How much paint for a 1,500 sq ft house?
How much paint for a 1,500 sq ft house? Buy 19 gallons to give every interior wall two coats at 8 ft ceilings, or 9 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 1,500 sq ft of house is roughly 3,300 sq ft of wall.
| Surface | Area | Coats | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|
| All walls | 3,300 sq ft | 1 | 9 gal + 2 qt |
| All walls | 3,300 sq ft | 2 | 19 gal |
| All ceilings (flat white) | 1,500 sq ft | 2 | 9 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 $855 for two coats in a $45 mid-grade line (19 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 $2,500 to $5,000 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.
The size where a color plan starts costing real money
Fifteen hundred square feet is usually one story, which means nothing on these walls is out of reach of a four-foot pole and a two-step stool. That is worth more than it sounds: this is the largest interior most people can paint start to finish without renting, borrowing, or standing on something they will regret.
The variable that actually moves the bill here is how many colors are in the plan. Nineteen gallons in one color is nineteen gallons. The same house in five colors is five separate round-ups, and a round-up averages half a gallon, so a five-color scheme buys roughly two gallons it will never open. Settle the palette before you write the shopping list.
This is also where the ceiling decision stops being free. Ceilings across 1,500 sq ft take about 9 gal of flat white, close to a third of the wall order on its own. Skipping them is the largest single line you can cut, and in a house with no water stains and no smokers in its past it is a defensible cut.
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 19 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 1,500 sq ft take about 9 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 3,713 sq ft of wall and wants 21 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.