What Does It Cost to Paint a House in Pierce County? (2026 Prices)
The short answer: in Pierce County in 2026, painting the exterior of a typical 1,500–2,500 square foot home runs $7,000 to $12,000 depending on how much detail work is involved. A whole-house interior repaint with walls, trim, and ceilings reaches around $20,000 at the higher end. Kitchen cabinets run $5,000 to $8,000. A single room is generally billed as a day rate, around $650 to put a painter on site.
Most contractors won't put numbers in writing before they've seen your house, and there's a reasonable argument for that: every house is different. But "it depends" isn't useful when you're trying to figure out whether to budget five thousand dollars or twenty-five thousand.
So here are our actual numbers, along with the thing that matters more than the numbers: what makes them move.
Prices current as of September 2026. Every figure is a typical range, and every job gets a written, itemized estimate after we've walked the property.
Exterior: $7,000 to $12,000 for a typical home
For a standard single-story home in the 1,500–2,500 square foot range, we quote $7,000 to $12,000, and where you land inside that range comes down almost entirely to detail work.
Here's the mechanism. Spraying is fast. Hand work is not.
If there's a lot more trim, maybe a lot more colors — the current job we're doing has two different colors on every window — the price goes up dramatically. But if it's very simple, we can just mask stuff off and spray it, and it'll drop the price pretty substantially.
A simple house with one body color and minimal trim can be masked and sprayed efficiently. A house with heavy trim, multiple accent colors, and detailed window work has to be brushed by hand, and hand work is measured in days.
That's also why we don't bid off a flat per-square-foot rate. We measure the square footage and the linear footage of the specific walls, trim, and soffits we'll actually be touching. It's more work to produce a quote that way, but it's the only way the number reflects your house instead of an average house. The full fourteen-step process is on our exterior painting service page.
Interior: up to about $20,000 for a whole house
A two-story home getting the full treatment — walls, trim, and ceilings throughout — lands around $20,000 at the higher end.
Interior pricing is driven by prep just like exterior is, but the prep is different:
It depends on how much prep. Are there things that need to get primed and caulked and really defined, so they get the highest quality paint job they can?
A house where the walls are sound and just need color is a very different job from one that needs nail holes filled, trim re-caulked, and bare or patched spots primed before a drop of finish paint goes on.
Single rooms and small jobs: a $650 day rate
Once a job gets down to one room, we switch from measured pricing to a day rate — roughly $650 to have a painter on site for the day.
That can feel steep for one room until you understand where the day goes:
Normally you're going to be at least doing two coats. So you're going to be masking, doing a coat, you've got to wait for it to dry, and you've got to do another coat.
The drying time is unavoidable and it consumes the day regardless of how small the room is.
Our answer to that is worth knowing about if you're considering a small job, because it changes the value equation:
So I try to talk to the customers — are there any other things we can add in while we're there? If we're waiting for something to dry, maybe to make that larger cost of $650 a little bit more easy to digest.
While a coat dries, the crew can clean gutters or do a roof moss treatment. Those are the building maintenance jobs we offer our painting customers, and pairing one with a room repaint means you're getting the day's worth of work out of a day you're paying for anyway.
Getting back to our main goal — it's to just take care of the home.
Apartments and commercial units: from $1,500
A small apartment unit can be done for around $1,500. Multi-family and property-manager work is priced differently from residential for a specific reason: a homeowner looks at those walls every single day, while a commercial or rental space is somewhere people are working or passing through. The expected level of finish detail is lower, so the price per square foot comes down — but the total square footage is usually much larger. If you manage buildings, our commercial painting page covers how we bid and schedule that work.
Kitchen cabinets: $5,000 to $8,000
Cabinet painting is priced by the piece, not by the day, and it depends on the size of the kitchen. Most kitchens land between $5,000 and $8,000. A small bathroom vanity — the kind of job the crew can be in and out of quickly — can be as low as $1,200.
The comparison people actually want is against replacing the cabinets, and we've looked into this:
The cost is very similar. If you're thinking about low-end Home Depot style cabinets — pre-finished, but probably not the best quality — us repainting some good cabinets is going to be about the cost of buying a lower quality cabinet.
So on price, it's roughly a wash against the cheap end of replacement. Where it isn't close is downtime:
If you're going to replace your cabinets and countertops, your kitchen is going to be out for a month or so. We are able to get in and out within about a week.
With painting, the cabinet boxes are primed, painted, and unmasked within a couple of days — you get your kitchen back almost immediately, minus the doors and drawer fronts, which finish curing on racks elsewhere in the house. The full comparison is in cabinet painting vs. replacing.
The ranges at a glance
| Job | Typical 2026 range | What moves it |
|---|---|---|
| Exterior, 1,500–2,500 sq ft home | $7,000 – $12,000 | Trim, number of colors, hand work vs. spray, prep condition |
| Whole-house interior, two stories | Up to about $20,000 | Walls + trim + ceilings, prep and priming, number of colors |
| Single room | About $650 (day rate) | Two coats and dry time fill a day regardless of room size |
| Apartment / rental unit | From $1,500 | Unit size, finish level expected, turnover schedule |
| Kitchen cabinets | $5,000 – $8,000 | Number of doors and drawers, cabinet condition, product |
| Bathroom vanity | From $1,200 | Size; often a one-day job |
What drives your number up
Reading across all of it, a few things reliably move the price:
- Hand work. Trim, multiple colors, detailed windows. This is the single biggest factor on an exterior.
- Prep condition. Split caulking, rot, failing paint, bare wood needing primer. What's under the paint costs more than the paint.
- Old homes with lead paint. Lead work requires certification and meticulous containment — you're collecting every scrap of lead paint that falls on the ground so it doesn't contaminate the customer's home. It's the most labor-intensive prep in the trade.
- Number of coats and product grade. We run mid-to-high grade paint as standard because it's what makes the job last.
What "cheap" is usually leaving out
If a quote comes in dramatically under everything else, the difference is generally not efficiency. It's scope. The most common omissions we see:
- Washing without a bleach system — which leaves mold and mildew to get sealed under the new paint rather than removed
- Thin or skipped caulking
- Less prep across the board
- Lower-grade paint
There's also the labor side, which shows up in the price whether or not anyone talks about it. We carry full benefits for our full-time crew and pay deliberately above the bottom of the market. That's a real cost, and we'd rather explain it than hide it. If you're weighing two bids, how to choose a painting company in Pierce County walks through the questions to ask both of them.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to paint the exterior of a house in Tacoma?
For a typical 1,500–2,500 square foot home, $7,000 to $12,000. The range is driven mostly by trim, accent colors, and how much has to be brushed by hand rather than sprayed.
How much does it cost to paint a whole house interior?
A two-story home with walls, trim, and ceilings runs up to about $20,000 at the higher end. Prep condition — caulking, filling, and priming — is the biggest variable.
Is it cheaper to paint or replace kitchen cabinets?
Painting good existing cabinets costs roughly the same as buying low-end replacement cabinets. The bigger difference is time: replacement puts your kitchen out of service for about a month, painting for a few days.
How much to paint one room?
Around $650, billed as a day rate. Two coats plus drying time takes a painter a full day regardless of the room's size, so ask about adding other small work to the same visit.
Why are painting quotes so different from each other?
Almost always scope, not efficiency. Ask both the high and the low bidder to itemize their prep and products, and the gap usually explains itself.
Wyatt & Sons bids every job off the actual square and linear footage we'll be touching, and itemizes the prep and products so you can see exactly where the number comes from. Serving Tacoma, Gig Harbor, Federal Way, Puyallup, Auburn, Lakewood, and the surrounding Pierce County area. Call (253) 680-9621 for an estimate.