work, they differ from one another, and knowing which one you are standing on is worth thirty seconds. And if card money has to be yours before Monday, instant payout moves it onto your debit card in about half an hour for 1 percent, quoted on screen before you agree to it.
- Truck stock that counts itself down. Painter's tape, roller covers, drop cloths, caulk, sandpaper: the painting list waits as tap-to-add chips, each one opening the stock form already named with a sensible reorder point in the box. The list itself starts empty; you tap what you actually carry. Pull one onto a job and the count drops, and the app speaks up on the one that empties the shelf. Finding that out on a Saturday morning, halfway up a ladder, is its own particular kind of day.
- Shoot the room before you move a thing. The two photos pair into the gallery on your public page, and painting is unusually well served by that: no homeowner can read a mitre or a taped seam, but everybody can read a dark panelled den beside the room it turned into. The catch is that the useful half of the pair has to be taken before the first drop cloth goes down, when the room is still ugly and you are in a hurry.
All of it is running on a sample painting business in the live demo — free, no signup, nothing saved.
Price it now
Put the room in — length, width, ceiling height, and how many doors and windows come out of it — and the tool does the takeoff: wall area net of the openings, gallons of wall paint at 350 square feet to the gallon per coat, then ceiling, primer, trim and tape, with your labor on top. The same free calculator the painter page runs, right here (or open the full version):
It is an interior tool, and its rate box is deliberately the other denominator: labor only, against wall area, because it is building the material side for you out of the takeoff. The $3.50 in the app is all-in, against the floor. Two different numbers, both of them yours to set.
The paper worth keeping
The list further up says what a painting job records. What follows is why a painter would want each of those things on file even if nobody ever asked for them:
- Everything you learned standing in the house. What you called the job, where it is, which scope you quoted, the pre-1978 answer, and a notes field asking for surfaces, prep, colors and access. Of all that, only the property's label reaches the customer's copy — its address, if you never gave it a label — and the rest stays on your side of the account. Which is the point — it is the reason next spring's quote for the same house takes four minutes and is not a guess.
- Four notices you never have to remember. They are printed onto the estimate and the invoice by the app, on every painting job, in the same four paragraphs each time. On a pre-1978 property, disturbing more than about six square feet of interior paint per room, about twenty square feet outside, or any window at all puts the work under the federal EPA lead-safe renovation rules: a certified firm, a certified renovator leading it, lead-safe practices, and the EPA "Renovate Right" pamphlet in the owner's hands before anything starts. SideWRK provides neither the certification nor the pamphlet and says so. Prep on lead-painted surfaces — sanding, scraping, blasting — also falls under OSHA's Lead in Construction standard the moment a helper is on the job, and open-flame burning and dry power-sanding of lead paint without HEPA control are prohibited outright. Coatings are meant to meet the VOC content limits that apply where the work is done, federal and stricter in California and several other states, and it is the manufacturer who sets a product's VOC compliance. The fourth line says the quiet part plainly: SideWRK is a documentation tool, not legal advice, and does not determine or guarantee compliance with any of it.
- Two cautions that arrive while you are still holding the phone. The $5,600 ranch worked out above sets off both of them. One appears once a total climbs past the size at which home-improvement work generally wants a written contract, and it is careful to add that SideWRK is not the contract and you should bring your own. The other appears when a total reaches the point most states put a contractor license behind, and only if there is no license number saved on your profile — with the sentence painters most need attached to it, which is that writing the exterior and the trim as two separate estimates does not put you back under the line. Neither one stops you doing anything. Where your own state draws these lines is still a thing you go and check. Put your license number in Settings and it rides on every document you send after that.
- The paint receipts, already sorted. A painter buys material on almost every job, in small amounts, from two or three places. Those receipts, the numbered invoices and the payments feed a year-end summary you can hand over or export, which is the difference between an evening of March and a folder in the truck. The rest of the paper trail assembles the same way, as you work.
SideWRK helps you keep the records. The rules stay your state's, and meeting them stays yours.