 HOW MUCH DOES A PAINTER COST PER HOUR? You want to get your home painted. It’s reasonable to wonder what the going hourly rate is for those painters. If you’ve done a Google search to find the hourly earnings of a house painter, you’ll probably be surprised by the variety of answers. Many results are from the USA whose dollar is stronger and whose minimum wage is much lower. American results are NO use to us here. You might as well ask what a painter from Finland charges. Most Australian “painter cost per hour” entries are from “find-a-tradie-listings” - Oneflare, Hipages, Serviceseeking etc. The rates given range from $30 to $60 per hour. At first glance this might seem pretty generous but I'm not so sure. OVERHEAD What a lot of folks forget is that even the tiniest painting business has overheads. As a tiny painting business owner I can accurately say that 20% comes off every dollar in overheads - vehicle, fuel, insurance, equipment, Accounting fees, office supplies, GST. NON BILLABLE HOURS And no painter can be charging clients all the time. There’s always non billable hours taken up with quoting, invoicing, book keeping, buying supplies, maintaining tools, marketing, and just down time between jobs. SICK LEAVE Haha! Don’t make me laugh. The hourly rate has to cover time taken when the painter might be sick. Also painters (and other tradies) have to deal with injury. I spent 9 weeks recovering from a ladder fall. No pay for 9 weeks. HOLIDAY LEAVE See above ALL OVER AUSTRALIA? Also, strangely, the quoted painters hourly rate is assumed to be the same all over Australia. This is just not the case. The cost of living in central Sydney is very different to rural South Australia so the hourly rate should be different. SO WHAT DO YOU RECKON, TONY? You can probably guess that I just don’t think the $30 - $60 per hour figure is in anyway accurate for a painting job in ANY suburb of Sydney. After expenses the poor old painter is barely making enough money to justify the risk of running a business! One Hire-a-tradie-list, HireTrades.com.au, has a much more accurate range of figures. They sensibly show the difference between the main cities of Australia.
*Price estimates are based on Rawlinsons’ Australian Construction Handbook 2018, Edition 36
So I think it’s fair to say house painting in Sydney will cost somewhere between $60 and $105 per hour. But do you really want to hire a painter by the hour? Only if you KNOW how long he will take and if you want to become the site foreman, making sure no one slacks off and costs you money. For house painting, hourly is not the way to go. DOES THE HOURLY RATE MATTER? Not really. What matters is that you have a fixed figure for the JOB that you want done. A BETTER WAY TO COMPARE PRICES ON A PAINTING JOB IN SYDNEY. Ok, there are the 3 parts that do MATTER when getting and comparing quotes. It’s amazing how seldom clients get all three parts specified. Without ALL THREE you are flying blind and can’t make an accurate assessment of value. And worse still without all three you can spend a fortune and not get what you wanted in the first place! They are: PART 1 - A full itemised list of what WORK is going to be done. A quote to “paint a room” could mean almost anything ...
Occasionally I’m asked to explain why my quoted PRICE is different to another painters quoted PRICE. Almost certainly it’s because the WORK I plan to do is different to the WORK they plan to do. But without their fully itemised breakdown we’ll never know why. PART 2 - A commitment to the NUMBER OF DAYS that your painting job will take. A low price is pretty useless if the painting job is rushed through at lightening speed. I’ve seen five people painting a bathroom at the same time. Some were plastering, some were drying the plaster with hair dryers, some were painting. It was like a Marx Brothers movie! God knows how long that paint job lasted. But, hey, it was cheap! PART 3 - The PRICE. And of course you want to know the price. But you want to know the price IN COMBINATION with work done part and time taken part. Notice that hourly wage doesn’t come into the equation at all. What you want to know is: WHAT WORK IS BEING DONE, AND WHAT TIME IS BEING SPENT, FOR THE MONEY BEING QUOTED? Then and only then can you compare quotes and decide on the best value for YOUR SYDNEY HOME. Was this info helpful? If so, please leave a 5 star rating. Its easy and fast. No review needed. Comments are closed.
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