How much paint for a 3,000 sq ft house?
How much paint for a 3,000 sq ft house? Buy 38 gallons to give every interior wall two coats at 8 ft ceilings, or 19 gal 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 3,000 sq ft of house is roughly 6,600 sq ft of wall.
| Surface | Area | Coats | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|
| All walls | 6,600 sq ft | 1 | 19 gal |
| All walls | 6,600 sq ft | 2 | 38 gal |
| All ceilings (flat white) | 3,000 sq ft | 2 | 17 gal + 1 qt |
| Trim & doors (semi-gloss) | varies | 2 | 2 to 3 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 $1,710 for two coats in a $45 mid-grade line (38 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 $4,800 to $9,500 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.
Thirty-eight gallons is where tint batches start to show
An order this size does not come out of one tint batch. Paint is tinted per container at the counter and the colorant dispensers carry a tolerance, so two separately tinted pails of the same deep color can differ by an amount that is invisible on a chip and perfectly visible across a thirty-foot wall in side light. Long uninterrupted walls are exactly what a 3,000 sq ft house has.
The fix is boxing, and it is literal: pour the pails together into a clean drum, stir them into one batch, then pour back. Painters do it without being asked at this volume. It is also the single practice most likely to be missing from a DIY job of this size, and the one that shows up in the photographs afterwards.
Order ahead, too. Thirty-eight gallons of a custom color is not a walk-in purchase; the counter will have the base but not seven pails of it, and a special order runs a few days. Put the ceiling white and the trim enamel on the same order, and ask for the batch numbers on the receipt so a touch-up gallon in 2029 can be matched to the run rather than to a chip.
Last thing, and it sounds trivial until the sixth room: write down which color and which sheen went where. By the time you reach the last bedroom you will not remember whether the hall was eggshell or satin, and the wall will not tell you.
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 38 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 3,000 sq ft take about 17 gal + 1 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 a house this size), 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 7,425 sq ft of wall and wants 42 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.