How much paint for a 1,800 sq ft house?
How much paint for a 1,800 sq ft house? Buy 23 gallons to give every interior wall two coats at 8 ft ceilings, or 11 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 1,800 sq ft of house is roughly 3,960 sq ft of wall.
| Surface | Area | Coats | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|
| All walls | 3,960 sq ft | 1 | 11 gal + 2 qt |
| All walls | 3,960 sq ft | 2 | 23 gal |
| All ceilings (flat white) | 1,800 sq ft | 2 | 10 gal + 2 qt |
| 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 $1,035 for two coats in a $45 mid-grade line (23 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 $3,000 to $6,000 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.
Measure the house, do not trust the listing
The first thing to check at this size is whether 1,800 is the number you should be using. Listings count above-grade finished area, and a finished basement is conventionally left out of that figure and painted anyway. If yours has one, add its floor area before you buy: 700 sq ft of basement is another 1,540 sq ft of wall and roughly nine more gallons than the answer above.
Split-levels land in this bracket too, and they bring the one wall nobody plans for. The open stair between levels is a full story of wall plus the drop, commonly 12 to 14 feet from the lower tread to the ceiling, in a house where every other surface is an ordinary eight. Look at that wall before you decide this is a weekend.
Assuming it is not a split, 1,800 sq ft is still one long weekend for two people with a simple palette and no primer in the plan. It is the last size on this site where that is true, and the 3,960 sq ft of wall is why.
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 23 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 1,800 sq ft take about 10 gal + 2 qt 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 4,455 sq ft of wall and wants 25 gal + 2 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.