You can be the best painter in your county and go out of business in three years. The mechanism is always the same: bids that are complete on materials and short on everything else — prep hours, access, protection, cleanup, lead compliance, the true cost of an employee, and a margin that survives one bad job.
This chapter is the office side of the C-33. It is the smallest slice of the exam and, for most candidates, the one they get wrong most often, because nobody taught it on a jobsite.
5.1 Reading Plans and Specifications
Before you measure anything, read the specification. It tells you what the exam calls "the scope" and what your crew will call "the reason we're still here on Friday."
A painting specification identifies the surfaces, the coating systems required for each, the number of coats, the surface preparation standard, the film thickness, and the quality standards the work will be judged against. Two of those — prep standard and film thickness — drive both labor and material cost far more than the paint selection does. A specification calling for SSPC-SP6 commercial blast rather than SP3 power tool cleaning can double the job. A specification calling for 3 mils dry rather than 2 changes your material by 50%.
Submittals. A commercial specification typically requires submittals before any coating is delivered to the site: product data sheets, safety data sheets, and color drawdowns (sample panels of the actual material, applied at the specified thickness). Not timecards, not your license and bond certificates, not a subcontractor list. Build the submittal time into your schedule; a rejected submittal at week two costs a week.
Permits. Routine repainting rarely requires a building permit on its own. A permit becomes relevant when the painting is part of larger permitted construction, or when the work is lead abatement rather than renovation. Know the distinction; do not tell a customer "painting never needs a permit."
Sequencing with other trades. A painting contractor scheduled to work inside a building where drywall finishing is still underway has a real problem: sanding dust will contaminate wet paint. The trades must be separated in time, not just in space. Raise it at the schedule meeting rather than discovering it on the first coat.
Weather and season. An exterior repaint scheduled in a coastal California town in January is not a pricing problem, it is a drying-window problem — cool temperatures, fog, and dew give you a short usable day, and Chapter 2's coalescence and dew-point rules govern whether you can coat at all. The bid must carry the schedule risk honestly.
Access. Reaching a 30-foot elevation is not free. The estimate must carry equipment rental, setup and takedown time, and operator training — not just the daily rental rate, and not just extra labor hours.
Site conditions. A residential exterior surrounded by mature landscaping and a pool needs time for protection, careful access, and daily cleanup built into the price. Not a reduced price because less wall is reachable, and not a warning to the owner in place of protection.
Document what you found. Photographing existing conditions before starting protects the owner and — more to the point — protects you, because photographs establish which damage predated your work. Every experienced exterior painter has been blamed for a cracked pot or a scratched window that was already there.
And when you cannot see part of the job — the rear elevation of a two-story you could not get behind — note an exclusion or carry an allowance until it can be inspected. Do not assume it matches the front, and do not add a blind percentage and hope.
5.2 Area Takeoff
Rectangle: length × height. A wall 40 ft long and 9 ft high is 40 × 9 = 360 sq ft.
Room walls: perimeter × ceiling height. A room 14 ft by 18 ft with 9-foot ceilings: perimeter = 2 × (14 + 18) = 64 ft; 64 × 9 = 576 sq ft gross wall area. (The single most common takeoff error is multiplying 14 × 18 × 9 or forgetting to double both dimensions.)
Ceiling: length × width. 20 ft × 15 ft = 300 sq ft.
Gable end: a triangle. Area = ½ × base × height. A gable 24 ft wide at the base rising 8 ft to the peak: ½ × 24 × 8 = 96 sq ft. Painters routinely price a gable as a rectangle and overbuy, or forget it entirely and underbid.
Round column: circumference × height. A column 2 ft in diameter and 12 ft tall: circumference = π × 2 ≈ 6.28 ft; 6.28 × 12 ≈ 75 sq ft.
Linear trim converted to area. 340 linear feet of baseboard averaging 6 inches (0.5 ft) high: 340 × 0.5 = 170 sq ft.
Both sides count. A board fence 200 ft long and 6 ft tall, stained both sides: 200 × 6 = 1,200 sq ft per side, × 2 = 2,400 sq ft.
Openings: the deduct decision
There is no single right answer here, and the exam knows it. What matters is that you have a consistent method and that you can defend it.
- Small openings — windows and standard doors — are often left in, because the cut-in labor around the opening offsets the deducted area. Deducting a window's 15 square feet and then spending twenty minutes cutting its casing loses money.
- Large openings must be deducted, because leaving them in materially misstates the work. A warehouse wall 120 ft × 22 ft (2,640 sq ft) containing two 12 × 14 overhead doors (336 sq ft) is not a 2,640 sq ft wall. Deduct them.
- When a takeoff deducts, do the arithmetic: a wall 50 ft × 8 ft is 400 sq ft; less a 3 × 7 door (21 sq ft) = 379 sq ft.
Two corrections that are easy to forget
Profiled siding has more area than its flat measurement. Measuring lap siding as a flat rectangle understates it, because the overlapping courses and their exposed bottom edges add surface. The same is true of any profiled material.
Some things are not priced by area at all. Interior doors are commonly priced by the unit, because each door takes a similar amount of time and unit pricing captures the labor better than area does — a door is a slab plus two edges plus hardware work plus set-up, and its square footage does not predict any of that. A stair railing with closely spaced turned balusters is the extreme case: its measured surface area is small, and it takes forever. Price it at a much higher labor rate per measured foot of rail than you would price a wall.
5.3 Material Estimating
Gallons per coat = area ÷ spread rate. Multiply by the number of coats. Round up to whole containers.
- 800 sq ft of wall, two coats, 400 sq ft/gal → 800 × 2 = 1,600 ÷ 400 = 4 gallons.
- 2,000 sq ft of rough surface at 250 sq ft/gal → 8 gallons per coat.
- 2,700 sq ft, three coats, 320 sq ft/gal → 2,700 × 3 = 8,100 ÷ 320 = 25.3 → 26 gallons.
- 1,800 sq ft of concrete block at ~100 sq ft/gal block filler → 18 gallons.
That block filler line is worth staring at. It is high-build; it covers about a quarter of what a topcoat covers. An estimator who assumes topcoat coverage buys 5 gallons and runs out on the first wall.
Adjust the rate for the surface, and for the coat. Rough and porous surfaces have more real area and absorb more coating, so the effective rate drops below label. And on bare, porous stucco, the first coat is absorbed and covers far less area than later coats — an estimator using one rate for all three coats under-buys the primer coat and over-buys the finish coats.
Add a waste and touch-up factor. Paint is lost to tray and roller retention, hose and pump priming, overspray, spillage, and touch-up. The label figure is theoretical; the field figure is always lower.
Sundries. Add a percentage of material cost for the things nobody lists: tape, plastic, caulk, sandpaper, brushes, rollers, rags, strainers. They are not overhead and they are not profit — they are job material, and on a heavily masked job they are a real number.
Material cost = quantity × unit price. 18 gallons at $45 = $810, plus sundries.
Keep extra of the same batch for touch-up, and leave the owner a small labeled container. It costs you a quart and saves a callback.
5.4 Labor: Production Rates and the Real Cost of an Hour
Hours = area ÷ production rate. 1,200 sq ft at 150 sq ft/hr = 8 hours per coat.
Two disciplines make this number honest.
The rate must match the method the crew will actually use. A spray-and-back-roll crew covering 400 sq ft/hr and a brush-and-roller crew covering 150 sq ft/hr on the same surface are not two estimates of the same thing — they are the rates for two different methods. You do not average them, and you do not use the higher rate because it "represents best practice." Use the rate for the method you will use.
Estimate preparation separately. Prep varies enormously with condition and can equal or exceed the coating time. This is the single largest source of underbidding in the trade, and the classic failure is pricing a repaint of a 60-year-old house using new-construction prep hours. New construction prep is predictable and light. A 60-year-old exterior may need washing, scraping, feathering, epoxy repairs, spot-priming, and caulking before a drop of finish goes on, and the bid will fall short if it assumes prep is a fixed percentage of any job.
Add setup, masking, and cleanup as their own hours. They are not absorbed into the coating rate.
Crew days. 240 labor-hours with a crew of three working 8-hour days: 240 ÷ 3 = 80 hours per worker ÷ 8 = 10 working days. Divide by the crew, then by the day. (Dividing 240 by 8 and calling it 30 days ignores the crew; dividing by 3 and calling it 80 days ignores everything.)
The burdened labor rate. This is the number that separates contractors from painters. You pay a journeyman $32 per hour. Your estimate must be built on a higher figure, because payroll taxes, workers' compensation insurance, and benefits are real costs of that hour. Workers' compensation in the painting classification is not cheap. The wage is not the cost; the burdened wage is the cost — and profit is not hidden inside it.
Overhead recovery. Overhead is the cost of being in business whether or not you paint anything today: insurance, vehicles, tools, the office, the license, the phone, the accountant. It is recovered across your billable hours. A contractor with $120,000 of annual overhead billing about 10,000 field labor hours per year must recover $120,000 ÷ 10,000 = $12 per labor hour. That $12 rides on every hour you sell, on top of the burdened wage.
5.5 Pricing: Markup Is Not Margin
Here is the arithmetic that quietly bankrupts small contractors.
Markup is a percentage added to your cost. Margin is profit as a percentage of the price. They are not the same number, and markup always produces a smaller margin than its own percentage.
Worked both directions:
- Markup → price. Costs $8,000 with a 20% markup: $8,000 × 1.20 = $9,600 price. Gross profit = $1,600. Margin = $1,600 ÷ $9,600 = 16.7%. You marked up 20% and earned a 16.7% margin.
- Margin → price. To earn a 25% gross margin on a job costing $12,000, cost must be 75% of price, so price = $12,000 ÷ 0.75 = $16,000. (Marking $12,000 up by 25% gives $15,000 — a 20% margin, not 25%.)
Price for a target margin: Price = Cost ÷ (1 − margin).
Contingency. On an occupied-building repaint, an estimator includes a contingency line for conditions that cannot be seen at bid time — hidden damage, unexpected prep, substrate surprises behind furniture and fixtures. Contingency is not profit, is not a materials-price hedge, and is not retention.
Unit prices. A commercial bid that includes unit prices for additional wall area beyond the base scope sets an agreed rate for added work without a renegotiation. It protects both sides and speeds up change orders.
Allowances. When a specification includes an allowance for wallcovering material, carry the stated allowance for the material and price your labor separately. An allowance is a material budget, not a lump sum covering installation, and not a ceiling on the owner's total obligation.
Retention. A commercial contract holding 10% until final acceptance means 10% of your money arrives at the end. That is a cash-flow planning problem: you will pay your crew and your supplier long before you see it. It is not extra profit, it does not license deferring material purchases, and it does not remove the punch-list walkthrough.