How much paint for a 1,000 sq ft house?
How much paint for a 1,000 sq ft house? Buy 13 gallons to give every interior wall two coats at 8 ft ceilings, or 6 gal + 2 qt for one coat. A house carries about 2.2 sq ft of paintable wall per sq ft of floor after doors and windows (our factor), so 1,000 sq ft of house is roughly 2,200 sq ft of wall.
| Surface | Area | Coats | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|
| All walls | 2,200 sq ft | 1 | 6 gal + 2 qt |
| All walls | 2,200 sq ft | 2 | 13 gal |
| All ceilings (flat white) | 1,000 sq ft | 2 | 6 gal |
| Trim & doors (semi-gloss) | varies | 2 | 1 to 2 gal |
Nobody paints a whole house in one color, and that matters for the shopping list: gallons split across four colors round up four times. If your plan is greige everywhere plus one accent wall and a moody office, price the big color from this page and the small ones with the single-wall calculator.
What the job costs (estimate)
The wall paint itself is about $585 for two coats in a $45 mid-grade line (13 gallons), with ceilings and trim bought as their own cans. Labor is where a whole-house repaint lands: painting every interior wall in a house this size typically runs $1,800 to $3,500 in most markets, walls only, no ceilings or trim. That is a planning band, not a quote, and it swings on wall height, prep, and how many colors you run.
Price grades, ceilings, trim, and primer on the paint cost calculator.
Condo or bungalow, and a contractor's minimum
Interiors this size are mostly condos and pre-1960 bungalows, and each carries a catch worth knowing before you open a can. In a condo the entry door usually faces a common hallway and the association owns its outside face, so that one door is not yours to repaint. In a pre-war bungalow the walls are plaster rather than drywall, and bare or chalky plaster drinks the first coat well past the 350 sq ft a gallon covers on primed board.
The upside is that 13 gallons is little enough that one color throughout is a real plan, and this is the only house size here where that holds. A single color means a single tint batch, no shift between rooms, and one can left on the shelf that still matches in ten years.
Where the arithmetic stops being proportional is the quote. Most painting contractors carry a minimum job charge, so a 1,000 sq ft interior does not come in at half the price of a 2,000 sq ft one. Read the band above as sitting nearer its top than the floor area suggests, and expect the crew to be gone in two days.
Questions people ask
Is that every room, or the rooms people actually paint?
Every wall in the house, twice. Real repaints usually skip closets, the garage, and a room or two, so treat 13 gallons as the whole-hog ceiling and subtract rooms you're leaving alone. One 12x12 room is roughly 2 gallons of the total.
How much for ceilings and trim on top?
Ceilings across 1,000 sq ft take about 6 gal of flat white for two coats. Trim, doors, and baseboards for a whole house typically run 1 to 2 gallons of semi-gloss (2 to 3 for larger houses), painted from their own can.
Do 9 ft ceilings change it much?
By 12.5%: wall area scales straight with height. At 9 ft this house carries about 2,475 sq ft of wall and wants 14 gal + 1 qt for two coats. The calculator has a height setting.
Other house sizes
Same floor area, outside walls: the exterior calculator takes your footprint, story count, and real door and window counts. Have room measurements instead? Use the room paint calculator room by room. One accent color: single-wall calculator. Materials dollars: paint cost calculator.