A painting estimate template that prices prep separately.
Interior and exterior line items laid out the way paint jobs actually cost, with the surfaces and prep work that usually get folded into one number broken out.
Get the painting estimate template
A working spreadsheet, not a picture of one. The totals, overhead, and margin are live formulas. We email it over, so no download to lose track of.
One email with the template attached. We will not pass your address on.
Most painting estimate templates have three lines: labor, paint, total. That works right up until you quote a house where the prep takes longer than the painting, and you find out afterward that the number you gave covered neither.
The structure below separates the things that vary independently. Surface area drives one set of costs, condition drives another, and mixing them is why a per-square-foot rate loses money on exactly the jobs that were hardest to do.
The template
| Section | Line item | Unit | What decides it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prep | Masking and protection | Room or elevation | Furniture, flooring, landscaping |
| Prep | Scraping and sanding | Hours | Condition, not area |
| Prep | Patching and filling | Hours | Nail holes, cracks, water damage |
| Prep | Caulking | Linear feet | Trim runs, gaps, joints |
| Prep | Pressure washing | Square feet | Exterior only |
| Coating | Primer | Square feet | Bare substrate, or heavy color change |
| Coating | Walls, finish coats | Square feet | Area x coat count |
| Coating | Ceilings | Square feet | Priced apart from walls, slower to roll |
| Coating | Trim, doors, windows | Linear feet or count | Cut-in time, not wall area |
| Materials | Paint by product | Gallons | Coverage, coats, substrate |
| Materials | Sundries | Percent or per day | Tape, film, covers, brushes, abrasives |
| Access | Staging, ladders, lifts | Day rate | Anything above one story |
| Totals | Job cost subtotal | Sum | Everything above |
| Totals | Overhead recovery | Percent | Your annual rate |
| Totals | Profit | Percent | Margin, not markup |
Three lines that earn their place
Ceilings sit apart from walls because rolling overhead is slower per square foot, and textured ceilings consume noticeably more paint over the same measured area. One combined number hides both.
Trim is counted by linear feet or by opening rather than by wall area. Cut-in time scales with how many edges there are, which is why a small room full of windows and doors can take longer than a larger empty one.
Prep gets its own block because it does not scale with size at all. A small house in poor condition will beat a big house in good condition on total hours, every time, and a template that buries prep inside a square foot rate cannot show that.
Filling it in
Measure wall and ceiling area rather than floor area, deduct only the large openings, and write the coat count into the estimate as an explicit line so a customer comparing your bid against a one-coat quote can see the difference.
Overhead and profit go on as separate percentages at the bottom. Combining them into a single markup means that when a job comes back tight you cannot tell whether you underestimated the work or whether your overhead rate has drifted out of date.
The longer version of the reasoning behind each of these lines is in our walkthrough on how to estimate a painting job, and the margin arithmetic at the bottom of the sheet is covered in markup vs margin.
When a template stops being enough
A template solves the formatting problem. It does not help you remember which elevation had the failing caulk, or what the customer said about wanting the trim a different color, and those are the details that decide whether the number is right.
That part is a capture problem rather than a document problem. Photos of each elevation and a record of the walkthrough, turned into a scope while the details are still accurate, is what a blank template cannot do for you. FlyQuote drafts painting quotes from exactly that, and you review a filled sheet instead of an empty one.