How to Price Paint Jobs Correctly (Without Guessing)

If you own a painting business and you're not sure your pricing is actually right, this video is for you. Maybe you're winning a lot of jobs, but cash still feels tight. Maybe you're losing bids and wondering if you're too expensive, or maybe you're just guessing, hoping your prices feel about right. That's dangerous because pricing mistakes are one of the fastest ways to destroy profit in a painting business. And today I'm going to show you how you price your jobs accurately while maximizing profit without guessing and without relying on your gut feel. If you clicked on this video, you're probably wondering 3 things. First, how do I make sure my pricing is actually accurate? Second, how do I properly mark up my price when I present it to my customers? And third, how do I know when I'm underpricing or overpricing my jobs? In this video, I'm gonna answer all 3 using a simple, repeatable 3-step framework you can apply immediately. My name is Daniel Honan. I'm a CPA and former painting business owner. Over the last several years, I've helped more than 500 painting businesses from startup all the way to $20 million in revenue understand their numbers, fix pricing, and save big in taxes. And what I've learned is most pricing problems aren't about effort, they're about skill, and they're not about working harder, they're about math and systems. Quick note before we dive in: if you like learning this way, I wrote a book called Profitable Painter that walks through these same frameworks in more detail— budgeting, owner pay, cash flow, pricing. It normally costs about $20 on Amazon, but you get a free free copy, just cover the shipping. There's a link in the description if you want to go deeper. All right, let's get into it. Step 1: Use production rates to price accurately. The foundation of good pricing is accurate labor hours, and the best way to get accurate labor hours is by using production rates. A production rate measures how long it takes to paint a specific surface. For example, how many square feet per hour it takes to paint an interior wall for one coat, or how many linear feet per hour it takes to paint trim, or how many doors per hour your crew can complete. The Painter Contractors Association, the PCA, has estimating guides with sample production rates that are a great place to start. But the most accurate production rates come from your own team by timing jobs, tracking hours by surface type, and refining those numbers over time. There's another benefit here. When your estimates are based on real production rates, your team buys into them because expectations are clear instead of vague work orders, your crews know exactly what the job requires. Here's a quick story. We worked with a painting business owner who was doing what I call square footage estimating. He'd walk up to a house, eyeball the size, and throw out a price. The problem was that every interior was different. Some had heavy trims, some had lots of doors, some had vaulted ceilings, and his gross profit was all over the place. Some jobs were great, others were disasters. We switched him to production rate estimating. Now his work orders looked like this: 10 hours for walls, 8 hours for trim, 6 hours for doors, 6 hours for ceilings. Almost immediately, pricing became more consistent and gross profit stabilized. And his crews actually liked the change because the expectations were clear. Accurate pricing starts with accurate hours. Step 2: Mark up correctly to hit your gross profit target. Once your labor hours are accurate, the next step is markup. Quick definition: gross profit is what's left over after you subtract labor costs from revenue. Direct costs are labor and materials. This is where a lot of painting business owners get tripped up. Here's a common mistake. I worked with a painter who was marking up labor correctly but not marking up materials at all. His labor numbers looked fine. His average painter made about $25 an hour. Fully burdened, that cost him around $32 an hour. He charged customers $64 an hour, and that's a 100% markup on labor. On materials, zero markup, no margin, no buffer, no recovery for waste handling or cash flow. He was targeting a 50% gross profit margin but consistently landing around 35%. And the reason was simple: materials weren't marked up. If you want to hit your gross profit target, you need to mark up both labor and materials. That's the correct formula: price equals direct costs divided by 1 minus your target gross profit. Let me give you an example. If your labor and materials add up to $5,000 and you want a 50% gross profit margin, you divide $5,000 by 1 minus 0.5. That gives you a $10,000 price. And yes, that includes marking up materials. Materials still create risk, and risk deserves margin. Materials tie up cash, they require management, and if you don't mark them up, You're giving away margin. Step 3: Use close rate to calibrate your pricing. Once your pricing is accurate and properly marked up, the market gives you feedback. That feedback is your close rate. Quick definition: close rate is simply the percentage of estimates you present that turn into signed jobs. If you give 10 estimates and close 4 of them, your close rate is 40%. Now, this only works if your sales process is solid. That means you qualify leads before for estimating, you present in-home using a script, you attempt to close on the spot, and you follow up consistently. If sales execution is weak, close rate stops being a pricing signal and just becomes noise. Assuming your sales process is solid and your leads are qualified, here's how to read the close rate in residential repaint. Close rate is not about ego, it's about market feedback. If you're closing around 80%, you're severely underpriced. The market is telling you your prices are dramatically low. If you're in the 60 to 80% range, you're underpriced. You've got significant room to raise prices. Between 50 and 60% close rate, you are slightly underpriced. You probably could increase your prices by 30 to 50%. Of course, test this incrementally. Don't increase your prices overnight by 50%. If your close rate is between 40% and 50%, you're mildly underpriced. Probably can increase your prices by 10% to 25%. The ideal pricing zone is a 30% to 40% close rate. At 30% to 40% close rate, you're winning enough work to keep the crews busy, but losing enough bids to know you're not leaving any money on the table. That's where top-performing painting companies intentionally price themselves. Why? Because it maximizes gross profit. It filters out price shoppers. It attracts the right homeowner and protects margins as you grow. If you're consistently above 45% close rate, the market is telling you to raise prices. Let me give you a real example. We worked with a painting business owner whose gross profit was around 45%. That's not terrible, but he had aggressive growth goals and wanted to increase marketing spend. Now, to do that safely, we needed his gross profit north of 50%. So instead of guessing, we looked at his close rate. It was at 60%, and that was the signal. At 60% close rate, that told us he had room to raise prices without killing demand. We increased his prices by 10%, then we held pricing steady for 30 days and watched the numbers. 30 days later, his close rate settled right around 40%. Still healthy, still predictable. But here's the key: that 10% price increase pushed his gross profit from 45% gross profit to 55% gross profit. Same team, same marketing, same sales process, just better pricing. That's how you use close rate to calibrate pricing intelligently. Now, if your close rate drops below 30%, don't immediately lower prices. First, check your sales process. Poor qualification, weak presentation, no clear value framing. Little or no follow-up. Fix your sales process before touching pricing. Second, look at your customer avatar. If you're selling to the wrong customer, no pricing model will save you. Wrong customers destroy close rates every time. Summary. Let's bring this together. To price a painting business correctly, first, use production rates to build accurate labor hours. Second, mark up labor and materials correctly to hit your gross profit margin target. Third, use close rates to calibrate your pricing based on market feedback. No guessing, no vibes, just systems and math. Pricing is the number one issue I see in painting businesses. The second biggest issue? Overcompensating the team and killing margins without realizing it. In the next video, I'm going to break down how to compensate your team correctly so pricing actually turns into profit. Click the video on the screen now and I'll see you there.