Painting & plastering estimating
in the trade
Square footage is the easy part.
Takeoffs and bid pricing for painting, stucco and plaster subcontractors. Counted by substrate, coat and system — not one rate smeared across a building — and back in three business days, with a confirmed delivery date within an hour of you sending the plans.
What gets counted
Surface area separated by what it actually is and what actually goes on it. Two walls with the same footage aren't the same money.
Prep
- Patching, sanding, skim and spot-priming
- Caulking and sealant at trim and openings
- Masking, papering and floor protection
- Pressure washing and substrate cleaning
- Rust treatment and sound-metal prep
- Efflorescence, chalking and old-coating removal
Interior coatings
- Area by substrate — board, CMU, wood, metal, previously painted
- Primer plus coats, per the paint system in the spec
- Sheen and color changes read off the finish schedule
- Doors, frames and louvers counted as units, not area
- Trim, base and standing millwork by linear foot
- Epoxy, urethane and high-performance coatings in wet and back-of-house areas
Exterior & high-performance
- Elastomeric and acrylic wall coatings
- Waterproofing, sealers and clear coats
- Structural steel, railings, gates and bollards
- Intumescent and fire-resistive coatings
- Exposed deck, structure and overhead — priced at its own production rate
- Traffic coatings and line striping where they're in your scope
Stucco, plaster & EIFS
- Three-coat and one-coat stucco systems
- Lath, weather-resistive barrier and fasteners
- Casing bead, corner aid, control joints, weep screed
- EIFS — board thickness, mesh, base and finish coat
- Veneer plaster and blueboard
- Texture matching, patch and repair work
- Ornamental bands, moldings and foam shapes
Where painting and stucco bids lose money
Almost never the wall area. Almost always one of these.
- Prep written somewhere other than your section. Substrate condition, patching and protection get scattered through the general conditions and the demolition scope, and then land on you anyway. It's the single biggest variable in a paint bid and it's the one most often left out of the number.
- Level 5 and critical lighting. When the drywall finish isn't right for the lighting, the paint gets blamed and the painter does the extra skim. If the spec calls critical or raking light, that changes your scope whether or not it changes the drawings.
- A "one color" job that isn't. Read the finish schedule, not the elevation. Every additional color and sheen is another cut-in, another setup, another day of moving one bucket around a floor.
- Exposed structure and deck. Painting an open ceiling — deck, joists, hangers, conduit, ductwork — is enormous surface area at a terrible production rate. Taking it as flat square footage will bury you.
- Doors, frames and units taken as area. A door is a unit of labor with a setup, not 21 square feet. Same for louvers, grilles, handrails and gates.
- Height and access. Anything past a six-foot ladder changes the number — lifts, scaffold, swing stage on a high-rise, and the hours spent moving them rather than coating anything.
- Touch-up and punch treated as free. It is never free, it always happens, and on an occupied or phased job it's a line item, not a rounding error.
How your labor gets priced
Painting production varies more between crews and methods than almost anything else on a job. Spraying an open shell is a different business from brushing trim in an occupied corridor, and one rate across a building is how bids get lost or regretted.
So I'll ask how you actually work: square feet per man-day by method — spray, roll, brush — your rates for cut-in versus open wall, your coverage assumptions per gallon on each substrate, and what you allow for setup and takedown. For stucco and plaster, yards or square feet per crew-day by system, and how you handle scratch, brown and finish separately. If you track it, I price to your numbers. If you don't, I use mine and show every one of them in the summary so you can tell me where I'm off.
And the rest of it gets priced too, because it's real: lifts and scaffold, containment and protection, off-hours and phased work, dry time between coats where the schedule doesn't allow for it, and the touch-up that's coming whether or not anyone scoped it.
Who this is for
The painting sub bidding his own work
You're on site all day and pricing at night. This gets the bids out that currently don't.
The stucco and plaster contractor
Exterior packages where the accessories and the access are the real money, not the mix.
The contractor who does both
Plenty of shops carry drywall, stucco and paint. One estimator can price the whole package instead of three.
Try it on a job you're actually chasing.
Your first takeoff is free: up to 10 drawing sheets on a real bid, or a typical floor or unit type on a bigger job. Send the set, the finish schedule and the bid date, and I'll come back within the hour with a delivery date.
Standard turnaround is for paying work. Give the free one a few days' runway.